Page:An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic - Morris - 1920.djvu/25

 correct, we would have a further ground for assuming the tale to have originated among the Akkadian settlers and to have been taken over from them by the Sumerians.

New light on the earliest Babylonian version of the Epic, as well as on the Assyrian version, has been shed by the recovery of two substantial fragments of the form which the Epic had assumed in Babylonia in the Hammurabi period. The study of this important new material also enables us to advance the interpretation of the Epic and to perfect the analysis into its component parts. In the spring of 1914, the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania acquired by purchase a large tablet, the writing of which as well as the style and the manner of spelling verbal forms and substantives pointed distinctly to the time of the first Babylonian dynasty. The tablet was identified by Dr. Arno Poebel as part of the Gilgamesh Epic; and, as the colophon showed, it formed the second tablet of the series. He copied it with a view to publication, but the outbreak of the war which found him in Germany—his native country prevented him from carrying out this intention. He, however, utilized some of its contents in his discussion of the historical or semi-historical traditions about Gilgamesh, as revealed by the important list of partly mythical and partly historical dynasties, found among the tablets of the Nippur collection, in which Gilgamesh occurs as a King of an Erech dynasty, whose father was Â, a priest of Kulab. The publication of the tablet was then undertaken by Dr. Stephen Langdon in monograph form under the title, "The Epic of Gilgamish." . In a preliminary article on the tablet in the Museum Journal, Vol. VIII, pages 29–38, Dr. Langdon took the tablet to be of the late