The Gilgamesh story begins as several independent Sumerian poems about the king of Uruk (often written as “Bilgames”). Some of these poems may date as far back as the Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III), showing that the tradition started before a single unified epic existed.
In the early second millennium BCE, Sumerian literature was widely copied for training scribes (professional writers). Gilgamesh stories—especially the Humbaba/Huwawa episode—became standard school texts, helping preserve the narratives in many manuscript copies.
By the Old Babylonian period, scribes combined earlier materials into a more continuous Akkadian epic. The earliest surviving unified version (often called the Old Babylonian version) dates to around the 18th century BCE and was known by its opening line, “Surpassing All Other Kings.”
One important Old Babylonian witness is the so-called Pennsylvania tablet, which preserves part of the early story in which Enkidu is introduced and then confronts Gilgamesh. Such tablets show how the epic’s plot was already being arranged into linked scenes, even though the text survives only in fragments.
Versions of Gilgamesh circulated outside Babylonia and Assyria, including in the Hittite world at Hattusa (in present-day Turkey). This wider transmission shows the epic was becoming an international story in the Late Bronze Age, not just a local Mesopotamian tradition.
A later, more standardized Akkadian form of the epic was compiled in what scholars call the Standard Babylonian version. This edition is traditionally associated with the scholar-scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni and is usually dated to roughly the 13th–10th centuries BCE.
The Standard Babylonian epic circulated as a formal series written on multiple clay tablets, known by its opening words “ša naqba īmuru” (“He Who Saw the Deep”). Its multi-tablet format helped create a stable reference text that later scribes could copy and compare.
A major highlight of the Standard Babylonian epic is Tablet XI, which includes a flood narrative told by Utnapishtim. Modern scholars often note that this episode draws on older Mesopotamian flood traditions and became one of the epic’s most discussed sections because of later comparisons with biblical flood stories.
In the Neo-Assyrian period, scholarly copying and collecting brought many literary texts together in the royal library associated with King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Important manuscript copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh— including Tablet XI—come from this library, which helped preserve the Standard Babylonian text for modern discovery.
In the 19th century, large numbers of cuneiform fragments from Nineveh, including pieces of the Gilgamesh epic, were excavated and brought to the British Museum. This transfer set the stage for the epic’s reappearance in modern scholarship once specialists began sorting and reading the fragments.
In December 1872, British Museum scholar George Smith publicly presented his translation of a flood story from a Gilgamesh tablet at the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London. The announcement attracted wide attention because it revealed an ancient Mesopotamian flood account and pointed to a longer 12-tablet epic behind it.
During the 20th–21st centuries, scholars produced critical editions and widely used translations that compare many fragments and manuscript witnesses. These works do not “complete” the epic—many lines remain missing—but they provide a stable framework for studying how the Sumerian poems developed into the Standard Babylonian tradition and how the story continued to be copied down to about 600 BCE.
The Epic of Gilgamesh (Sumerian to Standard Babylonian traditions, c. 2100–600 BCE)