How to Read “Gilgamesh”In 1872, when Smith presented his findings to the Society of Biblical Archaeology, even William Gladstone, the Prime Minister, was in attendance. The discovery became front-page news across Europe and the United States. Soon, London’s Daily Telegraph gave Smith a grant to go to the region to see if he could add to his findings. Within days, he hit pay dirt—a shard that appeared to complete the flood story—and the British Museum financed two further trips for him. On the second of these, he died of dysentery in Aleppo, at the age of thirty-six. He never lived to understand that, in fact, he had not proved the truth of the Old Testament with his clay tablet. (Both flood narratives could have been descended from older sources, quite possibly fictional.) He had done something else, though. He had discovered what was then, and still is, the oldest long poem in the world, “Gilgamesh.”
