This is the state of the Standard Babylonian epic after 3,000 years of transmission: every tablet broken, none lost entirely. The best-preserved tablets (I, VI, XI) are the ones ancient readers copied most — survival correlates with popularity. Tablet XII is a literal translation of an older Sumerian poem, tacked on by tradition; scholars have argued about it ever since.
Four of the editor's changes are reconstructed as pull requests, aligned line-by-line against the Old Babylonian originals.