The Telegraph this weekend (Saturday 21 September) featured an extensive article by School of English lecturer Vybarr Cregan-Reid. The article chronicles the ill-fated journey of George Smith (the Victorian archaeologist and assyriologist) who rediscovered a lost tablet containing the text of The Epic of Gilgamesh. The poem (and its rediscovery) had a considerable impact on the Victorian period, the implications of which are still being considered to this day as Vybarr illustrates in the article:
‘The poem tells of the adventures of the king of Uruk in Mesopotamia from around 4,000 years ago. The reason that the Epic’s rediscovery caused such a controversy in the 1870s was that the King’s voyages were analogues for stories from the Old Testament, pressed into clay at least 1,000 years before the Bible’s first books and many centuries before Homer. The impact of the discovery challenged literary and biblical scholarship and would help to redefine beliefs about the age of the Earth.’
Vybarr’s latest publication, Discovering Gilgamesh (Manchester University Press, 2013), which will be published next month, discusses George Smith’s extraordinary discovery in the context of Victorian notions of history.