Sometimes it is the smallest discoveries that have the largest impact. When Alexandra Kleinerman and Alhena Gadotti found a new fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh in 2015 CE, it did not seem to be particularly impressive. The broken tablet bore just 16 lines of text, most of it already known from other manuscripts. But working on the fragment, Andrew George discovered something remarkable. The structure of the new tablet did not fit our understanding of the epic. To get the fragment to make sense, whole episodes had to be moved around, yielding an entirely new sequence of events. One consequence of this was a new sex scene. The epic tells how the wild man Enkidu became human by having sex with a woman named Shamhat for an entire week, making love for six days and seven nights. But now it turns out that it took, not one, but two full weeks of love-making to make Enkidu truly human.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original content at https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1286/new-gilgamesh-fragment-enkidus-sexual-exploits-dou/.