Many attributed the legend surrounding the great king of Uruk and many of the city's written attributes to mythology. Uruk is said to have become famous as the capital city of the King Gilgamesh, the ancient ruler and hero of the epoch of Gilgamesh. It is believed that Uruk was the biblical erek from Genesis 1010, the second city founded by Nimrod in Shinar.

The epic of Gilgamesh, written by a Middle Eastern scholar 2500 years before the birth of Christ, commemorates the life of the ruler of the city of Uruk, from which Iraq gets its name. In 2003, just prior to the Iraq invasion which toppled Hussein, astonishing discoveries were being made in Iraq, culminating in one of the most extraordinary claims anywhere for centuries. A claim which American forces have been strongly accused of confiscating, subsequently becoming the prime suspect as the driving force behind a complete suppression of these astonishing discoveries within the country.

In April of 2003, Jorg Fosbinder of the Bavarian Department of Historical Monuments in Munich told the BBC's World Services Science and Action Program, "I don't want to say definitively that it was the grave of King Gilgamesh but it looks very similar to that described in the epic. We found just outside the city an area in the middle of the former Euphrates River the remains of such a building which could be interpreted as a burial," Mr. Fossbinder said. In the book, Gilgamesh is described as having been buried under the Euphrates. He said the amazing discovery of the ancient city under the Iraqi desert had been made possible by modern technology.

"The most surprising thing was that we found structures already described by Gilgamesh," Mr. Fossbinder stated. "We covered more than 100 ha. We found garden structures and field structures as described in the epoch and we found Babylonian houses." Here, predictably, is where the story goes silent. Due to conflict within the country, it was largely believed the excavations had been halted. However, it seems that the discovery of King Gilgamesh may not have been made in isolation. This footage was supposedly leaked to numerous places.