Gilgamesh is decidedly remote from our world and time. Uruk, the Mesopotamian city near the fertile banks of the Euphrates, where the poem’s action begins and ends, is one of the earliest cities in the world. Its citizens and their king live in close proximity to one another. Few barriers separate them, so that a trapper from the countryside can gain immediate audience with the king, and the king knows the temple harlots by name.

The shepherds who tend their flocks three days away from Uruk, providing the city with food and wool, know their king and talk about him familiarly. At the time of the poem, Old Babylonian Uruk had between 50,000 and 80,000 inhabitants and was probably one of the biggest cities in the world. It declined after 2000 BCE, but some insist (through a very doubtful etymology) that it gave its name, through Arabic, to the country we now know as Iraq. It is alien, it is strange, an urban setting presented as if for the first time.

Can we visualize it precisely from the detail we are given, or does the problem we encountered with the ship and the heroes’ stature recur? Are the passages we read intended as descriptions in our sense, or do they carry meaning in a different way, less to the eye than to another faculty, agreed and shared by those to whom the poem was originally addressed?

And whom did it address? There are as many enigmas as face the walrus and the carpenter walking along the beach in Lewis Carroll’s poem. Definitive answers come there none. Thinking about the ways in which Gilgamesh was composed, or how it evolved, how it was preserved and rediscovered, extends our sense of reading and writing, language and translation, poetic shapes and forms. But it doesn’t resolve in a set of definitive answers.

We are not dealing with a single world and time. We are not dealing with a single language. Gilgamesh starts as a series of discrete Old Babylonian stories about Bilgames composed as early as 2250 BCE, but well after the historical king Gilgamesh went to the Netherworld. The earliest surviving versions of these stories were pressed by scribes into soft damp river clay tablets with a cut reed stylus. The clay tablets dried, hardened and were preserved and valued.

Important texts (laws, omens, chronicles) were copied and re-copied, used as exercises in the scribal schools whose debris is a crucial scholarly resource, and collected into libraries. Fragments of the poems have been found as far afield as Anatolia in modern Turkey. The poet John Wilkinson laments, “Clay tablets last four millennia but I can no longer access what I wrote on my Atari ST. . . .” Many readers will have no memory of what an Atari ST was.

Of the estimated 3,600 lines of Gilgamesh, 3,200 are known in whole or in part.

The poem we call Gilgamesh is based on copies of a work assembled over a millennium after the earliest stories were written in Old Babylonian. Old Babylonian Bilgames morphed into Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh. A specific scribe, editor, collator, poet is given credit for bringing it all together. He may also have been an exorcist, magician, diviner, priest or seer; or a combination of these not unrelated vocations. He was active between 1300 and 1000 BCE. He may have been ancestor to a family of later scribes who retained his name.

Though there is no agreement on what to call his vocation, he is certainly not what we would regard in the modern sense as an author or a poet. His contribution was curatorial. Though he may have added lines and passages, his main task was to forge a plausible whole out of scattered parts, a major feat but in creative terms a secondary one, working behind the scenes.

He goes by the name of Sin-leqi-unninni, which means “The moon god Sin attends to my prayers.” The poet and editor John Clegg notes how “the problems one faces as a reader, the lacunae and apparent irrelevancies and so on, were the same sort of problems as faced by the original compiler (even if they arose in diferent places and degrees).”

Having organized the stories into a (more or less) continuous narrative of the heroes’ adventures, Sin-leqi-unninni topped the poem with prefatory lines and tailed it with a reprise that echoes the opening but in a darker tone. Unusually for Standard Babylonian scribal work, Sin-leqi-unninni’s name appears in a catalogue of texts and authors, not on any tablet of the poem itself.

No one can say for certain how much he contributed to the poem, but his name is, as Andrew George says, “a convenient identifier for whatever intellect it was that produced the standardized text that was the vehicle for the Gilgamesh narrative in the first millennium.” The Standard Babylonian poem loses some of the directness and freshness of the Old Babylonian stories he was working from. His is not primarily what we would call a poetic imagination. Was he perhaps, as George suggests, “a profound thinker, who gave the poem a structure and tone that were certainly the result of a deliberate and consistent policy to focus less on heroic grandeur and glory and more on human frailty and failure?”

Or was he, as Stephen Greenblatt says, like Homer and the “Genesis story teller,” nothing less than “a brilliant artist who was working with already existing materials, texts and oral legends that reached far, far back into the past?” Or was he less consistent and less decisive than either of these imagined figures, and his transformation of the given material less spectacular? How many of the arresting passages and metaphors are totally unattested in other and earlier versions?

In Middle Babylonian, judging from how many fragments survive over a wide area, there was a mess of versions or parts of versions (apprentice scribal exercises: far more beginnings survive than middles and ends). Sin-leqi-unninni appeared as in the Augean stables, Hercules’s fifth labor, with his bucket, mop and shovel. He was not the only editor we know by name. Another organizer of even more disparate material, well before Sin-leqi- unninni, was Esagil-kin-apli, who, at the end of the second millennium, edited into canonical tablets some of the omen collections and other scattered material.

His Manual for Exorcists was a substantial and essential medical text, identifying complaints and assigning them to the appropriate divine sender. Up to that point the omen traditions were in a tangle, which he voluminously sorted out.

Sin-leqi-unninni’s Gilgamesh perhaps included 12 tablets. A tablet is neither a chapter nor a book: it is a count of lines—generally between 300 and 360, though some are shorter. Eleven of the tablets contain the narrative, with its brief introduction and its echoing coda, as though we had come full circle (which we haven’t, quite). The twelfth tablet does not pertain directly to the poem in its shapely structure, but it tells about the Netherworld, how it is organized, and what happens when we go there. Gilgamesh, the longest-standing poetic work in progress in history, is the most patient poem there will ever be. First it was entirely lost. Now it keeps being added to, corrected, adjusted.

W. H. Auden quotes Paul Valéry as saying that a poem is never finished, it’s finally abandoned. Gilgamesh will never be finished, but given the health of Gilgamesh scholarship, it is unlikely to be abandoned, either. Archaeologists and ruin-raiders turn up “new” ancient tablets and fragments. The holes in the poem are about possibilities of recovery and meaning, spaces that await missing words and also invite the inventive engagement of scholar and lay reader.

The closest we can get will always be approximate. Even in the light cast by great scholarship, it can seem as though the journey has only just begun. Of the estimated 3,600 lines of Gilgamesh, 3,200 are known in whole or in part. Some of the parts are very small, and the complexity and ambiguity of the text will never let scholars rush ahead. In the next century or two the poem will not acquire even the relative stability of the Homeric texts.

Assurbanipal did not require the standardization of the Gilgamesh text in the way that (it was once generally thought) the tyrant Peisistratos in 6th-century BCE Athens standardized the Homeric poems so that reciters at the Panathenaic Festivals would all sing, as it were, from the same hymn sheet. Even so, in the 7th and then in the 5th centuries BCE, complete versions of Gilgamesh existed, though differing from one another and differing also from their sources.

The British Museum has huge cuneiform holdings, and the task of translation began there. The emergence of Gilgamesh and the growth of Assyriology are down to a few remarkable modern advocates. First were the explorers who uncovered the great cities of Mesopotamia and thought to collect and send home not only the spectacular statuary but the mysterious, unreadable clay tablets they found. Unresting scholars follow them. With devotion and patient application, they deciphered the languages, finding human voices in the clay, and a king terrified of dying came back to the long half-life of poetry—of his particular poem.

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Excerpted from Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem by Michael Schmidt. Copyright © 2019 by Michael Schmidt. Published by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.