Sacred Texts  Ancient Near East 

The Epic of Gilgamish tr. by R. Campbell Thompson [1928]

This is one of the first essentially complete academic translations of the epic of Gilgamesh. It includes all of the principal episodes of the epic: the wild man Enkidu; the battle with Humbaba, the cedar forest demon; the death of Enkidu, the journey of Gilgamesh to find the secret of eternal life, in the course of which he encounters the Babylonian Noah, Uta-Napishtim, and hears the story of the great flood.

Oxford trained Thompson (1876-1941), was an Assyriologist associated with the British Museum. He was a teacher both of T.E. Lawrence and Max Mallowan, husband of Agatha Cristie. He excavated at Ur, Ninevah and Carchemish.

While often cited, this book is almost never seen. This work is long out of print (in fact it has never been reprinted) and extremely rare, even in libraries. However, it has a huge significance because it is one of the baseline translations of Gilgamesh. Because of its date of publication, under US copyright law it is formally still under copyright. Since there was no copyright notice in the original, the US copyright lasts for 70 years following the death of the author (i.e., 2011). We have attempted to locate the current copyright holder with no success. If one comes forward and requests that this electronic text be removed, it will be taken down without notice.