Tablet from the 13th century BC. J.-C., relating the dream of Gilgamesh. • BRITISH MUSEUM In 19 th Victorian England century, modest families can do little to raise their children in society. Such is the case of George Smith. Born in March 1840 in London, he worked from an early age in a publishing house that collaborated with the British Royal Mint, learning to make incisions and engravings for the banknotes that were issued. But Smith is very different from the other boys who swarm the dark and damp streets of London, for he is very early fascinated by the archaeological discoveries that Henry Layard and other Britons are making in what is now Iraq. In fact, the young George spent hours gazing at the cuneiform tablets displayed in the showcases of the British Museum, in the new rooms opened to present these discoveries to the public. A meticulous puzzle Henry Rawlinson, head of the museum's oriental collection, eventually noticed this young man sticking his nose to the windows of the tablets, but showed little interest in other more impressive works, such as sculptures and representations of kings, Assyrian gods and fantastic animals. Having noted the natural talent of the young Smith, Rawlinson in 1861 convinced museum officials to hire him for the restoration and classification of the cuneiform tablets. Many of them come from the excavations of Nimroud and Nineveh; there are already so many of them in the cellars of the museum that the disorder of the reserves is beginning to cause concern. George quickly learned the spelling and the Sumerian and Akkadian languages of the texts, becoming in a few years an expert in the subject. He had been examining the thousands of tablets piling up in dusty crates for a long time, when one day one caught his eye. This is a medium sized piece, rectangular in shape and diagonally broken. Although identical to many of those crammed into the wooden boxes, this one contains a few lines of text that refer to the biblical account of the universal Flood. George had already found some allusions to the Creation story on other tablets from Nineveh, which was why he was looking for similar texts. Fragment after fragment, George Smith managed to complete the piece of a first tablet, which alluded, in a few lines, to the story of the flood. As he himself later recalled, “Working with the fragments, I very quickly found half of an interesting tablet which originally had clearly contained six columns of text. In a quick read of the third column, my gaze fixed on the information saying that the ship had run aground on Mount Nisir and, in the next column, information on the sending of the dove which did not find no place to land and was coming back. I immediately realized that I had discovered, at least in part, the Chaldean account of the Deluge…I found the fragment of another copy of the account of the Deluge which also contained the sending of the birds. This is how I began to recover other fragments of the same tablet; I laid them in a row next to each other, until I managed to reconstruct most of the second column. Quickly appeared fragments of a third copy:by placing them together, they completed a large part of the first and sixth columns. I then obtained the account of the Deluge. Apparently, Smith's emotion when he had this first intuition was such that he started running around the room and, when his companions turned to look at him, they noticed with amazement that he was beginning to undress! George Smith had found the story of the universal Flood as told in the Epic of Gilgamesh , one of the oldest literary works of mankind. He thus demonstrated for the first time in history that the stories of Genesis were attested in an environment and on documents foreign to the Bible, even prior to the writing of the biblical text. In 19 th Europe century, the impact of these discoveries is simply extraordinary, both among specialists, academics and academics, and in public opinion. In view of the turmoil caused by this issue, the editors of a major London newspaper, the Daily Telegraph , make an offer to George Smith which must have seemed incredible to him:the newspaper would pay all the expenses of the trip and the excavations if he went to Iraq to seek other texts containing these marvelous legends, on condition that the young philologist undertake to grant the exclusivity of his discoveries to the London newspaper. Thus, in 1873, the former employee of the Royal Mint left for the Middle East, surrounded by the celebrity that crowned him with the Daily Telegraph . Three trips to Iraq The journey to Mesopotamia will not be easy. Smith is not used to traveling and he is constantly sick from food and weather. When he arrived in Mosul, the officials of the Ottoman Empire, to which the territory of present-day Iraq then belonged, plunged Smith into a bureaucratic labyrinth. The excavations are delayed for several months, but a few days after the start of the work, Smith begins to discover new fragments of a story he calls the "Primal Flood", belonging to an unknown work, the Atrahasis Epic . The Daily Telegraph publishes the scoop of the discovery, but, his expectations being fulfilled, he decides to put an end to the aid granted to the young philologist. George Smith then returned to London with 384 fragments of clay slabs, among which are those which complete the account of the description of the Deluge. Smith will return twice to Iraq. During his next visit, in 1874, he discovered new fragments relating to the myths of the Creation of man, the Tower of Babel and other legends related to the Bible. During his travels, Smith works in difficult conditions. He contracts dysentery during his third stay. This will be the last… In August 1876, while returning from his third trip to northern Iraq, George Smith suffered from dysentery in Syria. The summer heat aggravates his condition, to the point that he soon cannot even ride a horse. His assistant installs him as comfortably as he can in a village called Ikisji, 70 kilometers from Aleppo, where he quickly goes to find a doctor who speaks English; but he finds only the dentist John Parsons, who cannot do much to relieve the patient. Under these conditions, the only solution is to transport the latter to Aleppo. For this they prepare a tatravan , a kind of covered seat on the back of a mule, so that Smith could make the trip in relative comfort and protected from the scorching sun. But it is already too late:on the way, the discoverer of the Epic of Gilgamesh agonizes and dies. He is only 36 years old. Initially, the corpse of George Smith was buried in Aleppo, near the Protestant hospital located in a former wasteland, on the outskirts of the city. However, a few years later, all the remains buried in this small cemetery were moved to another location. The final resting place of the epigraphist and archaeologist is indicated by a modest tombstone placed by archaeologist Max Mallowan, husband of Agatha Christie, at the request of the British Museum. The passage of time has finally erased the memory of George Smith's tomb, located in the cemetery of the Sheikh Maqsoud district (a site reserved for Armenians of the Protestant faith). It was rediscovered a few years ago by the author of these lines. You can see the small reddish marble tombstone in the shape of an open book commissioned by the British Museum, on which an inscription recalls Smith's merits and his contribution to the dissemination of knowledge. Timeline 1861 Archaeologist Henry Rawlinson hires George Smith to classify cuneiform tablets.1872 In Nineveh tablets on the legend of Gilgamesh, Smith finds references to a great Flood.1873 Funded by the Daily Telegraph , Smith finds the missing fragments in Iraq.1876 After returning from his third trip to Iraq, Smith contracted dysentery and died in Aleppo at the age of 36. 24,000 tablets Austen Henry Layard found in 1845 the remains of Nineveh, Assyrian capital of Sennacherib. In 1849, he made a major discovery there:the great library assembled by Ashurbanipal, the most learned of the Assyrian kings, in the 7th th century BC. AD; in total, some 24,000 cuneiform tablets found. Proof in writing Discovered by Layard in the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, a fragment of tablet remained in the reserves of the British Museum until its rediscovery by George Smith. The fragments found in Iraq allow him to reconstruct the text:“But Ea, the lord of water under the earth, […] ordered me to build a boat and warned me that the Flood would last seven days. […] I carried all the gold and silver I had in the boat, I brought all my family and my relatives, all the domestic animals and the animals of the plain. […] The storms of the Deluge blew for six days and seven nights. [Then] the sea calmed down. […] In the distance, towards the horizon, I saw a strip of land. The boat docked at the foot of Mount Nisir. »
