Sumerian poems
separate tales
Not yet the twelve-tablet epic. Gilgamesh appears in several poems, including materials around death and the netherworld. The later flood inset is not yet present.
07 · The first survivor
What dropped
A poem that changed jobs as it was copied.
Enkidu dies. Gilgamesh cannot bear it. He goes looking for a life that does not end. An old man who survived a flood tells him how the gods once tried to erase humankind. A plant that restores youth is lost to a snake. The city remains.
That is one telling. It is not all the tellings.
Old Babylonian
epic in formation
“Surpassing all other kings.” Friendship, death, the wilderness, the road. The Standard flood tablet is not yet the architecture.
Standard Babylonian
twelve-tablet series
“He who saw the deep.” Tablet XI carries Utnapishtim's flood, widely held to be taken over from Atrahasis. The plant of youth is stolen by a snake. Gilgamesh returns. He does not become immortal.
1872
public recognition
George Smith reads a flood the room already knew from another book. The clay becomes news because of resemblance, not because anyone had kept the whole poem continuously in English.
2003
witness beside apparatus
Stages, languages, gaps. What can be established, and what remains reconstruction. A modern reader meets a poem that survived as scribal series, excavation chance, and translation, not as a single beloved original.
What dropped is the teaching. A Sumerian poem is not a Standard tablet. A Standard tablet is not Genesis. A lecture in 1872 is not the clay. Translation can keep a name and lose a world. Aelian's later Gilgamos is almost unrecognizable.
Did we keep Gilgamesh? Scribes copied a series. Kings kept libraries. A fire baked some clay harder. Archaeologists took what the ground still held. Victorian England kept a flood because it already had one. Each of those is a different keeping.
When the question becomes what a myth does inside a culture, Myth.