George Smith (assyriologist)

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For other persons named George Smith, see George Smith (disambiguation).

George Smith (Chelsea, London March 26, 1840 – August 19, 1876), was a pioneering English Assyriologist who first discovered and translated the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known work of literature.

1 Bibliography
2 Notes
3 Bibliography
4 References

[edit] Bibliography

Smith was naturally brilliant, but born the son of a working class family in Victorian England, his ability to move upward and gain a formal education was limited.^[1] At fourteen Smith was apprenticed to a printing firm to learn banknote engraving. In his spare time he became fascinated with Assyrian culture and history, reading everything that was available. His interest was so keen that while working at the print shop to support his wife and children, he would spend his free lunch and morning hours studying cuneiform tablets at the British Museum, which had recently been brought back from the Middle East and made available to the public.

Smith soon became more knowledgeable about cuneiform than the museum staff and he was brought to the attention of leading Assyrian scholar Henry Rawlinson. Smith then made his first important discovery, the date of the payment of the tribute by Jehu, king of Israel, to Shalmaneser III. Sir Henry suggested to the trustees of the Museum that Smith should be associated with himself in the preparation of the third and fourth volumes of The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia.^[2]

As he was already deep in the preparation of this work, in 1867, when Smith was appointed assistant in the Assyriology Department. The earliest of his successes was the discovery of two inscriptions, one fixing the date of the total eclipse of the sun in the month Sivan in May 763 BC, and the other the date of an invasion of Babylonia by the Elamites in 2280 BC.

In 1871 he published Annals of Assur-bani-pal transliterated and translated, and communicated to the newly-founded Society of Biblical Archaeology a paper on "The Early History of Babylonia," and an account of his decipherment of the Cypriote inscriptions.

In 1872 Smith achieved world-wide fame by his translation of the Chaldaean account of the Great Flood, which was read before the Society of Biblical Archaeology on December 3. This is better known today as the final chapter of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known work of literature in the world, for which Smith is most popularly famous today as the discover. In the following January Edwin Arnold, the editor of The Daily Telegraph, arranged for Smith to go to Nineveh at the expense of that newspaper, and carry out excavations with a view to finding the missing fragments of the Flood story. This journey resulted not only in the discovery of the missing tablets, but of fragments which recorded the succession and duration of the Babylonian dynasties.

In 1874 Smith again left England for Nineveh for a second expedition, this time at the expense of the Museum, and continued his excavations at Kouyunjik. An account of his work is given in Assyrian Discoveries, published early in 1875. The rest of the year was spent in fixing together and translating the fragments relating to the Creation, the results of which work were embodied in The Chaldaean Account of Genesis (1880, co-written with Archibald Sayce).

In March 1876 the trustees of the British Museum sent Smith once more to excavate the rest of Assurbanipal's library. At Ikisji, a small village about sixty miles northeast of Aleppo, he fell ill with a dysentery, and died in Aleppo on August 19. He left a wife and children, on whose behalf a yearly annuity of 150 pounds was granted by the Queen.

[edit] Notes

^ Damrosch, pp.12-15
^ The cuneiform inscriptions of Western Asia IV, London 1861 and III, London, 1870
^ Damrosch, p.77

[edit] Bibliography

Smith wrote about eight important works,^[3] including linguistic studies, historical works, and translations of major Mesopotanian literary texts. They include:

George Smith (1871). Annals of Assur-bani-pal.
George Smith (1875). Assyrian Discoveries: An Account of Explorations and Discoveries on the Site of Nineveh, During 1873 to 1874
George Smith (1876). The Chaldean Account of Genesis
George Smith (1878). History of Sennacherib. Edited by Archibald Henry Sayce.
George Smith (18--). The History of Babalonia. Edited by Archibald Henry Sayce.

Online editions

Assyrian Discoveries. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1876. From Google Books.
The Chaldean Account of Genesis. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1876. From Internet Archive.
History of Sennacherib. London: Williams and Norgate, 1878. From Internet Archive.
The History of Babalonia. London : Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge ; New York : E. & J. B. Young. From Internet Archive.

[edit] References

David Damrosch (2006). The Buried Book. ISBN 0805080295. Ch 1-2 (80 pages) of Smiths life, includes new-found evidence about Smith's death.
C. W. Ceram [Kurt W. Marek] (1967), Gods, Graves and Scholars: The Story of Archeology, trans. E. B. Garside and Sophie Wilkins, 2nd ed. New York: Knopf, 1967. See chapter 22.
Robert S. Strother (1971). "The great good luck of Mister Smith", in Saudi Aramco World, Volume 22, Number 1, January/February 1971. Last accessed March 2007.
Archibald Henry Sayce (1876). "George Smith", by Archibald Henry Sayce, in Littell's Living Age, Volume 131, Issue 1687.
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.