This Norton Critical Edition includes:
- An expanded translation from the Akkadian by Benjamin R. Foster based on new discoveries, adding lines throughout the world's oldest epic masterpiece.
- Benjamin R. Foster's full introduction and expanded explanatory annotations.
- Eleven illustrations.
- Analogues from the Sumerian and Hittite narrative traditions along with "The Gilgamesh Letter," a parody of the epic enjoyed by Mesopotamian schoolchildren during the first millennium BCE.
- Essays by Thorkild Jacobsen, William L. Moran, Susan Ackerman, and Andrew R. George, and a poem by Hillary Major.
- A Glossary of Proper Names and a Selected Bibliography.