George Smith reads the Flood Tablet

On the evening of 3 December 1872, a twenty-six-year-old engraver named George Smith stood before the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London and read out a cuneiform tablet from the British Museum's drawers: the "Flood Tablet," catalogued as K.3375. As he translated, he reached the lines where the gods resolve to destroy humanity and a man builds a boat to survive, and the room understood what he had found. Here was a Babylonian deluge, complete with a hero, a boat, and birds sent to test the water, older than the biblical flood by more than a millennium.

Smith published his account as The Chaldean Account of Genesis in 1876, and it sold out at once. The discovery did what scholarship rarely does: it changed the public's sense of where a founding story came from. The flood was no longer uniquely Hebrew; it was one version of a Mesopotamian account that also produced Atra-hasis and the Sumerian Ziusudra. The fullest of those siblings is the Atra-hasis epic. Later scholars, Lambert and Millard and Dalley and, in 2014, Irving Finkel in The Ark Before Noah, kept their heads down and translated the tablets properly. What they found confirmed Smith's first reading: the oldest surviving end-of-the-world story was a complaint about the noise of humanity, and it had been waiting in the museum's cabinets for twenty-five centuries.

The tablet he read is treated under Mesopotamian Flood.

The evening's drama is well attested. The audience included William Gladstone, then in opposition, who reportedly rose to say that the discovery touched his own translations of Homer. Prime Minister Disraeli's government later voted Smith an expedition grant to Nineveh to find the missing fragments of Tablet XI; he found them within a week of digging, and died five years later of fever at Aleppo on a further expedition, aged thirty-six.

The reading's religious shock is easy to overstate and easy to understate. Serious scholars had suspected Babylonian parallels since Rawlinson's translations of the 1860s; what Smith delivered was public confirmation, in a room full of journalists, on the eve of Darwin's debates, that Genesis had siblings in clay. The Times reported the lecture; pamphlets answered it within weeks.