THE DISCOVERY OF THE GILGAMES EPIC
The year is 1872. An Englishman named Messer Shmit at the Royal Academy of London said at his lecture that among the cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia, there was a tablet with the story of the Flood . This news threw the audience into great excitement. Because how could this event, which is believed to have been written by God in the Torah , be found on a tablet? After the speaker told the legible parts of the Flood on the tablet, he explained that this Flood story was the last part of the epic belonging to a hero named Gilgames . The saga was written on 11 tablets. There was also a 12th tablet. It also included another story by Gil-games, but written in two languages. These tablets were found among the library of Ashurbani-pal, which was excavated in the north of Mesopotamia, formerly known as Ninive and the new name Koyuncuk . Assyrian King Ashurbanipal, who lived around 700 BC
The tablets belonging to the library were brought directly to London, and the texts and languages were dissolved after long studies. There were two problems in the saga. One of them was that the tablets found had been shattered, some parts were destroyed and some parts became unreadable since they remained under the ground for thousands of years . New excavations were required to complete them. Another problem was that the epic was written in Akkadian. However, the names of people and gods in the epic did not belong to the Akkadian language . Accordingly, the epic was taken from another language or adapted. With the excitement of the flood legend, new excavations were made. Many pieces of the epic were found in these excavations carried out in various parts of Mesopotamia . According to them, the epic was at least three separate It was written in the figure.
The epic on the tablets found among the Ashurbanipal library was finally written and standardized by a wise priest from the city of Uruk, named Sin-lekke-unninni, around 1250 BC . 8-12 copies of it were made and sent to the libraries of various cities. At the beginning of the library of Ashurbanipal, it is written as “Tablet of the omniscient , Gilgames Series, the library of the World Queen Ashurbanipal”. According to the tablets found in the excavations, the first epic, written in Akkadian, was written in the 1800s, called the Old Babylonian period, and the second in the 1600s. The fragments of this last article, translated into Hittite and Hurricane in the Hittite archive in Bogazköy, and tablets found in Uga-rit in Syria and Megiddu in Palestine, of the saga beyond Mesopotamia shows it is spreading. The epic was tried to be completed from all these found tablet pieces and it is still being worked on . Despite all these studies, only 60 percent of the epic, which is estimated to have 2 900 lines, has been completed. Despite its incomplete parts, a general idea about the epic can be obtained. The problem that the Gilgamesh epic might have come from another language was solved in the excavations in Southern Mesopotamia, formerly Nippur, in the new name Niffer in 1889-1890. The tablets found here by Gilgames were written in Sumerian, a language completely separate from Akkadian. But these included separate stories. Later Babylonians combined these stories into a whole epic
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