No single person “wrote” the Epic of Gilgamesh; it grew over many centuries from earlier Sumerian poems into the long Akkadian epic we read today.

Who “wrote” the Epic of Gilgamesh?

  • The Epic began as separate Sumerian poems about a hero-king, Gilgamesh, composed in Mesopotamia around the early 2nd–3rd millennium BCE.
  • These stories were later translated into Akkadian and expanded by different scribes and storytellers across generations.
  • The best‑known, “standard” version in Akkadian was compiled and edited by a learned scribe named Sîn-lēqi-unninni sometime between about 1300 and 1000 BCE.

So if you must name one individual associated with the text, you’d usually say:

The Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh was compiled by the Babylonian scholar-scribe Sîn‑lēqi‑unninni , using much older Sumerian and Akkadian materials.

Quick mini-facts

  • Origin region: Ancient Mesopotamia (Sumer, later Babylonia).
  • Original language(s): Early poems in Sumerian; later epic in Akkadian.
  • Text form: Preserved on clay tablets in cuneiform, especially a 12‑tablet set from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.