July 5, 2019 Comments Off on George Smith and the discovery of Gilgamesh Views: 1625 Ancient Stories, Nostalgia

The epic of Gilgamesh first came to the light of the modern world during the 19th-century, more than three millennia after it was first written, and memorizing a hero whose quest is to find the secret of immortality. The poem about this ancient hero and city founder was hidden in shattered tablets of clay with cuneiform script, excavated from the ruins of Nineveh, an ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq).

The story of Gilgamesh may have easily been lost if it wasn’t for one, George Smith. At the time, Smith, a self-made scholar, was holding a job at the esteemed British Museum. As someone born in a modest London family, in 1840, he had managed to scale up his societal standing in Victorian England, proving he is a no ordinary man. As his life played out, Smith not only mastered the cuneiform writing of ancient Mesopotamia–he also made a ground-breaking discovery that rattled Victorian society.

In the 1870s, the English Assyriologist George Smith published a translation of Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, containing the Flood myth, which attracted immediate scholarly attention and controversy due to its similarity to the Genesis flood narrative. Photo source: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0

When he turned 14, he left school and nabbed a job in a publishing house in London. On the job, he specialized in elaborate banknotes engravings, as the assignments required his immense patience and attention to detail. Not too far away from where he worked, was the British Museum, and by the age of 20, Smith became a regular there.

As Francisco Del Rio Sanchez writes for National Geographic: “In 1860 Smith began spending his lunch breaks there [at the British Museum] to feed his growing hunger for the study of Mesopotamia. Of particular interest were the discoveries that Austen Henry Layard and other archaeologists had recently made at the site of Nineveh, near Mosul in modern-day Iraq. Smith spent hours at the museum studying the clay tablets and teaching himself to decipher them.”

Neo-Assyrian clay tablet. Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 11: Story of the Flood. Known as the “Flood Tablet” From the Library of Ashurbanipal, 7th century BC.

Smith’s talent to decipher the mysterious language on the tablets was spotted by the British Museum antiquities department staff. He eventually met with Sir Henry Rawlinson, collaborator of Layard at Nineveh, and sometimes described as the Father of Assyriology.

“Smith proved particularly adept at spotting which fragment fitted where when faced with a table strewn with shattered clay tablets,” writes National Geographic, and in 1861 he was officially hired by the British Museum to help with such assignments.

In the period that followed, Smith studied the thousands of Nineveh tablets kept at the British Museum and dated the 7th-century B.C. Which helped him hone his knowledge in Akkadian script, a rare mastery to possess in the 19th-century.

An ancient Assyrian statue currently in the Louvre, possibly representing Gilgamesh, Photo source: Urban, CC BY-SA 3.0

Over the next ten years, Smith successfully pinned down some dates related to the Israelites history, clarifying certain biblical chronological aspects. The self-made scholar hoped to also journey to the Middle East in a quest to harvest more tablets, however, at this point, the British Museum preferred that he stayed in England and work on the translation of the existent tablets.

Smith eagerly looked for connections to the Bible in those tablets, and the first exciting moment took place in November 1872. As he was pondering on the Nineveh tablet known as K.3377, he found out, the tablet said something about a great flood (the Deluge). The text hinted at similarities with the story of Noah from the Bible’s Book of Genesis. It reportedly contained a claim that a vessel had anchored in the mountains of Nizir, what some scholars have suggested to be a genuine mountain in the north of Iraq. And what Smith was actually looking at, was, in the words of the Smithsonian Magazine, “one of the most sensational finds in the history of archaeology.”

Existential angst during the aftermath of World War II significantly contributed to Gilgamesh’s rise in popularity in the middle of the 20th-century. For instance, the German novelist Hermann Kasack used Enkidu’s vision of the Underworld from the Epic of Gilgamesh as a metaphor for the bombed-out city of Hamburg (pictured above) in his 1947 novel Die Stadt hinter dem Strom.

The “flood” tablet comprised the 11th part of the 12th-book Epic of Gilgamesh. What fascinated everyone was the evidence of a great flood account resembling the one found in the Bible. More than that, since the ancient tablets appeared quite older than the Sacred text, experts now had to re-position this intriguing biblical story further back on the timeline. Shattered tablets suddenly shattered old assumptions.

“Few could have anticipated the media storm that would break when the Epic’s discovery was sneak-previewed in The Daily Telegraph on November 14, 1872,” also wrote The Telegraph’s Vybarr Cregan-Reid in 2013.

Nineveh – Mashki Gate , Photo: Omar Siddeeq Yousif, CC BY-SA 4.0

“The poem tells of the adventures of the king of Uruk in Mesopotamia from around 4,000 years ago. The reason that the Epic’s rediscovery caused such a controversy in the 1870s was that the King’s voyages were analogues for stories from the Old Testament, pressed into clay at least 1,000 years before the Bible’s first books and many centuries before Homer. The impact of the discovery challenged literary and biblical scholarship and would help to redefine beliefs about the age of the Earth,” writes Vybarr Cregan-Reid.

Following the sensational announcement, the Daily Telegraph went on to financially support an archeological trip for George Smith to the Middle East, giving him an opportunity to look for more tablets and fill in important gaps in his translation efforts.

Representation of Gilgamesh, the king-hero from the city of Uruk, battling the ‘bull of heavens’; terracotta relief kept at the Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels. The episode is described in Tablet VI of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Photo source: U0045269, CC BY-SA 4.0

Smith’s archeological career advanced quickly. Shortly after his arrival at Nineveh, he did discover more tablets that added to the epic. The corpus grew and gave the Epic of Gilgamesh, today considered the world’s earliest-known great work of literature. In it, Gilgamesh, the founder of Uruk is saddened by the death of his friend Enkidu. Therefore he begins the futile quest to find immortality and it is within this journey that he learns about the great flood that eradicated humanity.

Smith’s early translations of the Nineveh tablets were published under the title The Chaldean Account of Genesis, during the 1870s. Sadly, it would be in August 1876, that his life stopped too early at the age of 36. During one of his stays in Syria, Smith contracted a disease and died, far away from home. His efforts and discoveries, however, remained to serve generations of experts and archeologists to come.

“You have known, O Gilgamesh,

What interests me,

To drink from the Well of Immortality.

Which means to make the dead

Rise from their graves

And the prisoners from their cells

The sinners from their sins.

I think love’s kiss kills our heart of flesh.

It is the only way to eternal life,

Which should be unbearable if lived

Among the dying flowers

And the shrieking farewells

Of the overstretched arms of our spoiled hopes.”

― Herbert Mason, The Epic of Gilgamesh

Tags: Ancient civilizations, Ancient Explorer, ancient Mesopotamia, George Smith, Gilgamesh, London, Nineveh