In 1872, George Smith, an employee at the British Museum, made a groundbreaking discovery while examining a clay tablet encrusted with grime in a quiet room on the second floor. He identified words in ancient cuneiform that referenced a stranded ship and a bird sent in search of land, leading him to believe he had uncovered a precursor to the biblical flood narrative.
“I am the first man to read that after more than 2,000 years of oblivion,” Smith exclaimed in his excitement after the tablet was cleaned.
Smith determined that the tablet, which was excavated in what is now Iraq, was only a small fragment of a much larger work, potentially providing insights into the Book of Genesis. This revelation propelled Smith, who had largely self-educated himself in cuneiform and came from a working-class background, to fame. He committed the rest of his life to locating additional pieces of the poem, embarking on several journeys to the Middle East before succumbing to an illness on his final expedition in 1876 at the young age of 36.
For the past 152 years, generations of Assyriologists—scholars specialized in cuneiform and the associated cultures—have continued Smith’s mission to reconstruct a complete version of what is now known as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Fragments of the epic, which dates back over 3,000 years and is based on earlier texts, have gradually resurfaced as archaeologists have unearthed tablets, discovered them in museum storerooms, or encountered them on the black market.