Anonymous (Babylonian; standard version attributed to Sin-leqi-unninni)

About Anonymous (Babylonian; standard version attributed to Sin-leqi-unninni)

The epic grew over more than a thousand years in ancient Mesopotamia. Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk, were written down around 2100 BC or a little later; Akkadian-speaking scribes of the Old Babylonian period (c. 1800-1600 BC) joined such stories into a single epic; and a later scholar-scribe named Sin-leqi-unninni, whom Mesopotamian tradition credited with the work, is thought to have shaped the standard version in eleven tablets sometime between about 1300 and 1000 BC, to which a twelfth tablet was attached. Gilgamesh himself may have been a real ruler of Uruk in the early third millennium BC, as the Sumerian King List suggests, but nothing certain is known of his life.