The Epic of Gilgamesh

Older Than Genesis, Lost Until 1872

First attested
18th century BCEOld Babylonian tablets of about 1800 BCE carry the Akkadian epic "Surpassing all other kings", among them the Pennsylvania and Yale tablets; the twelve-tablet standard version is known chiefly from Assyrian manuscripts of the eighth and seventh centuries BCE excavated at Kuyunjik (Nineveh) between 1849 and 1854 and now in the British Museum. The text remains incomplete — George's 2003 count for the eleven-tablet poem, setting the appended Tablet XII aside, is almost 2,400 lines surviving of an original just short of 3,000, a fifth of it missing outright and many surviving lines damaged — and fragments still surface: a Tablet V manuscript the Sulaymaniyah Museum bought from a smuggler in 2011 added roughly twenty lines, published by Al-Rawi and George in 2014.
Claimed
27th century BCEasserted by The epic's own prologue, which tells the reader to open the tablet-box in Uruk's wall and read what Gilgameš himself set down; the antiquity that implies is the reign the Sumerian King List assigns him, which modern chronology places around 2700 BCE. No ancient source gives that date.

The claim runs about 900 years ahead of the evidence.

The poem itself went unread for two thousand years after its last dated copy of about 130 BCE — but the name kept moving without it: a giant in the Book of Giants at Qumran, and a Babylonian king called Gilgamos in Aelian around AD 200.

Its subject is grief: undone by a friend's death, he crosses the world for a cure and comes home with a wall.

Gilgameš was a king of Uruk whom the Sumerian King List places in the early third millennium BCE; five Sumerian poems about him survive, and an Akkadian epic beginning "Surpassing all other kings" was circulating by about 1800 BCE. A Neo-Assyrian catalogue of texts and authors credits the twelve-tablet standard version to Sîn-lēqi-unninni — his name is on the catalogue, never on the poem. Copies from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh reached the British Museum, where George Smith read Tablet XI and announced its flood to the Society of Biblical Archaeology on 3 December 1872: an ark, birds released, a mountain landing, in a text older than Genesis. Nobody had read a line of the poem for two thousand years, though the name travelled on without it.

Light

Its subject is grief. Gilgamesh loses Enkidu, crosses the world for a cure, and comes home with nothing but the wall of Uruk. Rilke, reading Ungnad's German translation of 1911, called it the epic of the fear of death at the end of 1916.

Shadow

Since 1872 it has been read mostly as evidence in an argument about the Bible — Smith's own 1876 book was The Chaldean Account of Genesis, naming the older poem after the younger. Andrew George's edition traces Tablet XI's flood to the earlier Atrahasis instead.

Sources and verification9 sources · 5 links

Primary source

  • George Smith, "The Chaldean Account of the Deluge", Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 1873, vol. 2 (1873), pp. 213–34; paper read 3 December 1872Smith's own announcement of the flood tablet, read to the Society of Biblical Archaeology on 3 December 1872 and printed in the Society's Transactions the following year.
  • Andrew R. George (trans.), The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation, 1999, Tablet I, prologue; Tablet X (Uta-napishti on death); Tablet XI (the flood)English wording of the prologue's instruction to open the tablet-box in Uruk's wall and read what Gilgameš set down, of Uta-napishti's speech in Tablet X on the death whose face no one sees, and of the Tablet XI flood narrative, with tablet and line numbers matching the critical edition.
  • Stephanie Dalley (trans.), Myths from Mesopotamia, rev. ed., 2000, AtrahasisThe text of the Old Babylonian poem Atrahasis, the earlier Akkadian flood narrative, in a translation with its gaps honestly marked.
  • Black, Cunningham, Robson, Zólyomi et al., The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), 2006, the Gilgameš compositions, ETCSL section 1.8.1The Sumerian Gilgameš poems, freely readable with line numbers, as separate compositions rather than parts of one epic.

Scholarship

  • W. G. Lambert, "A Catalogue of Texts and Authors", Journal of Cuneiform Studies, 1962, vol. 16, pp. 59–77The Neo-Assyrian catalogue in which the series of Gilgameš is credited to Sîn-lēqi-unninni — the attribution rests on this catalogue and not on any manuscript of the poem itself.
  • Andrew R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols, 2003, vol. 1, introduction; commentary on Standard Babylonian Tablet X, line 308The manuscript history and line numbering; the attribution of the twelve-tablet Standard Babylonian version to Sîn-lēqi-unninni on the evidence of the catalogue alone; the derivation of the Tablet XI flood narrative from the older poem Atrahasis; the surviving line count for the eleven-tablet poem with Tablet XII set aside (almost 2,400 lines of an original just short of 3,000, a fifth missing outright); the latest dated manuscript, of about 130 BCE; the survival of the name after cuneiform, at Qumran and in Aelian; Tablet XII as a literal Akkadian translation of the latter part of the Sumerian poem Gilgameš, Enkidu and the Netherworld, appended to an epic whose narrative ends at Tablet XI; and the commentary arguing against the familiar rendering of SB X 308 as a question about building a house for ever.
  • Matthew Goff, "Gilgamesh the Giant: The Qumran Book of Giants' Appropriation of Gilgamesh Motifs", Dead Sea Discoveries, 2009, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 221–53The appearance of the names Gilgameš and Ḥumbaba among the giants in the Aramaic Book of Giants from Qumran (4Q203, 4Q530, 4Q531), and what that appropriation does and does not show about knowledge of the epic.
  • Farouk N. H. Al-Rawi and A. R. George, "Back to the Cedar Forest: The Beginning and End of Tablet V of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgameš", Journal of Cuneiform Studies, 2014, vol. 66, pp. 69–90; Sulaymaniyah Museum T.1447Publication of a Neo-Babylonian Tablet V manuscript the Sulaymaniyah Museum acquired in 2011 from a dealer in smuggled antiquities, adding about twenty lines to the epic.

Further reading

  • Jeffrey H. Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic, 1982, University of Pennsylvania PressThe compositional development from the Sumerian poems through the Old Babylonian version to the Standard Babylonian recension — an unusual case where a text's growth can be followed in surviving manuscripts.

Linked entries

  • Set againstThe Egyptian Book of the DeadAttested

    Both re-entered reading through nineteenth-century excavation, but "Book of the Dead" is a modern title for a body of spells no two papyri agree on, while Gilgamesh is a single poem with a fixed sequence of tablets and a critical edition.

  • Set againstThe Pyramid TextsAttested

    Maspero's excavations at Saqqara opened the inscribed pyramids in 1880–81, eight or nine years after Smith read the flood tablet — two long texts of the ancient world back in legible form within a decade of each other. The Pyramid Texts are much the older, cut around 2350 BCE, and there is no evidence of contact between the traditions that made them.

  • Set againstThe Popol VuhDisputed

    Both narrate a flood that destroys an early humanity, and the resemblance is a standing exhibit for claims of one ancient source behind all flood stories; nothing connects a K'iche' book written in the sixteenth century and surviving in Ximénez's copy of about 1701 to a Babylonian poem unread since antiquity.

  • Set againstThe Bardo ThödolA modern connection

    Both are read as books about dying, but the Bardo Thödol supplies a procedure for it and Gilgamesh reports that there is none — Uta-napishti tells him no one sees the face of death. The pairing is a modern reader's, not a historical link.

  • Set againstEnūma ElišAttested

    Both came out of Ashurbanipal's library and both were published by George Smith inside a decade, but Gilgamesh is a narrative poem about a man who cannot escape death, and this is a text with a job in a temple on a named day.

Follow the thread