What George Smith Actually Read
Companion essay
A man stood up from a clay tablet in the basement of the British Museum and began to undress in front of his colleagues. He had just discovered that the story of Noah was not the original. The original was a thousand years older. The video this essay accompanies follows the global pattern of flood myths across two hundred and eighty cultures. This piece sits underneath the video and shows you the specific lines on the tablet — what George Smith actually read, what it actually says, and why it scrambled the Victorian intellectual world for the rest of the century.
Smith was a former apprentice engraver who had taught himself Akkadian and Sumerian by spending his lunch breaks in the British Museum’s Assyrian Gallery. In 1872, working on a backlog of unsorted cuneiform fragments from Austen Henry Layard’s excavation at Nineveh, he came across Tablet XI of what we now call the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. The tablet was unprovenanced — pieces had been jumbled together for two decades. Smith was the first reader to translate it as a coherent narrative.
The text told a story Smith already knew. A god warned a chosen man of an impending deluge. The man was instructed to build a ship and load it with his family and the seed of every living thing. The flood came. The ship grounded on a mountain. The man released birds — first a dove, then a swallow, then a raven, and the raven did not return. He offered sacrifice. The gods smelled the smoke.
The cadence is in Genesis. The structure is in Genesis. The bird sequence is in Genesis. The mountain landing is in Genesis. And Tablet XI predates the Pentateuch by approximately a thousand years.
The lines themselves are worth reading. Tablet XI, in modern translation, includes this passage:
“I sent forth a dove and let her go. She flew to and fro, but there was no resting place, and she returned. I sent forth a swallow and let her go. She flew to and fro, but there was no resting place, and she returned. I sent forth a raven and let her go. She saw that the waters had abated. She did not return.”
Genesis 8:7–12 reads, in summary:
“And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth. Also he sent forth a dove… but the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned… he sent forth the dove out of the ark… and she returned not again.”
The bird sequence is reversed in Genesis, but the device — successive birds testing whether the world has dried — is identical. There is no serious living Assyriologist who reads these passages independently and concludes they were composed in cultural isolation from one another.
What does that mean? Three things the video could not fully unpack.
First, the Hebrew authors of Genesis almost certainly inherited the flood narrative through Mesopotamian channels — most likely during or after the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE, when the Judean elite spent two generations in Babylon and learned its literary canon. They did not plagiarise; they assimilated. Every ancient literary tradition assimilated the traditions that surrounded it. Originality is a Romantic-era idea, not an ancient one.
Second, the Babylonians themselves inherited the story from earlier Sumerian sources. The Epic of Ziusudra — fragmentary but real — predates Gilgamesh by perhaps another thousand years. So the chain stretches further: Sumer → Babylon → Israel → Christendom → the modern Sunday-school imagination. Four thousand years of telling and re-telling. Every generation believed it was the first.
Third — and this is the part the video gestures at but cannot dwell on — Smith’s discovery did not damage faith in the Bible. It complicated it. Many serious religious thinkers since 1872 have come to read the Babylonian parallel not as evidence that the Bible is false, but as evidence that some stories are too large for any one tradition to own. The flood is one of them. It belongs to everyone who has ever watched a river rise.
That was Smith’s real discovery, in the end. Not that the Bible was second. That the flood was older than any of us thought.
He died four years later in Aleppo, on a return expedition to Nineveh, of a fever he caught en route. He was thirty-six.
Watch the full video →
Sources
Andrew George (trans.), The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols. — Oxford University Press, 2003
Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood — Hodder & Stoughton, 2014
George Smith, “The Chaldean Account of the Deluge” — Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 1873
Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others — Oxford University Press, 1989
David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh — Henry Holt, 2007
William Ryan & Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History — Simon & Schuster, 1998
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