An edition written on 11 tablets and known today as the Standard Version seems to have become standardized between roughly 1200 and 1000 B.C.E. Lastly, at some point, perhaps in the early first millennium, a twelfth tablet was added to the Standard Version. This tablet consisted of an Akkadian translation of a Sumerian tale (composed in Stage 1) that had not previously been included in the epic. A copy of this 12-tablet version was kept in the city of Nineveh at the royal library of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria during the seventh century B.C.E. English archaeologists discovered this copy in the nineteenth century and made the epic known to modern scholars and readers. Additional tablets from earlier stages were subsequently discovered. The epic’s sensitive exploration of friendship, death, and the hope for immortality, along with its meditations on the nature of humanity, divinity, and community, give this ancient work an enduring appeal.
The real Gilgamesh and the evolution of the myth. Although little is known about the real Gilgamesh, historical evidence seems to indicate that he did indeed exist. The Sumerian king list, which purports to trace the royal lineage from the time when kingship was conferred by the heavens through the defeat of Uruk itself, names Gilgamesh (therein called by his original Sumerian name, Bilgamesh) as fifth in line of the First Dynasty of the kingship of Uruk; his reign supposedly occurred in the latter half of the third millennium—around 2700 B.C.E.—and lasted 126 years.
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