고등학교 영어Ⅱ (미래엔 김성연) 연계 글

Between 1845 and 1854, excavations at Nineveh, an ancient city in what is now northern Iraq, uncovered thousands of clay tablets. More than twenty thousand tablets and fragments reached the British Museum, but most had broken into pieces. Scholars therefore had to work out which fragments belonged together before many texts could be read.

George Smith, a Londoner who began training as a banknote engraver at fourteen, took on this puzzle. During his lunch breaks, he visited the museum and taught himself cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script on the tablets. His skill impressed Henry Rawlinson, a leading expert on the script, and the museum later hired Smith to sort and rejoin the pieces. He grouped them by subject, and one group held tablets about gods and legends.

In 1872, while searching that group, Smith came across half of a tablet describing a ship coming to rest on a mountain. A dove was then sent out from the ship, but it came back because it could not find dry land. Smith realized what kind of story he was reading: a flood story strikingly similar to the account of Noah in Genesis. He then examined thousands of other fragments himself, looking for more of the story. Eventually he found parts of two more copies, which filled many gaps.

On December 3, 1872, Smith presented his translation to the Society of Biblical Archaeology, and the news caused a sensation. The Daily Telegraph, a London newspaper, then paid for him to travel to Nineveh and search for the missing lines. In May 1873, only days after digging began, he found a fragment of about seventeen lines that he believed filled the largest gap.

Yet even Smith himself could not say when the story had been written or who had composed it. The tablets themselves, he knew, were copies made for the library of Ashurbanipal, a seventh-century BC Assyrian king. He also worked out that the flood account was the eleventh of twelve tablets in a poem about a hero he called Izdubar. Later scholars read the name as Gilgamesh, a king of ancient Uruk. In the poem, Gilgamesh meets a survivor of the flood, who describes building a huge boat to save his family and many animals.

Smith died in 1876, at thirty-six, before he could see how much new discoveries would add to his work. Scholars have since found older versions of the flood story that were never part of the Gilgamesh poem. The epic that readers know today is thus the work of many hands: scribes copied it for centuries, and a self-taught engraver pieced it together.