George Smith

George Smith (1840-1876) was a British Assyriologist whose work on the cuneiform tablets in the British Museum produced two of the nineteenth century's most consequential results for the study of the ancient Near East: the first translation of the Mesopotamian flood narrative, and the first full edition of the Assyrian eponym documents. He had no formal education past the age of fourteen and taught himself to read cuneiform in his own time.

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From Engraver to the British Museum

Smith was born in Chelsea on 26 March 1840 into a working-class family and was apprenticed at fourteen to a firm of banknote engravers. The work suited him, since it trained exactly the qualities the tablets would later demand: close attention to small marks and a steady hand for copying them. He spent his lunch hours and evenings at the British Museum studying the Assyrian collections, and taught himself the script without instruction.

Samuel Birch, Keeper of Oriental Antiquities, noticed him and brought him to the attention of the museum's senior Assyriologist, Sir Henry Rawlinson. By 1861 Smith was working in the evenings sorting and cleaning tablet fragments, and Rawlinson took him on as an assistant in the preparation of the published cuneiform texts. He joined the staff of the Department of Oriental Antiquities as an assistant in 1867.

The Tribute of Jehu

Smith's first significant result came in 1866, when he established the date of the tribute paid by Jehu of Israel to Shalmaneser III. Fixing an Assyrian record of an Israelite king to a year was a demonstration of what the Assyrian material could do for biblical chronology, and it made his reputation.

The Flood Tablet

In 1872, working through fragments from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh that had been excavated by Hormuzd Rassam and were already in the museum's collection, Smith identified a piece carrying an account of a great flood, a boat, and the release of birds to find dry land. The fragment is now catalogued as British Museum K.3375 and forms part of the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh; the entity for it is the Gilgamesh Flood Tablet.

He announced the translation to the Society of Biblical Archaeology on 3 December 1872, to an audience that included the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The lecture was a public event of a kind archaeology rarely produces, and the Daily Telegraph funded an expedition to Nineveh to search for the missing portions of the text. Smith went, and found further fragments.

The Assyrian Eponym Canon

In 1875 Smith published The Assyrian Eponym Canon, the first full edition of the eponym documents: translations of the texts themselves together with an analysis of what they establish for the comparative chronology of the Assyrian and Hebrew kingdoms from the death of Solomon onward. It remained the standard treatment for decades and is the work that made the eponym material usable by scholars who could not read the tablets.

The book built on foundations Rawlinson had already laid. Rawlinson had reconstituted and published the first exemplars in 1862 and had shown in 1867 that the eclipse notice in the year of Bur-Sagale fixes the sequence to absolute dates. Smith's contribution was not that discovery but the edition built on it: the documents themselves, translated and set out in full, with the chronological consequences worked through against the biblical record. His relation to the Bur-Sagale eclipse is as the translator and publisher of the record that carries it.

Later Expeditions and Death

Smith made three journeys to the region, in 1873, 1874 and 1876, continuing to recover tablets from the mounds at Nineveh. On the third he fell ill, and he died at Aleppo on 19 August 1876, aged thirty-six. He had been at work on the cuneiform collections for fifteen years.

The material he opened has not stopped yielding. The flood tablet placed the Mesopotamian deluge traditions permanently alongside the account in Genesis as a subject of comparative study, and the eponym canon supplied the dated framework within which Assyrian contacts with Israel and Judah are still placed.