we’re so lucky that gilgamesh survived and is a banger. can you imagine if we found the oldest written human story ever recorded and it sucked balls.
We only find the bangers! This is a really important thing to remember both when analyzing ancient literature and when comparing your own writing to historical authors.
The less brilliant stories don't survive because people didn't make a million copies of them to pass around. It's pretty much guaranteed that there were a hundred other Gilgamesh stories circulating around the same time that did in fact suck balls, and just as many that were solidly mid, but people didn't write them down as many times (if ever), so fewer (if any) fragments survived.
It's easy to get discouraged thinking that 95% of ancient writers were brilliant compared to maybe 5% of modern writers. But really, it's just that 95% of what survived came from those few truly genius writers. Everybody else was out there telling stories too, and finding audiences who loved them, and producing beautiful art, they just weren't lucky enough or famous enough to get their stories recorded enough times for us to piece them together from whatever fragments survived the intervening centuries.
