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Iraq rooms

Copies from Nippur and Tell Haddad, Iraq

The Death of Gilgamesh

Old Babylonian copies (a Sumerian poem, not a tomb)

Comparison: an Old Babylonian Gilgamesh tablet from Nippur, Penn Museum CBS 7771. The same city and the same centuries produced the death poem. This piece is another Gilgamesh composition, not that poem. Onceinawhile, CC BY-SA 4.0. Shown unedited.

The gods do not grant Gilgamesh endless life. They remember that he brought the forgotten rites back from the flood survivor, and a funeral follows.

Why this is extraordinary

A Sumerian poem opens on Gilgamesh ill and near death. He dreams, and the gods sit in assembly and rehearse his life. He had reached Ziusudra, the flood survivor. He had brought back to the land the me, the divine powers of Sumer, that had been forgotten: the orders and the rituals, including the washing of hands and mouth. He is not given a mortal life without end, and a funeral follows. The copies are Old Babylonian, written in cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script, from Nippur and, in a fuller state, from Tell Haddad, ancient Me-Turan, about 1900 to 1600 BC.

No openly licensed photograph of those death tablets is shown here. The pictures are neighbouring objects, labelled as neighbours: another Nippur Gilgamesh tablet, an Old Babylonian tablet in Berlin, a plaque of the fight with Humbaba, and the Nippur flood tablet whose hero is the man the poem says Gilgamesh reached. The line-by-line edition is linked below. It is copyrighted, and this room summarises it.

The poem is the textual form of a claim that later people restored rites from someone who had outlived a flood. It does not say the rites were a machine, and it does not say the companion Enkidu was an earlier species. Enkidu, in the Gilgamesh poems, is a wild man brought into the city. That is a literary type. A reading that makes him a fossil human is a further step, and it is thin. The city is Uruk. The survivor is the hero of the Eridu Genesis. The same word, me, is weighed in Enki and the World Order and in the Shuruppak room.

The order of the poem. The flood is already in the past. The funeral is the end. Diagram: Our Deep History.

Why it matters

This is the poem in which a journey to Ziusudra restores knowledge. What that knowledge is, in the lines that survive, decides how far the claim can be taken.

Gilgamesh of Uruk is given 126 years in the king list, after the flood. The flood speech he hears in the Akkadian epic is Tablet XI, a different composition in a different language. The death poem is Sumerian. Ziusudra is the man he had already reached. The edition's rendering of the restored powers, as powers, orders and rituals, is the footing used in the Shuruppak room and here.

Photo tour

4 photographs, unedited. On a phone, swipe the row. Choose one to look closely.

Comparison: an Old Babylonian Gilgamesh tablet from Nippur, Penn Museum CBS 7771. The same city and the same centuries produced the death poem. This piece is another Gilgamesh composition, not that poem. Onceinawhile, CC BY-SA 4.0
Comparison: VAT 4105, Old Babylonian Gilgamesh, Vorderasiatisches Museum. The number is written on the clay. It is another early copy of the king, and it is not the death poem.Bautsch, CC0
Comparison: a clay plaque, purchased in Iraq, of a fight the museum files as Gilgamesh and Enkidu killing Humbaba. 19th to 17th century BC. The companion is shown in action. This episode is not the death, and the plaque was not dug from a named pit.Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0
Comparison: the Nippur tablet of Ziusudra's flood, CBS 10673. This is the survivor the death poem says Gilgamesh had already reached. It is the flood story, not the death.Onceinawhile, CC BY-SA 4.0

See the evidence at the source

These pictures are not openly licensed, so they are not copied onto this page. Each link opens in a new tab.

What is still unexplained

These sit beside the consensus account, with the same visual weight. None of them is marked solved.

Observed in the summary of the copies A journey already finished The death poem does not tell the flood. It tells a dying king whose journey to the survivor is already behind him. The assembly recalls the journey as the reason something was restored. The flood itself is the other rooms. Here the stake is what he is said to have carried home.
Observed where the lines can be read Forgotten rites The restored things are the divine powers of Sumer that had been forgotten, glossed as orders and rituals. The washing of hands and mouth is among the rites named. Enki and the World Order uses the same word for powers Enlil places in Enki's hand, and the readable list there is offices and crafts. Nothing in either passage states a measurement or a device. A lost technical manual is a reading added to the rites. It is not the list.
Open — a thin reading The wild man Enkidu, in the Gilgamesh poems, is raised among the animals and then brought into Uruk. He dies before Gilgamesh, and the king's fear of death begins there. A reading that makes Enkidu a memory of an earlier kind of human uses that portrait. The poems do not name a species, a fossil, or a date before the Old Babylonian copies. The portrait is a type: the wild man who enters the city. The type can be enjoyed as literature and still be only a type.
Observed Copies, and no death mask The poem is known from Old Babylonian copies, Nippur and Tell Haddad. A photograph of CBS 7771 shows a real Nippur Gilgamesh tablet of those centuries with six columns and a crack. It is not the death poem. VAT 4105 in Berlin is another Old Babylonian Gilgamesh excerpt. The plaque of the fight shows two men striking a fallen figure the museum files as Humbaba. That is a different episode. The absence of a death-tablet photograph is a limit of open licensing, not a limit of the text. The edition is the evidence for the words.

Location and dating

Location
The copies come from Nippur and Tell Haddad, in Iraq. The tablets of the death poem are in museum collections. The photographs in this room are of other Gilgamesh objects, from Nippur, Berlin and a purchased plaque.
Period label
Current consensus — open to revision The working date is open to revision. The copies are Old Babylonian, about 1900 to 1600 BC, by script and findspot. Gilgamesh in the king list is a king of Uruk after the flood. That reign length, 126 years, is not a date for this clay.
How this dating was done
The copies are dated by typology, which places a tablet from the style of its script, here the Old Babylonian hand, and by the literary finds at Nippur and Tell Haddad. There is no tomb of Gilgamesh in this room to date by radiocarbon, the carbon left in bone or charcoal.
What could change it
A copy from a layer older than the Old Babylonian schools would move the poem. A line that made a me into a tool or a number would move the technical reading. A skeleton identified as Enkidu is not a test the poems propose.
Published ranges, drawn as bars. A bar is a claim about a span, not a point.
Copies of the poem
King-list reign, as writtenContested
2700 BCE2250 BCE1600 BCE
  • Copies of the poem. Nippur and Tell Haddad. Old Babylonian.
  • King-list reign, as written. 126 years in the list. Not a historical span.

What is actually there

Open questions

Question Status
What, exactly, had been forgotten, beyond the rites the lines name? Open in the broken passages
Does the funeral describe a tomb that could be dug? Open, and no such dig is in this room
Is Enkidu only a literary wild man, the figure raised among animals and brought into the city? The poems support the literary reading. A deeper one, in which he is an earlier kind of human, is thin.

The current narrative

Where publication stands today. It is the best-supported reading, and it is open to revision. It is not a verdict.

The current narrative — open to revision

A poem of a king's death and of rites restored

The Death of Gilgamesh is an Old Babylonian copy of a Sumerian poem. A dying king has reached the flood survivor and brought back forgotten rites. He is buried. He is not made immortal in the flesh.

What supports this

  • The copies are Old Babylonian, from Nippur and Tell Haddad.
  • The edition's speech names Ziusudra and the forgotten powers, orders and rituals.
  • The washing rites are concrete. They are the sort of thing a temple does.

What pushes back

  • The tablets are fragmentary. A summary leans on the joins.
  • Other Gilgamesh poems, in Sumerian and in Akkadian, tell other ends and other journeys. They have to be kept separate.

What would settle it

Best reading of this composition. The rites are what the lines restore. A manual is not.

Emerging narratives

Other published readings. Each may be right. None is adopted here unless the evidence carries it.

An emerging narrative

The restored powers are a lost technical code

What Gilgamesh brought back was a hidden art, and the language of rites is the cover.

What supports this

  • The word me is genuinely hard, and more than one poem treats it as worth recovering.
  • A journey to the only man who survived the flood is a strong frame for "something was saved."

What pushes back

  • The gloss in this poem is orders, rituals, and washing.
  • The list in Enki and the World Order, where it can be read, is offices and crafts.
  • No line states a measure or a device.

What would settle it

The recovery is real in the poem. The code is ahead of the wording. A line with a number would change the weight.

An emerging narrative

Enkidu remembers an earlier kind of human

The wild man raised with the animals is a memory of humans from a deeper time, and the death poem belongs to that memory.

What supports this

  • The poems insist that Enkidu begins outside the city and is changed by it.
  • A culture that told of sages and a flood might also tell of a human who was not yet a citizen.

What pushes back

  • The portrait fits a known literary type, the wild man who is civilised.
  • No poem gives him a species, a fossil horizon, or a year before the copies.
  • This particular poem is about Gilgamesh's death and the rites, not about Enkidu's bones.

What would settle it

Thin. It can be held as a possibility the texts do not test. It should not be asked to carry the poem.

Should the current view be reevaluated?

Open to revision

The poem and the restored rites are real testimony. The technical-code reading and the deep-time reading of Enkidu are both thinner than the lines. What the copies support is the funeral and the rites, and the broken passages stay open.

What drives this

  • Old Babylonian copies
  • A speech that names Ziusudra and the rites
  • No line that states a tool or a species

This is the museum’s own weighing of the evidence. It is not a visitor vote, and it is separate from the slider.

Weigh it yourself

Anonymous. Nothing here is stored except on this browser. Your lean does not change the assessment beside it.

A poem of a king's death and of rites restored Unsure The restored powers are a lost technical code

If the contested reading is right

What would follow if a reading that is not the consensus turned out to be true, and what could settle it. This explains the stakes. It does not adopt the reading.

The restored me are a technical art the readable rites only partly show

A death poem would also be a claim that practical knowledge was recovered from before the flood, and the broken lines would be the ones to join first.

Why it is still worth a test

A joined passage in which a restored me is a number, a tool, or a procedure.

Sources

  1. The death of Gilgamesh The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, Oxford
  2. CBS 7771, an Old Babylonian Gilgamesh tablet Penn Museum, photographed in the public galleries
  3. Gilgamesh Wikipedia

Image credits

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