Of this total, however, barely more than one-half
has been found among the remains of the great collection of cuneiform
tablets gathered by King Ashurbanapal (668-626 B.C.) in his palace
at Nineveh, and discovered by Layard in 1854 [1] in the course of his
excavations of the mound Kouyunjik (opposite Mosul). The fragments of
the epic painfully gathered--chiefly by George Smith--from the _circa_
30,000 tablets and bits of tablets brought to the British Museum were
published in model form by Professor Paul Haupt; [2] and that edition
still remains the primary source for our study of the Epic.
For the sake of convenience we may call the form of the Epic in the
fragments from the library of Ashurbanapal the Assyrian version,
though like most of the literary productions in the library it not
only reverts to a Babylonian original, but represents a late copy of
a much older original. The absence of any reference to Assyria in
the fragments recovered justifies us in assuming that the Assyrian
version received its present form in Babylonia, perhaps in Erech;
though it is of course possible that some of the late features,
particularly the elaboration of the teachings of the theologians or
schoolmen in the eleventh and twelfth tablets, may have been produced
at least in part under Assyrian influence.
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