Whoa, big “news”!
Interesting find that is hopefully authentic. My skepticism meter did go off however when I read the following: “Gilgamesh and Enkidu cut down the cedar to take home to Babylonia, and the new text carries a line that seems to express Enkidu’s recognition that reducing the forest to a wasteland is a bad thing to have done, and will upset the gods,” George said. Like the description of the forest, this kind of ecological awareness is very rare in ancient poetry, he added.”
Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk.
Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel. Mirab, with sails unfurled.
Good thing the Sulaymaniyah Museum got to them before ISIS/ISIL could.
Remember the faked Jesus family ossuaries, one was a box of bones with the names of Jesus’ brother on the outside, such discoveries were provided by smugglers and they were later exposed as frauds. If you can’t provide a list of ownership that accounts for the artifact’s history, it’s a bad sign. Someday an expert will determine the tablet as ancient but the writing is modern and badly faked with errors. The character of Gilgamesh is often brutal and callous and I can’t see him feeling guilty over a forest. We want so badly for these finds to be real and we therefore open ourselves up to fraud.
You can skip to page 77 without missing anything: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/18512/1/jcunestud.66.0069_w-footer.pdf