The library was destroyed by the Persians in 612 B.C., and all the tablets are damaged. All the above languages were written in the script known as cuneiform, which means 'wedge-shaped.' The fullest surviving version, from which the summary here is taken, is derived from twelve stone tablets, in the Akkadian language, found in the ruins of the library of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria 669-633 B.C., at Nineveh. These Sumerian Gilgamesh stories were integrated into a longer poem, versions of which survive not only in Akkadian (the Semitic language, related to Hebrew, spoken by the Babylonians) but also on tablets written in Hurrian and Hittite (an Indo-European language, a family of languages which includes Greek and English, spoken in Asia Minor). in the Sumerian language on clay tablets which still survive the Sumerian language, as far as we know, bears no relation to any other human language we know about.

Many stories and myths were written about Gilgamesh, some of which were written down about 2000 B.C. Although historians (and your textbook) tend to emphasize Hammurabi and his code of law, the civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates area, among the first civilizations, focus rather on Gilgamesh and the legends accruing around him to explain, as it were, themselves. Gilgamesh was an historical king of Uruk in Babylonia, on the River Euphrates in modern Iraq he lived about 2700 B.C.

Epic of gilgamesh tablet v