Why the ‘gaps’?

The foregoing discussions have highlighted a number of conspicuous ‘gaps’ in the Gilgameš Flood story, i.e. the many significant questions which the narrative leaves unanswered. One might hold that audiences of Gilgameš are simply supposed to fill in the gaps from their knowledge of other versions of the Flood story. But, given the relations of ‘epistemic competition’ that we found between the Gilgameš version and other Mesopotamian versions of the Flood story (see § 17.1, pp. 258– 260), this is not straightforward.