Epic of Gilgamesh

The standard Babylonian version opens with a formula, "he who saw the deep", and closes by returning to the same city walls it began with. Gilgamesh, part divine and oppressive to his subjects, is matched by the gods with Enkidu, a wild man of the steppe who is civilised by a week with the temple woman Shamhat and then loses the ability to run with the animals. The two fight, become inseparable, and go to the Cedar Forest to kill its guardian Humbaba. Gilgamesh rejects the advances of the goddess Ishtar, insultingly, and she sends the Bull of Heaven; the two men kill it too. For these offences the gods condemn Enkidu, who dies slowly and describes the house of dust that awaits the dead.

The second half is the consequence. Gilgamesh, undone by the death and by the recognition that it will be his own, crosses the waters of death to find Utnapishtim, the one man granted immortality, who tells him the flood story and then demonstrates that he cannot stay awake for a week, let alone live forever. A plant of rejuvenation from the seabed is stolen by a snake on the way home. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk with nothing except the walls he built, which the poem's last lines invite the reader to inspect.

Tablet 12 is a separate matter. It is a partial, fairly literal Akkadian translation of part of a Sumerian poem about Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the netherworld, appended to the eleven-tablet sequence in some copies. It contradicts the narrative, Enkidu is alive again, and most translators either relegate it or omit it, while noting that ancient scribes evidently thought it belonged.

Behind the standard version lie at least five Sumerian poems about Bilgames, the Sumerian form of the name, dating in written form to the early second millennium BCE and probably composed under the Third Dynasty of Ur, whose kings claimed him as a relative. These are independent short compositions, Gilgamesh and Huwawa, Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven, the Death of Bilgames, and others, not chapters of an epic. Some of their material is taken up in the Akkadian tradition and some, notably the Sumerian flood, is not.

An Old Babylonian version in Akkadian, from around the eighteenth century BCE, is the first to weld the episodes into a single connected poem with a governing theme. It survives only in fragments, including the well-known Pennsylvania and Yale tablets and a much-discussed passage in which an alewife advises Gilgamesh to enjoy ordinary life instead. The Old Babylonian poem differs from the later one in wording and in emphasis, and it is not simply an earlier draft of the same text.

The standard Babylonian version, the one usually translated, is a deliberate reworking from perhaps the thirteenth to eleventh centuries BCE. Mesopotamian catalogues attribute it to Sin-leqi-unninni, an exorcist-scholar, which is one of the very few named authorial attributions in cuneiform literature. What his editorial role amounted to is unknown: whether he composed the frame and the prologue, or standardised a text already in circulation, cannot be determined from the evidence, and the attribution itself is later than the reign in which he is supposed to have lived.

In November 1872 George Smith, working through unbaked tablets in the British Museum, found on tablet 11 an account of a flood: a man instructed to build a boat, a vessel grounded on a mountain, birds released to test for dry land. He announced it to the Society of Biblical Archaeology with, by the account of those present, considerable excitement, and the Daily Telegraph funded him to return to Nineveh, where he recovered further fragments. The parallels with the Genesis flood are close enough at the level of episode that borrowing in some direction, or common descent from a shared Mesopotamian tradition, is not seriously disputed, but the Babylonian material is older, and the flood also appears in the Akkadian epic of Atrahasis, where it makes better narrative sense than it does in Gilgamesh.

The important thing about the text is that it is not finished. The epic is reconstructed from many hundreds of fragments in several languages and dialects, from Nineveh, Babylon, Uruk, Ugarit, Megiddo and elsewhere, and substantial passages are still missing or damaged. New pieces continue to appear, from museum storerooms, from unread excavation material, and from the antiquities market.

The best publicised recent case is a large tablet fragment acquired by the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Iraqi Kurdistan and published in 2014 by Farouk Al-Rawi and Andrew George. It supplied around twenty previously unknown lines of tablet 5 and changed the reading of the Cedar Forest: the forest turns out to be described as a noisy, inhabited place full of birds and monkeys, and Enkidu voices regret at what they have destroyed. A text three and a half thousand years old is still, in a limited but real sense, being edited.