Piecing Together an Ancient Epic Was Slow Work. Until A.I. Got Involved.

In 1872, in a quiet second-floor room at the British Museum, George Smith, a museum employee, was studying a grime-encrusted clay tablet when he came across words that would change his life. In the ancient cuneiform script, he recognized references to a stranded ship and a bird sent in search of land. After he had the tablet cleaned, Smith was certain he’d found a prototype of the biblical flood story.

“I am the first man to read that after more than 2,000 years of oblivion,” Smith reportedly said in a frenzy of excitement.

Smith realized that the tablet, which had been excavated in what is modern-day Iraq, was a small part of a much longer work — one that some then thought could help shed light on the Book of Genesis. The discovery made Smith, who came from a working-class family and had largely taught himself cuneiform, famous. He dedicated the rest of his life to searching for missing pieces of the poem, making multiple trips to the Middle East before dying of an illness on his final trip in 1876, at age 36.

For 152 years since Smith’s discovery, successive generations of Assyriologists — experts in the study of cuneiform and the cultures that used it — have taken up his quest to piece together a complete version of the poem known now as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Fragments of the epic, which was written more than 3,000 years ago and was based upon still earlier works, have re-emerged as tablets have been unearthed in archaeological digs, found in museum store rooms or surfaced on the black market.

The researchers face a daunting task. There are as many as half a million clay tablets housed in the Mesopotamian collections of various world museums and universities, along with many more tablet fragments. But since there are so few experts in cuneiform, many of these writings are unread and many more are unpublished.

So despite a generation-spanning effort, about 30 percent of Gilgamesh remains missing and there are gaps in modern understanding both of the poem and Mesopotamian writing in general.

Now, an artificial intelligence project called Fragmentarium is helping to fill some of these gaps. Led by Enrique Jiménez, a professor at the Institute of Assyriology of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the Fragmentarium team uses machine learning to piece together digitized tablet fragments at a much faster pace than a human Assyriologist can. So far, A.I. has helped researchers discover new segments of Gilgamesh as well as hundreds of missing words and lines from other works.

“This is an extreme acceleration of what was going on since the time of George Smith,” said Andrew George, a professor emeritus at the University of London and a foremost authority on Gilgamesh, who has himself produced one of the epic’s translations into English.

Before 2018, only some 5,000 tablet fragments were matched. In the six years since, Jiménez’s team has successfully matched over 1,500 more tablet pieces, including those pertaining to a newly discovered hymn to the city of Babylon and 20 fragments from Gilgamesh that add detail to over 100 lines of the epic.

The Gilgamesh fragments “offer intriguing insights into the story,” Jiménez said.

At the heart of the epic is the story of a friendship between Gilgamesh, who is a demigod and the king of Uruk, and his wild-man sidekick, Enkidu. After Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill Humbaba, the monster guardian of the Cedar Forest, the gods kill Enkidu in retribution. Gilgamesh, in denial, refuses to bury Enkidu until after seven days, when a maggot drops from Enkidu’s nose.

“How can I be quiet?” Gilgamesh repeatedly asks. “When my friend Enkidu, whom I love, has [turned to] clay. [Shall I not be like] him, and also lie down, [never] to rise again, through all eternity?”

To escape the specter of death, Gilgamesh goes on a quest to find his ancestor Utnapishtim, a Noah-like figure who survived the flood, and learned the secret to immortality. After wandering the wilderness, Gilgamesh arrives at a divine-seeming tavern on the sea at the edge of the world. There, the tavern keeper and brewer, Sidhuri, offers sage advice, telling him to enjoy the simple pleasures in life. “Gaze on the child who holds your hand,” she says, “let a wife enjoy your repeated embrace.”

Gilgamesh ignores her and continues on his quest, eventually finding Utnapishtim. But the great flood hero is unable to help Gilgamesh achieve immortality. Instead, Utnapishtim shares his story of life before and during the flood. The ending of the epic suggests that Utnapishtim’s wisdom, and the knowledge it confers, is one of the main rewards for Gilgamesh’s journey.

The new fragments discovered with the help of A.I. reveal elements that add important details to many of these episodes. One of them, for example, reveals that after killing the forest monster, Gilgamesh and Enkidu traveled to Nippur, the religious center of Mesopotamia and home to the god Enlil. “They went there hand in hand, in an attempt to appease Enlil, who was angered by their killing of Humbaba, his protégé,” Jiménez said.

Benjamin R. Foster, an Assyriology professor and Gilgamesh translator at Yale University who worked with the A.I. team on some of the English translations, said the new lines also included details on Enkidu’s efforts to convince Gilgamesh not to kill Humbaba. Other lines provide a piece of a prayer made by Gilgamesh’s mother asking the sun god to touch Enkidu so he can lead Gilgamesh through the Cedar Forest.

One of the additions Foster finds most interesting is a single word uttered by Utnapishtim. He tells Gilgamesh that after his workmen built the ark, he lavished them with alcohol during a party.

“We didn’t have the word ‘lavish’ before,” Foster said. “And to my mind, he’s feeling guilty because he knows all the people who are helping him build the ark are going to be drowned in a few days.”

Some of these new finds have been included in English-language translations of Gilgamesh by Sophus Helle (Yale University Press, 2021) and George (Penguin Classics, 2020). The most recent finds are still unpublished, but Jiménez’s team will soon make all the new pieces available to the public as part of the Gilgamesh translation published on L.M.U.’s Electronic Babylonian Library.

Helle is intrigued by how the epic continues to reveal itself. “It is so ancient and yet so alive, and it kept changing as I was literally working on it,” he said. But it did make translation harder, he said: “I compare it to painting a model who won’t sit still.”

Assyriologists agree that more of Gilgamesh and other works of Mesopotamian literature remain undiscovered in store rooms and unexcavated historic sites. Many of the surviving tablets currently housed in museums and universities are mundane-seeming bills of sale, private letters, schoolbook exercises and other minutia from the ancient world. But experts say even these daily writings can offer literary insight.

Agnete Lassen, associate curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection, said one of her favorite tablets was a letter written by an unknown woman to her brother between 1900 and 1600 B.C. that may be quoting a lost work of literature. It reads: “You truly are the sun, so let me warm myself in your heat. You truly are a cedar tree, so let the heat not burn me in your shadow!”

Jiménez is also optimistic that A.I. will allow researchers to draw more connections between these types of ancient writings. His team has completed its work with the British Museum and is now working with colleagues at The Iraq Museum, in Baghdad, where he hopes to find more pieces of Gilgamesh.

In the meantime, the newly discovered lines have already given Smith’s successors plenty to ponder.

Among the most tantalizing, according to Foster, is another line from Utnapishtim: “You who are composed of divine and human flesh, whom they created, just like your father and mother. Did they ever, Gilgamesh, build a palace for a fool?”

“We don’t have any idea what he’s talking about,” Foster said. But he believes that a new fragment, discovered by A.I. or by traditional methods, will soon help solve the puzzle.

“Who knows, it might turn up tomorrow,” he said.