In 1872, museum employee George Smith was studying a dirt-encrusted clay tablet in a quiet room on the second floor of the British Museum when he came across words that would change his life. In the ancient cuneiform script, he recognized references to a stranded ship and a bird searching for land. After having the tablet cleaned, Smith was sure he had found a prototype of the biblical flood story.
“I am the first person to read this after more than 2,000 years of oblivion,” Smith is said to have said in wild excitement.
Smith realized that the tablet, unearthed in what is now Iraq, was only a small part of a much larger work – a work that some at the time thought could shed light on the Book of Genesis. The discovery made Smith, who came from a working-class family and was largely self-taught in cuneiform, famous. He devoted the rest of his life to searching for missing parts of the poem, making several trips to the Middle East before dying of illness on his last trip in 1876 at the age of 36.
Since Smith’s discovery 152 years ago, successive generations of Assyriologists – experts in cuneiform writing and the cultures that used it – have taken up his task of piecing together a complete version of the poem now known as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Fragments of the epic, written more than 3,000 years ago and based on even earlier works, have resurfaced as tablets have been unearthed in archaeological digs, found in museum storage facilities, or turned up on the black market.
Researchers face a daunting task. Mesopotamian collections in various museums and universities around the world contain up to half a million clay tablets, along with many other tablet fragments. But because there are so few experts on cuneiform writing, many of these writings remain unread and many more remain unpublished.
Despite efforts spanning generations, about 30 percent of the Book of Gilgamesh remains lost, and gaps remain in the modern understanding of both the poem and Mesopotamian literature in general.
Now an artificial intelligence project called Fragmentarium is helping to fill in some of those gaps. Led by Enrique Jiménez, a professor at the Institute of Assyriology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the Fragmentarium team uses machine learning to piece together digitized tablet fragments much faster than a human Assyriologist could. So far, AI has helped researchers discover new sections of the Book of Gilgamesh, as well as hundreds of missing words and lines from other works.
“This is an extreme acceleration of what has been going on since the time of George Smith,” said Andrew George, professor emeritus at the University of London and a leading authority on the Epic of Gilgamesh, who himself produced one of the epic’s English translations.
Before 2018, only about 5,000 tablet fragments could be identified. In the six years since then, Jiménez’s team has managed to identify over 1,500 more tablet pieces, including those belonging to a newly discovered hymn to the city of Babylon and 20 fragments from Gilgamesh that provide details on over 100 lines of the epic.
The Gilgamesh fragments “offer fascinating insights into history,” Jiménez said.
The epic centers on the story of a friendship between Gilgamesh, a demigod and king of Uruk, and his wild sidekick Enkidu. After Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill Humbaba, the monster guardian of the Cedar Forest, the gods kill Enkidu in revenge. Gilgamesh denies it and refuses to bury Enkidu until, after seven days, a maggot falls out of Enkidu’s nose.
“How can I be calm?” Gilgamesh asks repeatedly. “When my friend Enkidu, whom I love, has turned to clay. (Should I not be like) him and lie down too, (never) to rise again, for all eternity?”
To escape the specter of death, Gilgamesh sets out to find his ancestor Utnapishtim, a Noah-like figure who survived the flood and learned the secret of immortality. After wandering through the wilderness, Gilgamesh comes to a divine-looking seaside tavern at the edge of the world. There, the landlady and brewer Sidhuri gives him wise advice and tells him to enjoy life’s simple pleasures. “Look at the child that holds your hand,” she says, “and let a woman enjoy your repeated embraces.”
Gilgamesh ignores them and continues his search until he finally finds Utnapishtim. But the great flood hero cannot help Gilgamesh achieve immortality. Instead, Utnapishtim tells his story of his life before and during the flood. The end of the epic suggests that Utnapishtim’s wisdom and the knowledge it gives him is one of the main rewards of Gilgamesh’s journey.
The new fragments, discovered using artificial intelligence, reveal elements that add important details to many of these episodes. One of them, for example, shows that after killing the forest monster, Gilgamesh and Enkidu traveled to Nippur, the religious center of Mesopotamia and home of the god Enlil. “They went there hand in hand to appease Enlil, who was enraged by the killing of his protégé Humbaba,” Jiménez said.
Benjamin R. Foster, a professor of Assyriology and Gilgamesh translator at Yale University who worked with the AI team on some of the English translations, said the new lines also included details of Enkidu’s efforts to persuade Gilgamesh not to kill Humbaba. Other lines include part of a prayer from Gilgamesh’s mother, in which she asks the sun god to touch Enkidu so he can guide Gilgamesh through the cedar forest.
One of the additions that Foster finds particularly interesting is a single word uttered by Utnapishtim, who tells Gilgamesh that after his workmen had built the Ark, he plied them with alcohol at a feast.
“We didn’t know the word ‘wasteful’ before,” Foster said. “And I think he feels guilty because he knows that all the people who are helping him build the ark are going to drown in a few days.”
Some of these new finds have been included in the English-language translations of Gilgamesh by Sophus Helle (Yale University Press, 2021) and George (Penguin Classics, 2020). The most recent finds are still unpublished, but Jiménez’s team will soon make all the new pieces available to the public as part of the Gilgamesh translation, which will be published in the Electronic Babylonian Library at LMU.
Helle is fascinated by how the epic keeps revealing itself. “It’s so old and yet so alive, and it was constantly changing as I was literally working on it,” he said. But it has made translation more difficult, he said: “I compare it to painting a model that won’t sit still.”
Assyriologists agree that many works of Gilgamesh and other Mesopotamian literature still lie undiscovered in storerooms and unexcavated historical sites. Many of the surviving tablets now housed in museums and universities are seemingly mundane sales contracts, private letters, school textbook exercises and other odds and ends from the ancient world. Yet experts say that even these everyday writings can offer literary insights.
Agnete Lassen, assistant curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection, said one of her favorite tablets is a letter written by an unidentified woman to her brother between 1900 and 1600 B.C., possibly quoting a lost literary work, which reads: “Thou art truly the sun, so let me warm myself in thy heat. Thou art truly a cedar, so let not the heat burn me in thy shadow!”
Jiménez is also optimistic that AI will allow researchers to make more connections between these types of ancient writings. His team has completed its work with the British Museum and is now working with colleagues at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, where they hope to find more pieces of Gilgamesh.
In the meantime, the newly discovered lines have already given Smith’s successors much food for thought.
According to Foster, one of the most intriguing is another line from Utnapishtim: “You, who are made of divine and human flesh, whom they created, just as they created your father and your mother. Did they, Gilgamesh, ever build a palace for a fool?”
“We have no idea what he’s talking about,” Foster said. But he believes a new fragment discovered through artificial intelligence or traditional methods will soon help solve the mystery.
“Who knows, maybe it will show up tomorrow,” he said.
