"I Am the First Man to Read That!"

George Smith was a working-class printer in nineteenth-century London, but, like many people with tedious jobs, his real interests were elsewhere. Despite leaving school for an apprenticeship at 14 and having little formal education, Smith became obsessed with ancient history — specifically the Assyrians, a city-state that grew into a mighty Middle Eastern empire between the 1300s and 600s BCE

Smith, who was only in his twenties, spent all of his free time reading about the ancient Assyrians. He often walked over to the British Museum on his lunch break to look at the Assyrian collections there. He taught himself to read cuneiform, and the museum’s curators realized that he was quite good at translating ancient texts. So they turned Smith loose on their growing collection of ancient tablets.

In the 1860s and 1870s, Smith spent most evenings cataloging and cleaning the broken bits of clay in the museum’s collection. Most of his work must have been sheer drudgery, but, every once in a while, he would make a discovery that made the work worthwhile. In 1866, he found proof of Biblical events — a record of a tribute payment made by Jehu, an Israelite king, to the Assyrian ruler. The next year, he was able to put a precise date on a four-thousand-year-old war. He went on to find a description of a total solar eclipse, pinpointing it to June 15, 763 BCE. Smith was eventually invited to add to the scholarly record, publishing books and articles. He became an important figure in the field.

But all of this unexpected success paled in comparison to what came next. Among the piles of tablets in the Museum, Smith read the first few lines of one of them. It seemed promising, but he had to wait a few days for a restorer named Mr. Ready to clean the artifact. After what must have seemed like an eternity for the impatient translator, he was able to lay eyes on a passage that would change the world. His friend E.A. Wallis Budge described the wild scene that came next:

Smith took the tablet and began to read over the lines which Ready had brought to light; and when he saw that they contained the portion of the legend he had hoped to find there, he said, ‘I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion.’ Setting the tablet on the table, he jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself!

What had Smith read that caused him to start flinging his clothes around the room? A passage that he translated to:

… demolish the house, and build a boat! Abandon wealth and seek survival. Spurn property, save life. Take on board all living things’ seed! The boat you will build, her dimensions all shall be equal: her length and breadth shall be the same. Cover her with a roof, like the ocean below, and he will send you a rain of plenty.

It sure sounded a lot like the account of Noah’s Ark in the Bible:

So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit high all around. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish.

Smith’s discovery became international news. The New York Times wrote about it in deep purple prose:

Let us take the reader into the alchemist’s cell, where the dead past is made to live anew by the magic elixir of patient labor and high intellect… Here works the Muse whose skill had made the speechless kingdom give up its uttermost mysteries… He can almost put his hand on the place where Noah’s story is told in full, with that of the Creation, the building of Babel, and the rise of the diverse tongues — nay, all the great legends of the Bible may find here their fountain-text.

The tablet and the story it contained were exciting, but they were dangerous, too.

George Smith and his colleagues had uncovered the flood tablet during a precarious time for Christianity. About a decade before Smith’s discovery, Charles Darwin had published The Origin of Species, which had turned the Biblical account of creation on its head. Before him, Charles Lyell’s geographical insights had revealed that the Earth was much older than mainstream theology claimed.

Into the fierce debate over the veracity of the Bible came the flood tablet. Some saw the tablet as a confirmation of the Biblical accounts of Noah’s flood. There must have been a great flood and an ark. One magazine writer remarked upon how the discoveries at Nineveh (which included the flood tablet) would

silence the infidel, and strengthen the faith of the Christian, and assist us in the intelligent study of the sacred records! Incidental allusions by the historians and prophets, to manners and customs seeming strange, are verified by the monuments now brought to light. It is demonstrated that the Bible gives a true picture of the ancient life of the world. The crumbling mound of Mosul, and the rest, show the fulfillment of Scripture prophecies relative to the ruin of Nineveh; while the records of the past they so long entombed, but which are now revealed in the nineteenth century, exhibit the glory of Nineveh before its ruin.

Smith saw the texts in conversation with the Bible — he published a book called The Chaldean Account of Genesis that found other parallels between the Bible and Mesopotamian tablets, including the creation and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

But others dwelled upon the fact that this, older, version of the story did not necessarily show that the Bible was true. The Assyrian version of the story was polytheistic — the rain god unleashes the storms, the irrigation god tears down the levees, and the mother goddess Ishtar regrets having condemned humanity to death. The gods murdered humans out of childish spite (they were angry at humanity for being annoying) rather than inflicting a righteous punishment on people for failing to live up to an ethical code.

Was the flood tablet proof of the Bible’s historical roots, or was it proof that the flood story was a myth that had passed through many sets of hands over the centuries, with each culture adding its own gods and beliefs to the tale? And if the flood story was just a bit of folklore that the Jews had picked up from neighboring cultures, what else in the Bible might come into doubt?

George Smith knew that many other fascinating texts lay in the ruins of Assyrian palaces, and parlayed his newfound prominence — the Prime Minister had attended his lectures! — into a role in the excavations at Nineveh. He had finally achieved his dream of unearthing fragments of history that had been concealed for millennia.

Unfortunately for Smith, his obsession killed him. On his third expedition to the Middle East, he contracted dysentery and died in Aleppo, Syria. But he had started something that would transform our understanding of the past.

As scholars continued to translate tablets, they realized that the fragments of the flood story were part of a much longer work of literature, a series of stories about a man that Smith first identified as Idzubar. But, as they gained a better understanding of cuneiform, translators decided that his name was more accurately pronounced Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh appeared in ancient Mesopotamian king-lists, suggesting he was likely a real ruler, but he also featured in clearly fictional tales involving magic and gods. By the end of the 1800s, scholars had combed through thousands of tablets and compiled the stories about Gilgamesh into a coherent whole. We now call the story they stitched together The Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s the oldest story we have.

As with many ancient legends, several different versions seem to have floated around the ancient Middle East, along with some poems about Gilgamesh that don’t fit into the story proper. The main plot of the story takes all sorts of weird twists and turns, but at its heart are basic human themes: the meaning of civilization, the friendship between Gilgamesh and the “wild man” Enkidu, the nature of just kingship, the human desire to escape mortality, and the relationship between humans and the divine.

These tablets show us that the human desire to tell stories that give meaning to our lives goes back to the dawn of civilization, and they demonstrate that some of our stories are probably older than we know. They tell us that the ancient Mesopotamians, whose lives are in so many ways unimaginable to us, dealt with many of the same issues that we do.

The story of the tablets’ recovery reminds us of how much has been lost from our ancient past. If we had no idea about this ancient and influential story until George Smith happened upon that tablet, what else has gone missing in the mists of time?

Though Smith and his successors have plugged away at translating the British Library’s collection of cuneiform tablets, there are tens of thousands that remain untranslated in London alone (some scholars are working to unleash AI on the problem). And these represent only a tiny fraction of the writing that once existed — the vast majority has been lost.

I wonder whether one of those other artifacts, moldering in a storeroom somewhere, has the potential to upend our understanding of the past just as much as George Smith’s flood tablet did.

This newsletter is free to all, but I count on the kindness of readers to keep it going. If you enjoyed reading this week’s edition, there are three ways to support my work:

You can subscribe as a free or paying member:

You can share the newsletter with others:

Share Looking Through the Past

You can “buy me a coffee” by sending me a one-time or recurring payment:

Support me on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again next week!