By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News

The setting of the world's first great work of literature lies buried beneath the Iraqi desert, according to German archaeologists.

The ancient city of Uruk, commemorated in the epic poem of Gilgamesh, has come to light thanks to digital mapping technology, Jörg Fassbinder, of the Bavarian department of Historical Monuments in Munich, announced.

Walking back and forth over the desert with a hand-held 17-kilo (38-pound) magnetometer, scientists detected buried structures by measuring differences of magnetization in the soil.

"It is like an X-ray in medicine. Structures of about 0.5-1 meter depth are traced very sharply, while deeper structures appear more diffuse the deeper they are," Fassbinder told Discovery News.

The magnetogram detailed buried walls, gardens, palaces, houses and a surprising network of canals that would have made Uruk a kind of "Venice in the desert."

It also pinpointed a structure in the middle of the former Euphrates river "which could be interpreted as the grave of King Gilgamesh," according to Fassbinder.

The Gilgamesh epic, a work written on clay tablets about 2000 B.C. — which makes it one of the oldest books in history — tells the tale of a early third-millennium B.C. Sumerian king in search of the secret of everlasting life.

The epic, which includes an account of a huge flood, similar to the story of Noah in the Bible, also says that the king was buried in a tomb under the Euphrates when the waters parted following his death.

"We found a structure in the canal which was the former river Euphrates. Whether we found the grave or not must remain speculative, unless the structure is excavated," Fassbinder said.

Magnetic prospection mapped about 200 hectares (ca. 600 acres) of the ancient city, whose diameter is estimated to be more than 5 kilometers (3 miles).

"I would be very happy to hear that Gilgamesh's tomb has been found. However, I believe it is highly unlikely," Giovanni Pettinato of Rome's La Sapienza University told Discovery News.

One of the world's most respected assyrologists, Pettinato discovered a new version of the Gilgamesh story two years ago, after translating hundreds of tablets that archeologists from Baghdad had found in an immense private archive.

The new tables would tell of Gilgamesh meeting death freely, and at the same time ordering the mass suicide of his entire court. Indeed, after a huge tomb with a golden roof was built, the king invited his entire court to enter it. The structure was then inundated by the water of a dam opened after Gilgamesh's last order.

"We should not forget that this is myth. The German team is making a big mistake: they are trying to turn legend into history," Pettinato said.