A provenance study of the gilgamesh fragment from megiddo

A Late Bronze Age fragment of a clay cuneiform tablet with the Gilgamesh Epic was found in the 1950s on the surface at Megiddo. The presence of scribes in Megiddo is evident from the el-Amarna letters. This is the only first-class literary Mesopotamian text ever to be found in Canaan. The aim of the present study was to examine the origin of this tablet, by mineralogical and elemental methods. The petrographic and NAA results indicate that the tablet was not Mesopotamian, but was written in southern Israel. The implications of this result in view of the small corpus of scholarly cuneiform texts discovered in Egypt and the southern Levant in the second millennium BCE are discussed.