In the Epic of Gilgamesh What Gift Makes Old Men Young Again
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In November 1872, George Smith was working at the British Museum in a second-floor room overlooking the bare plane trees in Russell Square. On a long tabular array were pieces of clay tablets, amongst the hundreds of thousands that archaeologists had shipped back to London from Nineveh, in present-day Iraq, a quarter-century before. Many of the fragments bore cuneiform hieroglyphs, and over the years scholars had managed to reassemble parts of some tablets, deciphering for the first fourth dimension these records of daily life in Assyria of the 7th and eighth centuries B.C.—references to oxen, slaves, casks of wine, petitions to kings, contracts, treaties, prayers and omens.
Every bit scholars go, Smith, 32 years former, was an anomaly; he had concluded his formal education at age 14 when he was apprenticed to a printer, and maybe it was considering of his training as an engraver that he had such a knack for assembling coherent passages of cuneiform out of the drawers and drawers of old rubble. In fact, Smith had already established dates for a couple of minor events in Israelite history, and on this brisk fall 24-hour interval he was looking for other references that might confirm parts of the Bible. Then, on a fragment of a tablet, he came across a story that would before long astonish the Western world. He read of a flood, a ship caught on a mount and a bird sent out in search of dry land—the first independent confirmation of a vast flood in aboriginal Mesopotamia, complete with a Noah-like figure and an ark.
Nonetheless he could read only a few lines of the tablet, much of which was encrusted with a thick, lime-like deposit. The museum had an expert restorer on contract, Robert Ready, but he was away on private business. As Smith'south colleague E. A. Wallis Budge later recalled, "Smith was constitutionally a highly nervous, sensitive man, and his irritation at Fix'south absence knew no premises." Several excruciating days afterwards, Fix finally returned and worked his magic, whereupon "Smith took the tablet and began to read over the lines that Ready had brought to light," Budge recalled, "and when he saw that they independent 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 yard years of oblivion.' Setting the tablet on the tabular array, Smith jumped upwards and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement."
What he had uncovered would become known in the West as The Ballsy of Gilgamesh, the three,200-year-old account of the eponymous hero'due south exploits and one of the oldest works of literature in the earth. Information technology constituted one of the about sensational finds in the history of archæology. Smith would go on to become the earth's leading expert in the ancient Akkadian language and its fiendishly hard script, write the start true history of Mesopotamia'southward long-lost Assyrian Empire and publish pathbreaking translations of the major Babylonian literary texts. All that from a self-taught laborer who had never been to high school, much less college.
Scholars had only recently succeeded in nifty the code to the region's history: the complex cuneiform (wedge-shaped) script in which most of the ancient Mesopotamian texts were written. With few established protocols, Assyriology constituted a rare chink in the armor of the British class structure. An inquiring heed with a fresh perspective could be welcomed into the enterprise without a single credential, letter of introduction or family connexion. Resources were nonetheless pitifully slim, and full-time employment in the field was almost unattainable, so it would exist an exaggeration to speak of this as a window of opportunity; it was more of a mousehole of opportunity, but it was all that Smith required.
He was born in 1840 in the London commune of Chelsea, at that time a seedy surface area of grimy tenements and high unemployment. When he turned fourteen, his father took the sensible road of apprenticing the boy to the press firm of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, where he was put to piece of work learning to engrave bank notes.
Working amid the din of printing presses and the smell of damp ink on newspaper, Smith developed the patience, and nifty eye and fragile hand that would later serve him so well in his piece of work with cuneiform tablets. His work besides exposed him to a wider world, for Bradbury and Evans had branched out from printing into publishing; they owned the humor magazine Punch and published Dickens and Thackeray in lavishly illustrated editions. In the fall of 1860, the 20-year-old Smith, fascinated past ancient history, began to haunt the Nigh Eastern collections at the British Museum.
From the firm'due south offices just off Fleet Street, a young man in a hurry could thread his way amongst a dumbo press of carriages, horse-fatigued streetcars, window-shopping pedestrians and hand-drawn carts full of cabbages and potatoes to the museum in 20 minutes, probably eating as he walked, so as to spend his lunch break poring over the enigmatic tablets in the museum's collection.
At the fourth dimension, the dominant figure in British cuneiform studies was Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson. Haughty, ambitious and accustomed to control, Rawlinson had been knighted afterward a distinguished military career in India, Persia and Iraq. Though non a museum employee, Rawlinson was a frequent presence in the department's workroom. It was he who had made the decisive breakthrough in the decipherment of cuneiform writing; fifty years of historic period in 1860, he had just published the showtime book of his Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia.
Anybody sensed that at that place were exciting discoveries to be made in the cluttered mass of tablets, and newspapers such every bit the Illustrated London News published dramatic reports of every new confirmation of a biblical proper name or date. Yet the museum's professional staff were not peculiarly well qualified to make these discoveries themselves. The caput, or "keeper," of the Section of Oriental Antiquities was a learned Egyptologist, Samuel Birch, who had no directly expertise in Mesopotamian studies and left the supervision of the cuneiform collection to his sole assistant, a young classical scholar named William Henry Coxe.
At offset, Birch and Coxe paid little attention to the repose but persistent immature engraver. But it gradually became apparent to the two men that Smith could read the tablets better than they. In time, Birch brought him to Rawlinson'southward attention.
Rawlinson was impressed by the young man's ability to piece tablets together, a task requiring both exceptional visual retention and manual dexterity in creating "joins" of fragments. A given tablet might have been cleaved into a dozen or more than pieces that were at present widely dispersed among the thousands of fragments at the museum. Rawlinson persuaded the museum to rent Smith to piece of work on sorting and assembling tablets—a chore involving more manual labor than scholarship. Every bit Budge noted, Smith "worked for some years for a bacon that was smaller than that then received by a master carpenter or primary bricklayer."
But Smith made the fullest use of his new position to increase his command of the linguistic communication and its script, and by the mid-1860s he was making real discoveries: identifying Hebrew monarchs mentioned in Assyrian inscriptions and giving new detail to biblical chronology. In 1866 Smith published his first article, and he received an of import promotion when Rawlinson persuaded the museum's trustees to hire him equally his assistant for the next volume of his Cuneiform Inscriptions. "Thus, in the beginning of 1867," Smith later recalled with quiet pride, "I entered into official life, and regularly prosecuted the report of the cuneiform texts."
In improver to tablets and fragments, the museum held many paper "squeezes"—impressions that had been made past pressing damp paper onto inscriptions too big to motion. Information technology was an extraordinary trove, if only it could be read, simply the problems were not only linguistic. The squeezes deteriorated on handling and were further damaged when mice got at them. Unbaked clay tablets could crumble, and even those that had been baked, giving them the heft and durability of terra cotta tiles, had often been broken amid the ruins of Nineveh. Tablets were stored loose in boxes and sometimes damaged each other; items under active consideration were laid out on planks assault trestles in a dimly lit room. (Fearful of fire, the museum'south trustees had refused to allow gas lighting in the building.)
Eager to become a full-fledged archaeologist, Smith longed to go to Iraq to excavate. But museum trustees felt that they had more than enough Assyrian and Babylonian artifacts and wanted Smith at work on the premises. He had no way to support himself in a distant province of the Ottoman Empire, or fifty-fifty to pay his own way there, as he was now supporting a married woman and a growing family on his slender wages. Discouraged, he wrote to a friend in February 1872 that the "Government will not assist the motion in the least, at present, in fact I retrieve they will non give a penny until something is discovered." It was then that Smith began systematically surveying the museum's collection for texts that might shed new lite on biblical studies. In chancing upon the Flood story, Smith felt he had found the passport to the land of his dreams.
Discussion of the find spread rapidly, and Prime Government minister Gladstone himself was in the audition when Smith presented a lecture to the Biblical Archaeology Gild on December 3, 1872. Edwin Arnold, editor of the Daily Telegraph, promptly put upwardly the sum of a g guineas to fund Smith on an expedition—much as the Telegraph had successfully sent Henry Morton Stanley to discover the explorer-missionary David Livingstone in Cardinal Africa, after Livingstone had ceased to exist in contact with England during a long journeying of exploration begun in 1866. In Jan 1873, Smith was at last on his style.
As eager as Smith had been to go to Iraq, he was completely unprepared to do then. He couldn't speak Standard arabic, Turkish or Persian, and apart from a couple of brief research trips to Paris, he had probably never before set foot exterior England.
In his first Center Eastern port of call, the Turkish city of Smyrna, he was jostled past crowds, upset past noise and confusion, and appalled by the local cuisine. Just if Smith chafed under travel'due south discomforts, he loved the landscape and the sense of connectedness to the ancient history he had studied and then long. As he traveled through remote villages, he was struck by a sense of continuity with the past: he saw clay-brick houses whose way he recognized from ancient reliefs and encountered a threshing motorcar "like to those which are found in prehistoric deposits."
On March 2, 1873, he finally approached his life's goal, outside the provincial capital of Mosul. "I started before sunrise, and arrived near ix in the morning at the ruins of Nineveh. I cannot well describe the pleasure with which I came in sight of this memorable urban center, the object of and then many of my thoughts and hopes." It consisted of vast, flat mounds whose featurelessness had astonished British archaeologist Austin Henry Layard when he first saw them in 1840. Kouyunjik, the largest of these, was 40 feet loftier, a mile long and a third of a mile wide. Information technology was pitted with various trenches and holes dug by Layard and his Iraqi assistant Hormuzd Rassam years before, when they had uncovered more two miles' worth of sculptured reliefs. (It was Layard and Rassam who would ship to England the tablets Smith would one twenty-four hours decipher.)
Smith knew that Rassam hadn't been able to terminate excavating the North Palace library, from which he idea the Gilgamesh tablets had probably come. In fact, he had sold the idea of the expedition to the Daily Telegraph on the rather slender hope that he might be able to notice a missing piece of the Flood tablet, some three inches on a side, which he felt should nonetheless be lurking among the tons of accumulated rubble at the site. Yet he had to know that this would exist like looking for a needle in a haystack. The clay fragment would be almost indistinguishable from the debris effectually it, assuming it hadn't been pulverized in antiquity or tossed out by Rassam'due south men during their excavations 22 years earlier.
Really, the very difficulty of the quest was an advantage for Smith: the longer the piece stayed missing, the more excavating he could exercise. Smith wanted to brainstorm digging the very 24-hour interval he arrived, but he was delayed past local officials who, suspicious of his purposes or desiring bribes (or both), refused to honour his permit from the Ottoman government. He had to travel 200 miles downwards the Tigris to Baghdad to straighten things out. On returning with his say-so confirmed, Smith hired laborers from Mosul and surrounding villages and began to enlarge Rassam'due south one-time pit. Work began on May 7, 1873, and remarkably, within a week, lightning struck once more: Smith found a flake of tablet containing the missing part of the Flood story, describing the provisioning of the ark: "Into the midst of it thy grain, thy piece of furniture, and thy appurtenances, thy wealth, thy woman servants, thy female slaves...the animals of the field all, I will gather and I will send to thee, and they shall exist enclosed in thy door." He telegraphed word of his detect back to the Daily Telegraph; thanks to the laying of the get-go successful transatlantic telegraph line only seven years before, his feat was reported in paper stories around the earth.
Smith would later draw his find in his Assyrian Discoveries, published in 1875, in scholarly terms: "On the 14th of May.... I saturday down to examine the shop of fragments of cuneiform inscription from the day'southward digging, taking out and brushing off the earth from the fragments to read their contents. On cleaning ane of them I found to my surprise and gratification that it independent the greater portion of seventeen lines of inscription belonging to the start column of The Chaldean Account of the Deluge, equally Smith commencement titled the epic, and fitting into the merely identify where in that location was a serious blank in the story...and at present with this portion I was enabled to make it almost complete." Smith is almost excessively affair-of-fact hither—he was famous for his modesty, and one time blushed to the roots of his hair when a woman asked him if she could milk shake hands with "the keen Mr. Smith."
To Smith's deep regret, the Daily Telegraph immediately recalled him, no doubt so equally to salvage money, now that they had their media coup. Not wanting to admit this, yet, the paper perfidiously altered the phrasing of Smith's telegram to suggest that he himself had chosen to end his mission. Still fuming over this deception two years later on, Smith protested in Assyrian Discoveries that "from some error unknown to me, the telegram every bit published differs materially from the one I sent. In particular, in the published copy occurs the words 'as the season is endmost,' which led to the inference that I considered that the proper season for excavating was coming to an end. My own feeling was the opposite of this."
As information technology happened, the fragment Smith and so rapidly plant was non from Gilgamesh at all but was from what scholars now know to exist the opening of an even older version of the Flood story, dating from maybe 1800 b.c. (An account of a catastrophic flood is found in sources throughout ancient Mesopotamian literature.) Had he realized this, Smith might take been able to contend that his assignment hadn't been completed, though he really had gotten what he was sent to discover, the beginning of the story.
Violence was flaring up around Mosul, with warfare between rival Arab tribes; refugees were streaming effectually the mounds where Smith was digging. Smith, oddly unperturbed, reserved his outrage for the Turkish government's refusal to protect the antiquities in the lands under its rule. Ultimately, Smith had to sail from the Mediterranean port of Alexandretta in July 1873 without his treasures; weeks afterwards they were released past Turkish community officials and safely shipped to England.
Dorsum in London, Smith institute himself famous. The Daily Telegraph had run manufactures trumpeting
"THE DAILY TELEGRAPH" ASSYRIAN Expedition
COMPLETE SUCCESS OF EXCAVATIONS
THE MISSING PORTION OF THE DELUGE
TABLET DISCOVERED.
"The distinguished Assyriologue," as Smith was now all-powerful in the press, was in demand as a speaker, and the British Museum experienced an upsurge in attendance. And simply every bit Smith had hoped, the acclaim surrounding his Stanley-and-Livingstone-style success did finally induce the museum's trustees to provide further funds—grand pounds. Smith left London in November 1873, determined to make the most of the few months yet allowed for earthworks past his permit from Constantinople.
Though he securely missed his family, his letters domicile overflow with excitement. "I accept all sorts of treasures," he wrote to his married woman, Mary, after several months of piece of work, "historical, mythological, architectural &c &c. I await to bring home from 3,000 to iv,000 objects, you must come to the Museum and see them, it volition be nothing to me if you practise not share my success." Smith invariably sent dear and kisses to "the fiddling cherubs," Charley, Fred, Cissie, Arthur—nicknamed Twopenny—Bertie and Ethel. He asked after the older children's studies and the younger ones' progress in walking and talking, and he drew for them comic sketches: of his seasickness when crossing the English Channel, of riding on horseback brandishing a sword, and precariously perched atop a camel.
Now he dined with ambassadors in Constantinople, wealthy travelers in Aleppo and military officers in Baghdad, and even at his mound outside Mosul he was able to make a habitation away from home. He had a house constructed to his specifications, marking out its foundations himself, and he had an excellent English cook. "Except that I have not you with me," he wrote Mary, "I am every bit much at dwelling as in England and similar information technology a skilful bit better and I can hither exercise as I like and have power and influence."
Still, local officials were less pleased to have Smith doing as he pleased. Convinced that he must accept spirited away some ancient treasure on his kickoff trip, they threw up a succession of bureaucratic roadblocks. In the cease, they impounded several hundred tablets, and Smith had to return home with much less than he had found. In his 1925 Ascension and Progress of Assyriology, Budge was inclined to lay the blame at Smith's own feet. "His guileless soul did not understand the use of Bakshîsh [bribes]," Budge wrote.
Nonetheless, Smith arrived in England in early June 1874 with a large collection of tablets. Soon he had begun to decipher the total Flood story as well every bit the ballsy of Gilgamesh in which information technology appeared. Working at a furious step, he published his translation at the end of 1874, and the next year he finished no fewer than four more books, including Assyrian Discoveries and a big drove of translations of all the major literary texts he'd constitute. No longer able to link this more varied group of texts to the Alluvion story lone, he simply expanded his biblical frame, titling his new book The Chaldean Business relationship of Genesis: Containing the Description of the Cosmos, the Fall of Man, the Drench, the Tower of Boom-boom, the Times of the Patriarchs, and Nimrod; Babylonian Fables, and Legends of the Gods; from the Cuneiform Inscriptions. (Chaldean, a generalized term, refers to the mythologies of ancient Fertile Crescent cultures.)
Smith read The Chaldean Account of the Deluge non only for its parallels to the Bible. As he began to reconstruct the body of the ballsy leading up to the Alluvion narrative, Smith sought a unifying theme in the saga of the hero Gilgamesh's adventures. Smith located the center of the epic in Gilgamesh's journey to a distant cedar wood in Tablet 5, where he and his companion Enkidu defeat a demon called Humbaba.
Piecing together this account as best he could, Smith engaged in a brilliant piece of detective work, building plausibly on external prove to make sense of the fragmentary text. His accomplishment is all the more than impressive given that he congenital some of his interpretations on guesses nigh words that no one had ever deciphered, in lines that often were simply fragments of their total selves. Smith'south writings are total of discoveries that have stood the test of fourth dimension, often involving intuitive leaps across literal surfaces.
George Smith was at present at the elevation of his powers, with ambitious plans to write a series of books on Assyrian and Babylonian history and culture. He had left Iraq, moreover, vowing never to return, and could very well have spent decades working at the museum with his thousands of tablets, with no need ever to venture abroad once again. Even so he was nagged by the sense of opportunities not taken, and when the museum proposed a 3rd expedition to Republic of iraq at the end of 1875, Smith agreed to make the trip.
He encountered months of delay, first in Constantinople to get his let, and then in having it honored in Mosul. His travels eastward through Syria and then in Iraq itself were greatly delayed by civil unrest and spreading affliction. In June 1876, his companion, Karl Eneberg, a Scandinavian archaeologist, died of cholera equally the pair approached Baghdad. Writing dwelling house to Mary from Aleppo in Syria, he tried to make low-cal of his mounting difficulties: "The plague is sweeping office of the very district I ought to visit; now practice not be alarmed, you are not aware that the plague was in the country when I was here last although so it was not spreading so fast but as it is I am very cautious although in that location is no real danger, I accept stopped my journey & remain for the present at Aleppo to see how information technology goes—people hither are alarmed and naturally and so for final yr they lost in this metropolis 8,000 people out of a population of 100,000 by cholera, that nonetheless has disappeared."
In Mosul, Smith encountered still more bureaucracy, and by the time he was allowed to outset earthworks it was July, and the rut was too intense to proceed. Smith contemplated cutting his losses and coming home early. Equally he wrote to Mary: "I practice non enjoy my stay here, although I live well I am certainly thin, and often I feel I would sooner have cold mutton!!! at home than be here, the truth is I practice not exercise very well as a unmarried man, I have been married too long, information technology was all very well in the starting time trek, but the golden was soon off the gingerbread and if I had not been pledged I would not have come now....Buss all our pets and tell them Papa will soon come up back and look one of these days to see my cab drive up to the door. If I am successful this year I will come home in July and go out the excavations in charge of my assistant who is a very good and likely political party."
Smith then wrote to the museum, announcing this program; while that alphabetic character hasn't survived, the museum'due south reply has. Writing in a tone one might use to scold a lazy servant, the secretary of the museum, McAllister Jones, expressed his surprise that Smith would consider leaving his post prematurely. "This the Trustees consider to be very objectionable," Jones wrote. "Information technology is not stated that Mr. Matthewson'south labours would be equally efficient with your own, and if non every bit efficient it is clear that such excavating ought not to be left to his superintendence excepting in cases of absolute necessity. The Trustees will be glad to receive your explanation for this." Jones tried to close in a more than sympathetic vein:
"I am very sorry to hear from your concluding letter that the plague is increasing to and then peachy an extent. This will require every precaution on your part."
Of course the best precaution would have been leaving the plague-ridden surface area immediately. Instead, reprimanded, Smith stayed on far besides long, to no useful purpose. Past the fourth dimension he and his assistant, Peter Matthewson, finally headed west through the desert, having collected only a single torso'southward worth of items, a plague quarantine had precluded the simpler way down the Tigris from Baghdad and then home by steamer around the Arabian Peninsula.
As they made their fashion through Syria in August, Smith took sick with dysentery; as he gradually weakened, he became unable to ride his horse, and they halted at a village called Ikisji, 40 miles from Aleppo. Matthewson then rode ahead to Aleppo, where he sought out the closest affair to an English-speaking doctor he could find, a dentist named John Parsons. Parsons returned with Matthewson to Ikisji and did what little he could for Smith, then helped send him in a conveyance called a tatravan, a kind of mule-drawn sedan chair, to Aleppo.
In the brief decade later he "entered into official life" in 1867, Smith had written eight of import books. All modernistic scholarship on Babylonian literature stems from his pathbreaking piece of work, and at the time of his illness he did at to the lowest degree know that his accomplishments would alive on, both in his own books and in the work of those who would follow in his footsteps.
These considerations figure prominently in the concluding entries in his small-scale black field notebook, three and a half by six inches. In them, his listen wanders between family, duty, Assyrian history and two bronze statuettes that he had stored among his belongings:
"My drove includes some important specimens includ[ing] the two earliest bronze statuettes known in Asia before the Semitic menstruation. They are in my long boots beside in my trunk there are about xxx-five tablets and fragments about twenty valuable some unique including the tablet of Labir-bari-Kurdu the Laborssoarchus of Berossus, in that location is a large field of study in my collection, I intended to piece of work it out but desire now that my antiquities and notes may be thrown open up to all students. I have done my duty thoroughly." Then the entries trail off in the final few cleaved phrases, appropriately enough for the great restorer of fragments. Smith died in Aleppo on Baronial xix, three days after his terminal journal entry, simply four years subsequently he had been the first person to read The Epic of Gilgamesh in 2,500 years.
Author David Damrosch is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University.
From The Cached Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh past David Damrosch. Copyright © 2007 by David Damrosch, published past Henry Holt and Visitor, LLC.
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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/epic-hero-153362976/
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