In 1872, George Smith, an employee at the British Museum, was examining a dirty clay tablet in a quiet second-floor room when he stumbled upon words that would alter the course of his life. The ancient cuneiform script included references to a stranded ship and a bird sent to find land. After cleaning the tablet, Smith believed he had discovered 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, filled with excitement.
Smith understood that the tablet, excavated from what is now Iraq, was a fragment of a much larger work that could potentially provide insight into the Book of Genesis. This remarkable find brought Smith, who had come from a working-class background and had mostly self-educated himself in cuneiform, into the spotlight. He devoted the rest of his life to seeking the missing sections of the poem, making several trips to the Middle East until he passed away from illness in 1876 at the age of 36.
For the past 152 years, generations of Assyriologists—scholars specializing in cuneiform and the ancient cultures that utilized it—have continued Smith’s mission to reconstruct the complete version of the now-famous Epic of Gilgamesh. This epic, written over 3,000 years ago and influenced by even older texts, has yielded fragments as new tablets are discovered in archaeological sites, found in museum storage, or appear on the black market.