The Standard Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh is arranged across twelve tablets.
The tablets are clay manuscripts rather than modern bound pages. They preserve a long Akkadian poem assembled from older Mesopotamian stories about Gilgamesh, Enkidu, the Cedar Forest, the Bull of Heaven, the flood and the search for immortality.
The best-known surviving collection comes from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The version is often associated with the scholar Sin-leqi-unninni, although the history of its composition and transmission is complex. Parts of the poem survive in multiple copies and languages.
The twelfth tablet is unusual because it does not continue the preceding narrative smoothly. It contains a separate episode involving Enkidu and the underworld, based on an earlier Sumerian composition. Thus, “twelve tablets” describes the standard edition’s arrangement, not twelve perfectly continuous chapters written at one time.