“…Early interest in the Epic of Gilgamesh was almost exclusively on account of the flood story from Tablet XI. The flood story attracted enormous public attention and drew widespread scholarly controversy, while the rest of the epic was largely ignored. Most attention towards the Epic of Gilgamesh in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from German-speaking countries, where controversy raged over the relationship between Babel und Bibel (“Babylon and Bible”).
In January 1902, the German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch gave a lecture at the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin in front of the Kaiser and his wife, in which he argued that the Flood story in the Book of Genesis was directly copied off the one in the Epic of Gilgamesh…” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh