The Epic of Gilgamesh

This Norton Critical Edition includes:

• An expanded translation from the Akkadian by Benjamin R. Foster based on new discoveries, adding lines throughout the world’s oldest epic masterpiece.
• Benjamin R. Foster’s full introduction and expanded explanatory annotations.
• Eleven illustrations.
• Analogues from the Sumerian and Hittite narrative traditions along with “The Gilgamesh Letter,” a parody of the epic enjoyed by Mesopotamian schoolchildren during the first millennium BCE.
• Essays by Thorkild Jacobsen, William L. Moran, Susan Ackerman, and Andrew R. George, and a poem by Hillary Major.
• A Glossary of Proper Names and a Selected Bibliography.

Benjamin R. Foster is Professor of Assyriology at Yale University, where he has taught since 1975. His books include Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, From Distant Days: Myths, Tales, and Poetry of Ancient Mesopotamia, Sargonic Tablets from Telloh in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, and Administration and Use of Institutional Land in Sargonic Sumer, and Umma in the Sargonic Period.