The tablet
was identified by Dr. Arno Poebel as part of the Gilgamesh Epic; and,
as the colophon showed, it formed the second tablet of the series. He
copied it with a view to publication, but the outbreak of the war which
found him in Germany--his native country--prevented him from carrying
out this intention. [20] He, however, utilized some of its contents in
his discussion of the historical or semi-historical traditions about
Gilgamesh, as revealed by the important list of partly mythical and
partly historical dynasties, found among the tablets of the Nippur
collection, in which Gilgamesh occurs [21] as a King of an Erech
dynasty, whose father was ?, a priest of Kulab. [22]
The publication of the tablet was then undertaken by Dr. Stephen
Langdon in monograph form under the title, "The Epic of
Gilgamish." [23] In a preliminary article on the tablet in the
_Museum Journal_, Vol. VIII, pages 29-38, Dr. Langdon took the
tablet to be of the late Persian period (i.e., between the sixth
and third century B. C.), but his attention having been called to
this error of some _1500 years_, he corrected it in his introduction
to his edition of the text, though he neglected to change some of
his notes in which he still refers to the text as "late.
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