From which century do the oldest surviving fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh date?
Answer
18th century BCE
The oldest surviving fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh date to the 18th century BCE.
These fragments belong to the Old Babylonian version, an early Akkadian form of the epic known from several incomplete clay tablets. The text is not a single pristine manuscript: scribes copied, adapted, and expanded stories over many centuries. Earlier Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh may date to the Third Dynasty of Ur, but they are separate compositions rather than a complete surviving epic.
The best-known form is the later Standard Babylonian version, associated with the scholar Sîn-lēqi-unninni and generally dated between the 13th and 10th centuries BCE. Many surviving copies come from the 7th-century-BCE library of Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. That later version contains the famous flood story and is arranged in twelve tablets.
A common mix-up is to give the date of Ashurbanipal’s library or the Standard Babylonian version instead of the date of the earliest surviving combined epic. The 18th-century-BCE date refers to the Old Babylonian fragments.