The Epic of Gilgamesh - Anonymous [1]
We have good evidence that most of the Gilgamesh poems were already written down in the first centuries of the second millennium B.C., and that they probably existed in much the same form many centuries earlier, while the final recension, and most complete edition, comes from the seventh century library of Assurbanipal, antiquary and last great king of the Assyrian Empire. This Assurbanipal was a formidable general, the plunderer of Egypt and Susa; but he was also the collector of a notable library of contemporary historical records, and of much older hymns, poems, and scientific and religious texts. He tells us that he sent out his servants to search the archives of the ancient seats of learning in Babylon, Uruk, and Nippur, and to copy and translate into the contemporary Akkadian Semitic those texts which were in the older Sumerian language of Mesopotamia. Amongst these texts, ‘Written down according to the original and collated in the palace of Assurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria’, was the poem which we call the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Not long after the completion of this task of collation the epic was virtually lost and the hero’s name forgotten, or disguised and garbled out of recognition; until it was rediscovered in the last century. This discovery was due, in the first place, to the curiosity of two Englishmen, and thereafter to the labours of scholars in many different parts of the world, who have pieced together, copied, and translated the clay tablets on which the poem is written. It is a work which continues, and more gaps are being filled in each year; but the main body of the Assyrian Epic has not been altered in essentials since the monumental publications of text, transliteration, and commentary by Campbell Thompson in 1928 and 1930. More recently, however, a new stage has been reached and fresh interest aroused by the work of Professor Samuel Kramer of Pennsylvania, whose collection and translation of Sumerian texts have carried the history of the Epic back into the third millennium B.C. It is now possible to combine and compare a far larger and older body of writings than ever before.
2. The Discovery of the Tablets
The discovery of the tablets belongs to the heroic age of excavation in the mid nineteenth century, when, although methods were not always so scrupulous nor aims so strictly scientific as today, the difficulties and even dangers were greater, and results had an impact which profoundly altered the intellectual perspective of the age. In 1839 a young Englishman, Austen Henry Layard, set off with a friend on an overland journey to Ceylon; but in Mesopotamia he was delayed by a reconnaissance of Assyrian mounds. The delay of weeks was lengthened into years, but in time Nineveh and Nimrud were excavated; and it was from these excavations that Layard brought back to the British Museum a great part of the collection of Assyrian sculptures, along with thousands of broken tablets from the palace of Nineveh.
When Layard began excavating at Nineveh he hoped to find inscriptions, but the reality, a buried library and a lost literature, was more than he could have expected. In fact the extent and value of the discovery was not realized till later when the clay tablets with wedge-shaped characters were deciphered. Some, inevitably, were lost; but over twenty-five thousand broken tablets, a huge number, were brought back to the British Museum. The work of decipherment was begun by Henry Rawlinson, at the residency in Baghdad, where he was stationed as political agent. Before going to Baghdad, Rawlinson, then an army officer in the employ of the East India Company, had discovered what was to prove a principal key to the