Marvel Meets Mesopotamia: How Modern Comics Preserve Ancient Myths

Marvel Meets Mesopotamia: How Modern Comics Preserve Ancient Myths
A fragment of "The Epic of Gilgamesh" from Nineveh, 7th century B.C. Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, UCLA
The Conversation
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Ancient Mesopotamia, the region roughly encompassing modern-day Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Syria, Iran, and Turkey, gave us what we could consider some of the earliest known literary “superheroes.”
One was the hero Lugalbanda, whose kindness to animals resulted in the gift of super speed, perhaps making him the literary great-grandparent of the comic hero The Flash.