In 1872, George Smith, a humble employee of the British Museum, made a discovery that would change the understanding of the past. While examining an ancient clay tablet, he recognized references to a flood similar to the one described in the Bible.
Smith believed he had found a prototype of the biblical account. His discovery prompted him to devote himself to recovering missing pieces of the epic we know today as the Gilgamesh poem. His untimely death in 1876 left his quest incomplete.
For more than 150 years, scholars have worked to assemble a complete version of this Mesopotamian epic. However, approximately 30% of the poem remains missing, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of this ancient literature.
Today, the Fragmentarium project, led by Enrique Jiménez, a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, is helping to close these gaps. Using artificial intelligence, his team has accelerated the process of identifying and assembling tablet fragments.
So far, AI has facilitated the discovery of new segments of Gilgamesh, adding important details to the narrative. The findings include more than 100 unpublished lines that offer new insights into the story.
One of the recently discovered fragments reveals a journey to Nippur, an important religious center, by Gilgamesh and Enkidu after killing Humbaba. This detail was unknown until technology enabled its identification.
Benjamin R. Foster, a leading assyriologist at Yale University, has worked with the Fragmentarium team on the translation of these new texts. According to Foster, these fragments also include a prayer by Gilgamesh's mother and new details about the relationship between the main characters.
Despite the advances, experts agree that much of Gilgamesh's poem is still waiting to be discovered in museum repositories and archaeological sites. In the meantime, researchers believe there is still much to be revealed and that a new fragment could appear at any time, The New York Times reports.
