Sîn-lēqi-unninni
c. 1200 BCE · Uruk
Sîn-lēqi-unninni ('Sîn is one who accepts my prayer') is the scholar to whom Mesopotamian tradition ascribed the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgameš, known by its opening line 'He who saw the deep.' A catalogue of literary authorities names him as its author or compiler — unusually for cuneiform literature — and he is generally identified as an exorcist active in the later second millennium. Several Uruk scribal families of the Neo-Babylonian, Achaemenid, and Seleucid periods claimed him as their ancestor. The ascription of the epic's shaping to him is traditional rather than contemporaneously documented.
Did you know?
A 3,000-year-old epic, rediscovered by a self-taught engraver
The Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh — credited to the scribe-poet Sîn-lēqi-unninni around 1200 BCE — survived on clay tablets buried in the ruins of King Ashurbanipal's library and sat unread for years after their 19th-century excavation. In 1872 CE the fragments were finally joined and deciphered in London by George Smith, a working-class former banknote engraver who had taught himself cuneiform, roughly 3,000 years after the poem took its standard form.
How we know
Sîn-lēqi-unninni's Standard Version compiled c. 1200 BCE (scholarly range c. 1300–1000 BCE); tablets from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh (excavated 1850s); George Smith (1840–1876), ex-banknote engraver, deciphered the fragments at the British Museum and announced them to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in Dec. 1872 CE.
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Uruk
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Uruk
One of the oldest cities of Sumer, sacred to Inanna and Anu, in the southern Iraqi marsh-plain east of the Euphrates. The pin marks the findspot of the excavated tablet.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Sîn-lēqi-unninni’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.