The men who uncovered Assyria

BBC Magazine ^ | 23rd March 2015 | Daniel Silas Adamson

[the scotsman]

'Two of the ancient cities now being destroyed by Islamic State lay buried for 2,500 years, it was only 170 years ago that they began to be dug up and stripped of their treasures. The excavations arguably paved the way for IS to smash what remained - but also ensured that some of the riches of a lost civilisation were saved.

In 1872, in a backroom of the British Museum, a man called George Smith spent the darkening days of November bent over a broken clay tablet. It was one of thousands of fragments from recent excavations in northern Iraq, and was covered in the intricate cuneiform script that had been used across ancient Mesopotamia and deciphered in Smith's own lifetime.

Some of the tablets set out the day-to-day business of accountants and administrators - a chariot wheel broken, a shipment of wine delayed, the prices of cedar or bitumen. Others recorded the triumphs of the Assyrian king's armies, or the omens that had been divined by his priests in the entrails of sacrificial sheep.

Smith's tablet, though, told a story. A story about a world drowned by a flood, about a man who builds a boat, about a dove released in search of dry land.

Smith realised that he was looking at a version of Noah's Ark. But the book was not Genesis. It was Gilgamesh, an epic poem that had first been inscribed into damp clay in about 1800BC, roughly 1,000 years before the composition of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament). Even Smith's tablet, which had been dated to some point in the 7th Century BC, was far older than the earliest manuscript of Genesis.'

[LT Brass Bancroft]

But do they know the capital of Assyria?

[dadfly]

bookmark

[nothingnew]

Of interest?

FMCDH(BITS)

[Redbob]

And people wonder why universities feel entitled to keep the artifacts they’ve found.

[El Cid]

A George Smith ping.
A brilliant man who has never received his due from the public.

Although the NY Times back in the 1800s sounds like the NY Times we know and love in the 21st Century.

Smith's reading caused a sensation. There were some who seized on the poem with pious satisfaction, taking it to corroborate the essential truth of the Bible. But there were others who found it more troubling. As the New York Times put it in a front page article the following day, the Flood Tablet had exposed "various traditions of the deluge apart from the Biblical one, which is perhaps legendary like the rest".

Good to know that the NY Times has always been ... jerks.
Had they been publishing back in 32 AD, after the Lord Jesus walked on water, they'd have led their head line with "Jesus can't swim"...

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks nothingnew.

[SunkenCiv]

• The real Noah's Ark?
• Does An Ancient Tablet Tell the Real Story of Noah's Ark?
• How the ark changed shape
• British Museum: Prototype for Noah's Ark was round
• Ancient tablet suggests Noah's Ark was round
• Noah's Ark 'Was a Massive Double-Decker Coracle'
• Relic reveals Noah's ark was circular
• BBC Report: Noah's Ark "...more credible version based on Babylonian sources."

[colorado tanker]

I have been reading Homer Simpson's WWII 70 years ago today threads, which kick off with that day's N.Y. Times coverage. I must say the coverage has been excellent and not at all "balanced" but four square pro-Allies. The military analysis has also been excellent with perceptive reporting by people like Hanson Baldwin and Drew Middleton.

Of course, the Times was completely wrong in its pre-war coverage of the Soviet Union by Walter Delanty, which even the Times admitted.

But the Times losing its way and becoming the fact-challenged propaganda machine it now is seems to have happened after WWII.

[colorado tanker]

Thanks for posting. This is a really interesting article.

I think a lot of people are re-thinking the idea that the Brits and French "looted" the Middle East. At least in the IS occupied region, that may be all that will be saved.