Gilgamesh, Michael Schmidt’s ‘life’ of a poem

In the mid-19th century, around lunchtime, a pale young man with an enormous beard could be seen in the British Museum reading room poring over piles of books about Mesopotamia. His name was George Smith, and this was his secret passion. Then, one day, a museum attendant remarked that it was a shame no one had bothered to decipher ‘them bird tracks’ — by which he meant the weird-looking scratches in clay tablets from the newly rediscovered ancient city of Nineveh. It was at that moment that something clicked in Smith’s head.

He set to it, decoding the cuneiform script to make a series of breakthroughs, culminating in one that excited him so much that, when he recognised it, he had to take his clothes off. The tablets were part of a long narrative poem, which, though predating the Old Testament by centuries, included a version of the story of the Flood.