Page:An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic - Morris - 1920.djvu/19

 The Gilgamesh Epic is the most notable literary product of Babylonia as yet discovered in the mounds of Mesopotamia. It recounts the exploits and adventures of a favorite hero, and in its final form covers twelve tablets, each tablet consisting of six columns (three on the obverse and three on the reverse) of about 50 lines for each column, or a total of about 3600 lines. Of this total, however, barely more than one-half has been found among the remains of the great collection of cuneiform tablets gathered by King Ashurbanapal (668–626 B.C.) in his palace at Nineveh, and discovered by Layard in 1854 in the course of his excavations of the mound Kouyunjik (opposite Mosul). The fragments of the epic painfully gathered—chiefly by George Smith—from the circa 30,000 tablets and bits of tablets brought to the British Museum were published in model form by Professor Paul Haupt; Das Babylonische Nimrodepos (Leipzig, 1884–1891), supplemented by Haupt’s article Die Zwölfte Tafel des Babylonischen Nimrodepos in BA I, pp. 48–79, containing the fragments of the twelfth tablet. The fragments of the Epic in Ashurbanapal’s library—some sixty—represent portions of several copies. Sin-liḳî-unnini—perhaps from Erech, since this name appears as that of a family in tablets from Erech (see Clay, Legal Documents from Erech, Index, p. 73)—is named in a list of texts (K 9717—Haupt’s edition No. 51, line 18) as the editor of the Epic, though probably he was not the only compiler. Since the publication of Haupt’s edition, a few fragments were added by him as an appendix to Alfred Jeremias Izdubar-Nimrod (Leipzig, 1891) Plates II–IV, and two more are embodied in Jensen’s transliteration of all the fragments in the Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek VI; pp. 116–265, with elaborate notes, pp. 421–531. Furthermore a fragment, obtained from supplementary excavations at Kouyunjik, has been published by L. W. King in his Supplement to the Catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum No. 56 and PSBA Vol. 36, pp. 64–68. Recently a fragment of the 6th tablet from the excavations at Assur has been published by Ebeling, Keilschrifttexte aus Assur Religiösen Inhalts No. 115, and one may expect further portions to turn up.

The designation “Nimrod Epic” on the supposition that the hero of the Babylonian Epic is identical with Nimrod, the “mighty hunter” of Genesis 10, has now been generally abandoned, in the absence of any evidence that the Babylonian hero bore a name like and that edition still remains the primary source for our study of the Epic.