George Smith and the Rediscovery of Gilgamesh

In 1872, George Smith was working at the British Museum, sorting broken clay tablets dug from the ruins of Nineveh. Most looked like rubble.

But Smith could read the tiny wedge marks, and one day a fragment opened into a shockingly familiar scene.

A god sends a flood to wipe out the world. A man is warned. A boat is built. Animals are brought aboard. And when the waters fall, birds are released to find land.

The passage belonged to the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem older than the Bible by more than a thousand years.

Smith read it aloud in London and the room went quiet. Suddenly, the oldest stories in our civilization were not myths, but rather records, pressed into clay and waiting to be found.