Over 4000 years ago, the Epic of Gilgamesh was first told and written down on clay tablets.

Today, as far as I understand, the story is known from the discovery of those tablets in recent centuries.

Does human knowledge of the Epic of Gilgamesh have a continuous history? Was there ever a time when the story was lost, to all cultures, and it had to be rediscovered from the tablets? Or did knowledge of the story continue, either by oral tradition or by transcription from clay to parchment to paper, through all those centuries?