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When he read this, we are told, he became so excited that he jumped out of his chair and ran around the room, tearing off his clothes. He studied the shards for around ten years, and it was he who found the most famous passage inscribed on them, an account of a great flood wiping out almost all of humanity, with one man’s family surviving. When the tablets were first dug up, no one could read the curious-looking script, later called cuneiform, in which they were written. The site they came from was Nineveh, an important city in ancient Mesopotamia, and the reason so many tablets had been found in one place was that they were the remains of a renowned library, that of Ashurbanipal, a king of the neo-Assyrian Empire in the seventh century B.C. The staff eventually noticed him, and, in 1866, the management hired him, to help analyze the tens of thousands of clay shards that had been shipped there years earlier and had been sitting around in the museum’s storage boxes. As David Damrosch writes in “The Buried Book” (2007), Smith spent his lunch hours at the British Museum, studying its holdings. Many scientists and scholars redoubled their efforts to find evidence of the truth of the Bible.Īround the time that Darwin was writing his book, a young Londoner, George Smith, who had left school at the age of fourteen and was employed as an engraver of banknotes, became fascinated by reports of artifacts that were being turned up by explorers in what is today Iraq and sent to England. Not surprisingly, such ideas encountered vigorous opposition.
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In 1859, Charles Darwin, in his “Origin of Species,” put forth a theory suggesting that human beings might be descended not from Adam and Eve but from lower animals, things with fur. Though we might sin, we could hope for God’s mercy, because that’s what he had promised to Noah.īy the early eighteen-hundreds, however, scholars from various young fields-geology, archeology, paleontology-were producing evidence that the earth was much older than anyone had thought, and that human societies had existed long before the dates assigned to the Creation and the Flood. Was it really the case that we were all descended from Adam and Eve, whom God created in his own image and placed in a beautiful garden and then, by reason of their sins, banished from there? Did their descendants compound their wickedness, to the point where God decided to drown them all, in a huge flood? And did he, afterward, seeing the destruction he had wrought, make a covenant with the one surviving family, that of Noah, promising that he would never again raise his hand against his creation? “While the earth remaineth,” he decided, according to the King James Bible, “seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” For many centuries, this story comforted people. The mid-nineteenth century was a time when very many Western people began to doubt the historical truth of the Bible. Written in cuneiform on 12 clay tablets, this Akkadian version dates from around 1300 to 1000 B.C.This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. This epic story was discovered in the ruins of the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh by Hormuzd Rassam in 1853. “The Epic of Gilgamesh” tells of the Sumerian Gilgamesh, the hero king of Uruk, and his adventures. But generations of several civilizations created the story, added to it, wrote it down, translated it and edited the collection of tales that came to be known as Gilgamesh. Not even any one people can be said to have written it collectively. No one person wrote The Epic of Gilgamesh. Then, does the Epic of Gilgamesh have an author?
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language Ĭonsequently, who wrote the original Epic of Gilgamesh?īeside above, when was the Epic of Gilgamesh written? 2100 BC The latest and most complete version yet found, composed no later than around 600 b.c., was signed by a Babylonian author and editor who called himself Sin-Leqi-Unninni.