Time for some ancient history - I've been reading Andrew George's translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest long poem in recorded history. I'm pursuing a master's in literary and cultural studies, and it is fascinating being able to engage with this incalculably influential story.
George largely translates the "Standard Babylonian" version, pulling from older tablets from different periods to fill in lost text where possible. It is mentioned that translation work was often done by studying ink drawings of the script rather than the actual tablet.
My broad question is whether someone could tell me more about the history of the gradual translation process of the epic. My question within that is whether anyone knows whether there is a resource out there that contains transcriptions of the actual cuneiform script as it appears on the tablets. I have, of course, found English translations, and one source that included many English transliterations of how some lines might have been pronounced, but nothing representing the actual cuneiform, historical or modern, apart from photos of the actual tablets. (Full disclosure - I am considering a tattoo of a line from the epic in the original language and script, and having a resource like this to pore over would be helpful as well as interesting!)
George's critical edition (The Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, 2 vols., Oxford, 2003) contains
As u/KiwiHellenist has pointed out, the edition by George from 2003 is the standard work and contains everything you might need, not just for the Standard Babylonian version of the Epic, but also for the Sumerian precursors and related stories.
A few remarks on how cuneiform documents are published:
The cuneiform tablets with the ancient text (especially for the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is known in multiple copies) tend to be dispersed in museums around the world and are not always accessible to the researchers working with the texts, so the standard in the field is to publish the documents as so-called handcopies (facsimile drawings), making them available to scholars everywhere. This is very useful, particularly considering that cuneiform texts are threedimensional objects, and it is very difficult to represent this in photographs and scans – because the light only comes from one direction, some signs can be really hard to read in photographs (we need to see where the shadows fall to see the entire sign). So, drawings made by humans who held the tablet in their hands and were able to change the angle of the lighting can provide a more accurate picture of what is written on the document than photographs.
Add to that that publishing colour photographs was forbiddingly expensive in the time where books were published physically rather than digitally, so the black and white handcopies tended to be cheaper to print than photographs. That being said, these days, scans of a large number of cuneiform documents are being made available online through resources such as the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative.