Welcome to Sutton Hoo, your World Literature II weblog. Here you'll find links to supplemental readings, images and videos, as well as your quizzes and essay assignments.

An essential question drives this course: Why is storytelling significant to humans? Is it important to read ancient texts? Will the texts our era produces be significant, too?

Okay, okay. So those are three questions. As the semester progresses, I'm certain we'll come up with a few more.

For now, we begin with the oldest story on record, THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH (click on the title for an online version of the text). Below is an image of one tablet from the epic. It tells the story of a great flood, which many of you will find familiar (more on that later). The tablet was found in Northern Iraq, in what once was Mesopotamia and dates to the 7th century BC. Lucky for you, our textbook isn't in cuneiform.