The Legendary King Gilgamesh Was REAL According to Cuneiform Tablet

Image portraying a likeness of Gilgamesh, with insert of a cuneiform tablet.

April

/ 2026

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More than a century after the National Museum of Denmark began acquiring a vast collection of inscribed clay tablets from the ancient Near East, researchers have finally completed a comprehensive analysis of the artifacts. The groundbreaking project, titled "Hidden Treasures: The National Museum's Collection of Cuneiform Tablets," has digitized and cataloged these ancient texts for the first time. Among the most spectacular findings is a royal list that includes the legendary king Gilgamesh, providing rare documentary evidence that the hero of the world's oldest epic poem may have been a real historical figure.

The collaborative effort between the National Museum of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen examined texts that are, in many cases, over 4,000 years old. These documents were written in the now-extinct Sumerian and Akkadian languages using cuneiform writing, a communication system that emerged around 5,200 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. The project was led by Nicole Brisch of the University of Hamburg and Anne Haslund Hansen of the National Museum, with support from the Carlsberg Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation, and the Edubba Foundation.

Technology used to examine the cuneiform texts

Researchers from the National Museum of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen have analyzed, identified and digitized a large collection of cuneiform tablets. (Troels Pank Arbøll/University of Copenhagen)

A Royal List That Names Gilgamesh

The specific tablet that has caused such excitement is a school text listing kings who ruled at the end of the third millennium BC. Other known copies of this same royal list also include Gilgamesh, the protagonist of the famous Epic of Gilgamesh. Assyriologist Troels Pank Arbøll, who led the research, was emphatic about its significance:

"This makes this royal list one of the few relics that suggest that Gilgamesh may have really existed. We had no idea that we possessed a copy of that list here in Denmark. It is quite spectacular."

The Sumerian King List is already one of the most important documents in ancient history, but the discovery of a previously unknown copy in Denmark adds a new chapter to its remarkable story.

The Sumerian King List stele

The Sumerian King List, an ancient stone prism listing cities in Sumer, their rulers, and the length of their reigns. (M.atkinsonross / CC BY-SA 4.0)

The collection had sat largely unstudied in the museum's storage rooms for around a century. Thorkild Jacobsen, the first person to earn an Assyriology degree from the University of Copenhagen, donated a significant portion of the holdings in 1939. The application of digital methods and philological work has now enabled researchers to classify a heterogeneous set of documents that include accounting records, letters, medical treatments, and a series of magical spells of enormous historical relevance. The project has made the entire collection publicly available through the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, opening it up to scholars worldwide.

Magical Spells and Royal Protection

Beyond the tantalizing evidence of Gilgamesh, the collection revealed a fascinating array of other texts. A significant group of tablets originated from the Syrian city of Hama, which was destroyed and plundered by Assyrian warriors in 720 BC. The Assyrians carried much of the spoils back to their capital, Assur, in present-day Iraq, but left behind some clay tablets in their hurried withdrawal. These texts, nearly 3,000 years old, contain medical treatments and magical spells, and were found among the remains of what archaeologists believe was a large temple library. Arbøll noted that "all the other texts had disappeared," emphasizing the exceptional nature of these surviving fragments, as virtually no other cuneiform tablets on these subjects have been found in the same region from that period.

One text from Hama particularly caught the researchers' attention: an anti-witchcraft ritual designed to ward off misfortunes and political instability that might threaten the Assyrian king. The ceremony took place over an entire night and involved burning small figurines made of wax and clay while an exorcist recited a fixed series of incantations. Researchers were surprised to find this text so far from the Assyrian capital and the rich literary centers of Babylonia, since Hama was located on the periphery of those regions. The presence of such a ritual in Hama underscores the widespread reach of Assyrian magical practices and the deep-seated fears of supernatural threats to royal authority.

Bureaucracy, Beer Receipts, and a Century of Collection

Another group of analyzed texts comes from Danish excavations carried out at Tell Shemshara in northern Iraq in 1957. These tablets consist of correspondence between a local chief and an Assyrian king from around 1800 BC, along with various administrative documents. Such records reflect the highly developed bureaucracy necessary to manage the advanced urban societies of ancient Mesopotamia. As Arbøll recalled, a large number of the cuneiform tablets preserved today testify to this sophisticated administrative culture, which was the very reason for the existence of cuneiform writing in the first place.

Among these administrative texts, researchers found one of the most relatable expressions of ancient daily life: a very ancient beer receipt, confirming that the control of goods and the recording of everyday transactions were already an integral part of life thousands of years ago. The juxtaposition of grand epics featuring Gilgamesh and magical rituals for kings with prosaic beer tabs highlights the diverse and complex nature of Mesopotamian society, captured forever in these enduring clay tablets. The full catalog of cuneiform texts from the National Museum of Denmark has now been published, making these remarkable documents accessible to the world for the first time.

Top image: Image portraying a likeness of Gilgamesh, with insert of a cuneiform tablet. Source: AI generated.

By Gary Manners