Old Babylonian Gilgamesh (Pennsylvania and Yale Tablets)

Roughly five centuries before Sin-leqi-unninni assembled the eleven-tablet standard version, Akkadian-language poets in the Old Babylonian period had already fused several of the separate Sumerian Gilgamesh poems, Gilgamesh and Huwawa and Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven among them, into something closer to a continuous epic; Gilgamesh and Aga, by contrast, left no trace anywhere in the Akkadian tradition. The two best-known witnesses are the Pennsylvania Tablet, which introduces Enkidu's creation and his civilizing seduction by the priestess Shamhat, and the Yale Tablet, which continues directly into the expedition against Humbaba, guardian of the cedar forest; both are museum-catalogue tablets whose original findspots were not recorded at the time of acquisition, a common problem for Old Babylonian literary tablets that reached collections through the antiquities market rather than controlled excavation, though scholarly convention associates the tradition with Larsa on grounds of script and format. Other Old Babylonian fragments, including a Tell Harmal tablet and the Sippar tablet with Gilgamesh's dialogue with the alewife Siduri, round out a version of the epic that differs from the later standard text in emphasis as much as content. Enkidu here is created specifically to be Gilgamesh's match, 'a second self' meant to absorb a king's destructive restlessness rather than a wild man tamed for its own sake, and the poem's early Sippar fragment gives Siduri's advice a strikingly different, almost hedonistic register, urging Gilgamesh to fill his belly, dance, and cherish his family since the gods reserved immortality for themselves, a passage the later standard version reworks and abbreviates. The philosophical weight the standard version places on mortality is present here only in seed form; the Old Babylonian recension is more interested in kingship, restraint, and the civilizing power of companionship. Scholars treat this stratum as the crucial intermediate step between the freestanding Sumerian poems and the unified eleven-tablet standard version (a twelfth tablet, translating the second half of the separate Sumerian poem Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld, was appended centuries later still), the point at which Gilgamesh stopped being several heroes in several stories and became one continuous character with one continuous arc.