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.”
The next tablet they find will say, “Enkidu planted a new forest as a carbon offset.”
That line of Enkidu’s, “The planet is having a fever!” seems particularly suspect...
Perhaps it is the reverse.
Just as Tablet Six may have at least to some extent inspired The Walking Dead [Gilgamesh romantically rejects the goddess Ishtar, who threatens to raise the dead until they outnumber the living and devour their brains], perhaps Al Gore got a sneak peak at the new tablet and said, “this will get me a Nobel Prize in literature or somewhere if I use it to argue for bigger government”.
It made me think they did more that chop down a single tree. It sounded like they tore down the entire forest...which metaphorically, would be akin to blowing up a big piece of land. And the landlord was gonna be angry about THAT.