Series:

Cambridge Library Collection - Archaeology

1 total work

Cover of An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic
The epic tale of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest stories in world literature, composed more than four thousand years ago. It survives in fragmentary form in various cuneiform tablets. This 1920 publication presents transliterations and translations of Old Babylonian fragments found since the discovery in the 1850s of shattered clay tablets in the library of King Ashurbanipal (668-627 BCE) at Nineveh by A. H. Layard, and painstakingly pieced together by George Smith (several of whose works have been reissued in this series). Its American editors, Morris Jastrow Jr (1861-1921) and Albert T. Clay (1866-1925) discuss the complicated history of the epic, and the new information gained from more recently discovered sources, chiefly the two related items known respectively as the Pennsylvania and Yale tablets. The epic remains of interest to biblical scholars as well as Assyriologists, since its description of a great flood is reminiscent of the story in Genesis.