The twelfth tablet is a stowaway

Claim (verbatim)

The Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh (ša naqba īmuru, the twelve-tablet series credited to Sîn-lēqi-unninni) is an eleven-tablet architecture carrying a stowaway: Tablet XII is a prose-literal Akkadian rendering of the second half of the Sumerian Bilgames and the Netherworld, appended without narrative join — Enkidu, dead since Tablet VII, must die again. The eleven-tablet poem closes on a ring: the walls-of-Uruk lines from the prologue return at the end of Tablet XI, a designed-for-memory closure that tells any reading community where the work ends. Tablet XII rode along because first-millennium series were catalogue objects — once the count of twelve tablets was fixed, library copying reproduced it — but readers should have treated XI as terminal, and reading behavior, unlike series copying, leaves a differential record. Prediction: in a tablet-by-tablet census of first-millennium witnesses, Tablet XII will fall below a monotonic attestation trend fitted to Tablets VII–XI by at least a factor of two, while Tablet XI sits at or above its trend (primary clause: Tablet XII at least twofold below trend; the verdict follows it); secondarily, no first-millennium excerpt or commentary tablet will quote Tablet XII together with material from Tablets I–XI. Kill: the witness lists of the electronic Babylonian Library (eBL) Gilgamesh corpus and the sigla and manuscript census in George's critical edition, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (Oxford, 2003).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in a tablet-by-tablet census of first-millennium witnesses, Tablet XII will fall below a monotonic attestation trend fitted to Tablets VII–XI by at least a factor of two, while Tablet XI sits at or above its trend (primary clause: Tablet XII at least twofold below trend; the verdict follows it); secondarily, no first-millennium excerpt or commentary tablet will quote Tablet XII together with material from Tablets I–XI.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the witness lists of the electronic Babylonian Library (eBL) Gilgamesh corpus and the sigla and manuscript census in George's critical edition, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (Oxford, 2003).

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Borderline-leaked: Tablet XII as an inorganic appendix and Tablet XI's ring-closure are scholarly consensus (George), so the interpretation is established; but the specific empirical test (XII falls >=2x below the VII-XI attestation trend; no excerpt quotes XII with I-XI) was not located.

• A.R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (Oxford, 2003), on Tablet XII as an 'inorganic appendage'

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.