Older than the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran, the tale of Lugalbanda speaks to us in a startlingly fresh voice across nearly five thousand years of history. The clay tablets containing the original pieces of the story, recorded in cuneiform by the Sumerians, were found by nineteenth-century explorers but not translated until the 1970s.

Now Kathy Henderson and Jane Ray bring this, the oldest written story in the world, to a wider audience for the first time. Filled with adventure, myth, and magic, Lugalbanda is an extraordinary coming-of-age story about a boy who brings wisdom and peace to his people in a time of unchecked ambition and endless battle.

From the dust jacket