George Smith e la tavoletta del Diluvio / George Smith and the Flood Tablet

On December 2, 1872, an extraordinary discovery was presented at the Society for Biblical Archeology in London: a Chaldean account of the Flood, discovered in the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh and strikingly similar to the biblical one. The text, written in Akkadian, was part of a series of cuneiform tablets on the deeds of Gilgamesh, the hero, the builder of Uruk, the king who sought a solution to death, and who, not finding it, obtained wisdom. The author of the discovery was George Smith, a former banknote engraver and brilliant self-taught Assyriologist. The great interest shown by the newspapers for the discovery is visible in the many articles written on the subject and in the fact that it was one of them, the Daily Telegraph, to finance a new mission in northern Mesopotamia, to find the missing parts of the tablet. Two successive expeditions were funded by the British Museum, but during the latter one George Smith fell ill and died in Aleppo, unaware of the extent of his discoveries. The discussion on the relationship between Mesopotamia and the Bible continued for decades until it broke out in the controversy known as Babel-Bibel Streit in the early 20th century.