Personalities · Introduction
A self-taught engraver found the Flood story
George Smith left school young and worked as an engraver, teaching himself cuneiform at the British Museum. In 1872 he spotted a Babylonian flood story strikingly close to Genesis.
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Smith reportedly ran around the room in excitement, shedding clothes. The text was part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. His later book comparing biblical and Babylonian texts, discovered by a teenage night-student 125 years later, is what led Jacob Wright to switch from medicine to history.
Source: Why the Bible Began, pp. 6–7
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