“Woe to the bloody city! it is all full of lies and robbery; the prey departeth not. . . And it shall come to pass, that all they that look upon thee shall flee from thee, and say, Nineveh is laid waste: who will bemoan her? whence shall I seek comforters for thee?” (Nahum 3:1; 3:7, King James Version)
Austen Henry Layard needed help. It was 1845, and he was looking to investigate a very promising archaeological site he’d been casing out near Mosul, some 250 miles to the north of Baghdad along the Tigris River in what’s now Iraq. The site Layard was interested in was a large one that would require a large team of workers—and a clerk to manage and pay them.
Layard, who was just 28 in 1845, had been travelling around the Middle East for about six years on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society of Britain. His reports had drawn notice, and now he had been sent to this distant, rather poky outpost of what was then the Ottoman Empire by the Trustees of the British Museum. His assignment was to recover sculptures and clay documents from the Assyrians and Babylonians, whose cuneiform script was just then beginning to be deciphered by Westerners.
The British Museum was, uh, “collecting” in Ottoman Mesopotamia for a number of reasons. First, because they could: the Ottoman Empire’s bureaucracy was only interested in keeping artefacts made from precious materials—stone objects and clay tablets, to them, were surely only of interest to the most obscure scholars. And local representatives were generally Muslims, who at that time thought graven images of people were vulgar relics of a benighted past.
Second, the Museum was intensely interested in uncovering hard facts about the Assyrians and Babylonians that might confirm the reality of various events described in writings from classical antiquity, like Herodotus’s Histories and the Old Testament of the Christian Bible.
Third, the Museum knew that scholars from the Louvre in Paris were at work in the area, too, and there is nothing that perks up an English institution quite like an opportunity to beat the French.
The British Vice Consul at Mosul was a young local man named Christian Rassam. Rassam had been born a member of the Nestorian Christian community, but he and his entire family had converted to Anglicanism—the Church of England—in his youth. He had married the daughter of an English missionary. So when Layard came looking for help, Christian Rassam enthusiastically recommended his younger brother, Hormuzd, as an assistant.
Hormuzd was nineteen, energetic and organized, and capable of speaking English as well as Arabic and his native language, Aramaic. Layard liked him immediately. This younger Rassam was, according to the historian David Damrosch, “gregarious, curious, and interested in everything; he had exceptional stamina; he was scrupulously honest, and finally, not least of all, he was deeply impressed by the romance of antiquity and the excitement of the chase after artifacts.” (Damrosch 88)
Layard had his clerk. With Hormuzd Rassam at his side, he set out for the mounds south of Mosul. It was the beginning of two remarkable careers in this swashbuckling early era of archaeology—two careers that would spark the beginning of an entirely new discipline, Assyriology; two careers that would contribute to the rediscovery of the long-lost Epic of Gilgamesh. But for the better part of the next 170 years, as far as the British Museum was concerned, only one of those careers would be worth celebrating.
I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.
[Theme]
This is episode two, “The Library, the Museum, and the Lawsuit.” It’s the second part of our investigation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest known narrative. If you missed the first part, you may want to go listen to that before continuing with this.
And also, a note: this episode draws heavily on an excellent 2007 book by the historian David Damrosch, “The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Ancient Epic of Gilgamesh.” If you like what you hear in this episode and want to learn more on your own, that’s your first port of call. I’ll put a link in the transcript on our website, booksofalltime.co.uk.
Now, back to our daring duo of archaeologists.
The site that Henry Layard was interested in was a mound known as Kuyunjik. Local people had been finding stones and clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing at the site for generations, and there was a tradition that another nearby mound was actually the tomb of the prophet Jonah. These clues—along with some discoveries made by the French archaeologist Paul-Émile Botta at the site—had led Layard to believe that the mounds around actually concealed the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh. Nineveh is mentioned frequently throughout the Old Testament, including the Book of Genesis, the Book of Isaiah, the Book of Jonah, and the lesser-known book of Nahum, from which comes the bit of prophecy that I read out at the top of the show.
Now, if you’re an American like me, or from some other part of the English-speaking or European world, you may have a mental image of Iraq as a desert country that’s completely covered in sand. Layard later wrote a best-selling book about this expedition, “Nineveh and Its Remains”, and his descriptions of the country around Mosul show it to be much lusher and more fertile than I imagined. Here’s one passage to give you an idea:
“The middle of March in Mesopotamia is the brightest epoch of spring. . . . Flowers of every hue enameled the meadows; not thinly scattered over the grass as in northern climes, but in such thick and gathering clusters that the whole plain seemed a patchwork of many colors. The dogs, as they returned from hunting, issued from the long grass dyed red, yellow, or blue, according to the flowers through which they had last forced their way.” (Layard 1851, p. 55)
The mounds—which were really the size of large hills, some as tall as ninety feet high (Damrosch 82)—had to be broken open by teams of diggers. Digging at a site in the 19th century was nothing like today’s archaeological practice, however—no grid systems, no careful dusting of items or documenting finds in their original context before moving them. Instead, Layard and Rassam’s crew would, in the words of the scholar Eleanor Robson, conduct “exercises in tunnelling through the mounds, mostly following the line of the sculptured wall decorations, to look for portable objects.” (Robson 39) In other words, it was more like treasure hunting than science.
These digging teams would leave big piles of rubbish behind them—rubbish that would sometimes later prove to contain additional important finds—and although they took whatever precautions they could to protect what they excavated, Layard throughout his book frequently describes with dismay how some beautiful sculpture or relief panel he’s just uncovered crumbles into dust upon contact with the open air.
But Layard was right about the mound at Kuyunjik. Over the course of 1845-47, he and his team—ably managed by the enthusiastic Hormuzd Rassam—uncovered multiple buildings, including a palace decorated with gloriously sculptured panels all along its walls. Once the inscriptions on these artefacts were deciphered, they proved that Layard had indeed found Nineveh.
These discoveries dazzled and delighted the trustees of the British Museum and the public. Layard returned to England in 1847 as a celebrated man, and he returned with Hormuzd Rassam by his side. Sponsored by Layard, Rassam began pursuing a degree at Magdalen College, Oxford. Over the next few years, Rassam fell in love with life in England. He made friends, discovered pastimes like ice skating, and began to imagine a life away from his rather oppressive older brother—a life in which he was his own man, and an Englishman at that.
He also had a degree of celebrity thanks to Layard’s book. Rassam cuts a dashing figure throughout it, appearing here to charm suspicious officials with gifts of coffee, smoothing over ethnic tensions within the digging teams there, or squinting at a mound and divining—correctly—where exactly to dig to find new discoveries. This celebrity, combined with his personal charm, made him a sought-after dinner guest in ever more grand social circles, accepting invitations from the likes of the Bishop of Oxford and the Lord Mayor of London.
He was enjoying himself so much that he hesitated when the British Museum commissioned a new expedition to Nineveh in 1849. Layard wanted Rassam to come along for this trip, too, but not as his clerk. Instead, Rassam would be Layard’s official second-in-command. It was a fantastic promotion: Rassam would be able to play a more active role in securing new dig sites and run his own teams.
He wrote to Layard describing his misgivings:
“Really my dear Mr. Layard I cannot bear to leave England and I have a great horror for returning to the East . . . . I know you will laugh at my little sense if I [were] to say that I would rather be a Chimney Sweeper in England than a Pasha in Turkey . . . . but what can I do? I will sacrifice myself for England and worship forever the pure religion of Great Britain.” (Rassam, quoted in Damrosch p. 95-96)
If the first expedition had made the two men minor celebrities among the elites, the second made them stars. The major finds of the expedition were the lamassu—enormous, winged bulls and lions with human heads. The lamassu could stand eight or more feet tall and weighed many tons each. But Rassam went into MacGyver of Mesopotamia mode. Assembling a team of 300 men, he arranged to have these colossal sculptures hewn out of the mound, rolled to the Tigris river, and levered onto a wooden raft made buoyant with inflated goatskins. Layard and Rassam sent many lamassu out of Iraq, and you can see two of them at the British Museum today, almost immediately after you pass through the main entrance.
Thanks to Layard and Rassam, the British Museum now had an ancient art collection to rival that of the Louvre. Naturally, the Trustees were keen to send the two men back to Nineveh to see if they could acquire more treasures. They proposed a third expedition to begin in 1852.
But Layard was suffering from the long-term effects of a case of malaria he’d contracted on his travels, and he was ready to pivot to a new career in politics. He would not go back, he told the Trustees, but he nominated Rassam to take his place. Layard gave a glowing account of his friend and protégé: Rassam knew the local customs, had the organizational skills and experience necessary to manage excavations, and he was absolutely devoted to his adopted country.
The Trustees agreed. Hormuzd Rassam was now an archaeologist in his own right, and a groundbreaker now in more than one respect. According to David Damrosch, “Rassam was the only prominent archaeologist of his era who was of Middle Eastern origin.” (Damrosch 85) He was compelled, however, to check in with the British Consul at Baghdad, Colonel Henry Rawlinson, who was a leading expert in the fledgling study of the cuneiform languages as well as a decorated military officer.
When Rassam arrived in Baghdad, he found that Rawlinson had recently struck a gentlemen’s agreement with a French team led by a man called Victor Place. This agreement divided up rights to the mounds around Mosul, and the mound of Kuyunjik—the one that had yielded up so many treasures for Layard and Rassam during their first expedition—had been assigned to the French. Rassam accepted this, if through gritted teeth. He also accepted Rawlinson’s request to prioritize the recovery of more clay documents on this expedition, if possible. Recent advancements in the deciphering of cuneiform meant that scholars across Europe were keen to begin reading what the Assyrians had to say about themselves.
Rassam arrived at Mosul to a hero’s welcome from the locals, but he was irritated at having to cede Kuyunjik to the team from the Louvre. He had a hunch that there was another major building lurking in the mile-long mound, somewhere along its less-excavated northern side. For the better part of a year he brooded on this, until finally he couldn’t take it anymore. He decided it was easier to seek forgiveness than to get permission. He decided it was time for some wildcat archaeology. After all, as Rassam would later write in his memoir many years later, “Sir Henry Rawlinson had no power to give away land which did not belong to him.” (Rassam 27)
Over three moonlit nights in December 1853, Rassam snuck out to the northern end of Kuyunjik with three small strike teams of diggers. Experimental trenches on the first night initially yielded some promising remnants of a building. It wasn’t until the third night that Rassam’s gamble paid off: diggers uncovered a wall panel showing a king in a chariot being handed weapons in preparation for a hunt, and as they worked to reveal more of it, an entire length of earth collapsed, dramatically revealing fifteen further feet of beautifully figured sculptures under the light of the full moon. “The delight of the workmen was naturally beyond description,” Rassam wrote. “They all rushed to see the new discovery, and after having gazed on the bas-relief with wonder, began to dance and sing my praises . . . with all their might.” (Rassam 26)
The sculptures Rassam discovered depicted a lion hunt. And the king doing the hunting, it would later be determined, was a king named Ashurbanipal. As the digging continued over the next several weeks—this time by daylight, after deflecting the protests of Victor Place and the French—Rassam and his team unearthed an entire palace. A palace complete with a library full of clay tablets covered in that small, precise writing, so very like the tracks of birds. Hormuzd Rassam could not read that writing, but he trusted that the scholars back at the British Museum would. With his usual energy and ingenuity, he arranged to have the lion hunt panels and many crates of tablets shipped back to London.
The lion hunt panels would change his life immediately. The clay tablets would change the world. But that would take another twenty years.
[music here]
Do you have a lunch break? Do you try to be productive on that lunch break? Get a walk in, maybe read—or write—a few pages of a novel? You, my friend, are a piker compared to a young Englishman named George Smith. In 1860, when he was not quite 20—the same age Hormuzd Rassam had been when Henry Layard hired him, in a nice little coincidence—Smith began to spend as much of his very generous 90-minute lunch breaks as he could visiting the British Museum.
Smith was a working-class guy with an artistic bent. He’d finished formal education at 14 and then was apprenticed to a firm that printed money for the Bank of England. A talented engraver, Smith worked all day creating master plates for printing that were both beautiful and difficult to counterfeit. But his real passions lay with Biblical history. He’d devoured Austen Henry Layard’s books, and he was fascinated by the relics from Nineveh.
Smith wasn’t alone in this fascination. After Rassam’s discovery of the palace of Ashurbanipal, Victorian England was positively gripped by Assyrian fever. The Great Exhibition of 1854 featured a Nineveh court, with reproductions of artwork brought back to England by Layard and Rassam. Ladies at fancy dress parties appeared in Assyrian-inspired costumes as Ishtar or Queen Semiramis, while the actual queen, Victoria, had some jewelry made with an Assyrian motif, which she wore on an official visit to Paris. Just to rub it in, maybe, that the French had missed out on the big find.
What was singular about Smith was his talent for languages and his visual memory. He became interested in the tablets covered in cuneiform, and, through some judicious eavesdropping on scholars in the Department of Oriental Antiquities, gathered that they were short on warm bodies to help them decipher the trove of clay tablets Rassam and Layard had sent back from their expeditions. A kind of early crowdsourcing project was underway—anyone who could help decipher the tablets, or help clean the calcified deposits and earth off them, or help sort and reassemble broken fragments—could do so, if they could prove themselves to be serious and diligent.
So, Smith began studying Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, a recent book about the Akkadian language by one Henry Rawlinson—yes, him again, though by 1860 he had become Sir Henry Rawlinson. Smith ingratiated himself with William Coxe, the junior curator who was overseeing the cuneiform studies project. Coxe soon discovered that Smith had a knack for matching up fragments of tablets correctly, and that he was very quickly mastering the actual writing on them.
Smith worked on a voluntary basis at first, and then for a low wage. But as his language skills grew, he became gradually more and more indispensable to Coxe, and even attracted the notice of Sir Henry Rawlinson himself. In 1867, George Smith was finally hired as a full-time scholar at the British Museum. It was a role that came with higher social status—but lower pay—than his job as an engraver. Even 150 years ago, you’d make more in the private sector than you would in academia.
Smith spent his days examining and translating tablets and assisting Sir Henry with preparing his next book on cuneiform, but he yearned to make a real breakthrough. He wouldn’t be able to secure funding for his own expedition, being so junior and so poorly connected, so he began searching the tablets for interesting historical records or myths that might corroborate events in the Bible. In 1872, he discovered a series of tablets that told a continuous story: a story about a king who finds and loses a friend; a king who goes searching for a secret to immortality from “a man who survived the great deluge”.
Smith began to suspect he was on the trail of something big, but the next tablet—the eleventh in the series—was so covered in calcified deposits that it would require the attention of the museum’s specialist restorer. As is always the way with these things, the restorer was on holiday.
When the restorer finally returned and worked his magic on the tablet, Smith sat down at the long table in the second-story room where the cuneiform team worked. It was an afternoon in November. The only light in the room came through the tall windows—the Museum had no gas lighting due to the fear of fire. Smith bent closely over the tablet of ancient river clay, which was about the size of his palm. The writing impressed upon on the tablet had no punctuation marks, no paragraphs—just a stream of signs that could be interpreted any number of ways. But George Smith, slowly, taking great pains, began to read from it. It’s not clear which lines he read first. It could have been these:
“The seventh day when it came,
I brought out a dove; I let it loose:
Off went the dove but then it returned,
There was no place to land, so it came back to me.” (George 93)
Smith realized that he was reading an account of the great flood—Noah’s Ark without Noah; Noah’s Ark centuries before Noah.
Many years later, a colleague of Smith’s described in a book what happened next. “[Smith] said, ‘I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion.’ Setting the tablet on the table, he jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself!” (Budge 1925, p. 153)
If you know anything about George Smith, you probably know this story—that his response to the defining triumph of his career was to immediately get naked. It’s fun, but it is worth noting that it’s only this one colleague who records this story, and that he waited to do it until 1925, long after Smith had died. Smith himself doesn’t mention it anywhere, and neither do any of his other contemporaries.
The colleague with the sensational story was another plucky young working-class man who made his way up the British Museum’s career ladder. His name was Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge, and, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, he absolutely deserved it. Budge was brilliant. Budge was ambitious. Budge was, as we will soon see, a very unreliable narrator.
Anyway. There it was, after two thousand years lost to time: the Epic of Gilgamesh. Smith very quickly produced a translation, which he read out as a lecture to the Biblical Archaeology Society on December 3, 1872. His audience included international journalists, aristocrats, distinguished scholars, and the then-Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. If you look up a photo of Gladstone, you’ll see that he resembles a hawk with indigestion and sideburns. I wouldn’t want him scowling up at my lectern while I was reading, but George Smith—working-class George, brainy, passionate, persistent George—was a triumph. He became a household name overnight. He was 32 years old.
Smith’s newfound celebrity gave him the leverage to go after his dream: traveling to Mesopotamia to conduct his own research. The flood tablet had a corner missing, and he was convinced that another expedition to Ashurbanipal’s library could yield another copy of the story—one that might include a more complete version of the flood narrative. The British government wouldn’t underwrite it, but Edwin Arnold, the owner of the London newspaper the Daily Telegraph, did. Funded to the tune of £1,000 guineas—roughly £63,000, or $82,000 in today’s money—Smith was on his way.
Smith was not cut out for fieldwork. Although he was an expert in Akkadian, he didn’t know modern languages like Turkish or Arabic. He’d probably never traveled outside England when he departed for Iraq, and he was certainly unsettled and uncomfortable with the food and customs of other cultures. His accounts of his travels in the memoir he later produced are full of complaints about alien religious practices, dirty lodging-houses, and a “particularly repulsive” (Smith, quoted in Damrosch 30) local delicacy called the kebab.
Once Smith arrived in Mosul, he also struggled with the local officials, who thought the permits he had brought with him were all very well, but hadn’t he got anything more . . . interesting to show them? Any little gifts he might offer? Smith was utterly offended at the idea of participating in bribery, and wound up losing days of digging time as a result. He was actually obliged to make a four-hundred-mile round trip to Baghdad to obtain additional paperwork before he could finally begin.
But it didn’t matter, because within a week, he found what he was looking for: a tablet containing seventeen more lines of the Flood narrative. He sent a telegram to his backers at the Daily Telegraph, and soon was on his way home with many boxes of precious tablets. He returned in 1874 to a hero’s welcome and seemed to be on the glide path towards an Austen Henry Layard-style career in archaeology.
A second expedition in 1875, partly funded by the British Museum this time, was full of further bureaucratic frustrations. Once he returned to Mosul, Smith found that the local officials now expected him to turn over half of everything he found, and that they would choose their half without letting him examine any of it. He thought he was saved when the by-now legendary Hormuzd Rassam materialized in Mosul—he’d been visiting his family—but Rassam shocked Smith by siding with the officials. In a furious letter home to his wife, Smith referred to Rassam as “my bitter enemy.” (Damrosch 56)
Still, his second expedition was deemed a success, and after a brief year in London—a year in which he produced an astonishing four books, including his memoir Assyrian Discoveries and a new translation of Gilgamesh—he went out for a third time at the request of the Museum. He would never return. Plague and cholera were rampant in Iraq in 1876, and after dodging quarantine many times, Smith tried to return home from Mosul early. A brisk reprimand from his higher-ups at the British Museum convinced him to remain until his agreed departure date in July.
By July 1876, however, most of Baghdad was under quarantine. Instead of traveling down the Tigris from Mosul and then sailing out of Baghdad, Smith and his team would have to cross overland to Syria, and proceed to Europe from there. At some point along his journey, Smith contracted dysentery. He died of it in Aleppo on August 19, 1876. He was thirty-six years old.
Smith’s death was lamented in England—such a promising career, cut short. But scholarship grinds on regardless, and the British Museum began casting about for someone who could continue the excavations at Nineveh, and possibly even extend operations to other sites throughout Iraq. Once again, they turned to Hormuzd Rassam.
Rassam had actually retired from archaeology not long after discovering Ashurbanipal’s library in 1853—in fact, he had spent several years in the British diplomatic corps, acting as vice-consul at Aden, now in Yemen, and, in a bizarre interlude, briefly being held prisoner by the emperor of Ethiopia. He wanted to stay at his home by the sea in Brighton, spending time with his wife and children. Instead, he found himself reporting for duty yet again.
This time, Rassam would be acting as a kind of regional manager. From 1876 to 1882, he zipped around Iraq, setting up excavation teams not just near Mosul, but at thirty different sites throughout the country. These sites began to produce an enormous number of finds—not just tablets, but entire buildings, such as the Marduk Temple at the site of Babylon in southern Iraq.
This impressive operation, however, meant that Rassam’s authority was spread thinly. Theft was a constant problem for his sites, with artifacts found during one day’s digging appearing on the black market the next. Rassam knew this. He wrote to his superiors at the British Museum describing his efforts to stop the stealing and he requested additional resources to support better security, but funds and help were not forthcoming. In fact, funds were so short that he spent part of these final years going back and forth to Iraq working as an unpaid advisor rather than an employee.
Rassam retired from archaeology for the second and final time in 1883 at the age of 58. He left capable, hand-selected foremen behind at his sites, which continued to yield up amazing treasures for the Museum. But the thefts didn’t stop.
In 1887, the Museum sent out a 30-year-old assistant curator to investigate the sites Rassam had established—but was no longer directing, mind you—to try to stem the flow of losses. This curator was none other than E.A. Wallis Budge. Exactly why Budge took up against Rassam isn’t clear. Perhaps the younger man resented the fact that someone who couldn’t even read cuneiform was more important in the Assyriology department than he—Budge—was. Maybe he was envious of the resources the Museum had committed to Rassam’s excavations. Maybe he bore a racist grudge against the Iraqi.
Regardless of the reasons, he was a messy little Budge who lived for drama. He began a whisper campaign against Rassam—spreading what one scholar would later call a “hotchpotch of disreputable libels”. (Reade 59) According to Budge, the foremen Rassam left behind in Iraq were all his relatives, and, what’s more, his agents in a massive conspiracy. Rassam was, in fact, the hub of an illicit antiquities-trafficking ring, profiting off treasures that should rightfully have come to the Museum.
Not a single word of this was true, but the more Budge repeated this story, the more he seemed to convince himself that Rassam really was a thoroughgoing villain and a fraud to boot. When it came time to revise the museum’s guidebook in 1890, Budge removed Rassam’s name from it, even going so far as to credit his finds to Sir Henry Rawlinson or Austen Henry Layard.
It was Layard who first confronted Budge. Shocked to hear the little man repeating his outrageous claims against Rassam in the public galleries of the museum, Layard—by this time Sir Austen, and a trustee of the museum himself—went to the director of the museum to complain. Budge was obliged to produce a written apology. It was a weaselly little document; the 19th-century version of the “I am sorry if anyone was offended” statements celebrities post on Twitter. When Layard and Rassam complained about the quality of the apology, they were blown off.
Layard decided to go public. In a letter to the Times of London, he called out Budge for engaging in a libelous campaign against a friend who was “one of the honestest [sic] and most straightforward fellows I ever knew, and one whose services have never been acknowledged.” Rassam went further: he filed a lawsuit against Budge for slander, demanding £1,000 in damages.
Rassam wasn’t just angry. He was disillusioned. Julian Reade, an Assyriologist who was a curator at the British Museum from 1975-2000, wrote that Rassam was dismayed to find that “the contrast between the British and Ottoman Empires was not the one [he] had imagined, between a noble Christian world and a corrupt Muslim one, but between different societies whose leaders often had . . . a ready mistrust of outsiders.” (Reade 50)
In his home country, Reade further points out, Rassam had been a member of a persecuted religious minority. In his adopted country, he belonged to a mistrusted ethnic minority. This dual identity had often served him well throughout his career. Now it would contribute to its erasure.
The case of Rassam v. Budge went ahead in 1893, and it actually went in Rassam’s favor in some respects. During the trial, the judge in the case spoke out strongly on Rassam’s behalf. Of Budge’s “apology”, the judge said, “I cannot help saying that that sounds to me to be as shabby an apology as ever I read in my life. It is not a manly apology.” Drag him, judge.
While the jury found that Budge had slandered Rassam, they sent a strong signal that they didn’t entirely approve of this outsider prosecuting a true Englishman through the courts. Instead of the £1,000 in damages Rassam had asked for, the jury awarded him just £20.
Budge, having had his wrists slapped, returned to the Museum in a sulk. He was quickly consoled by a promotion, and by the many high-society friends who chipped in to cover his legal fees. His career was just beginning—but we’ll come back to Budge later, in episode six.
Rassam returned to his wife and children in Brighton, baffled and depressed by how his contributions to archaeology had been wiped from the records by the institution and the nation to which he’d devoted his entire life. He produced a book to defend his reputation in 1895—no British publisher would touch it; he had to shop it to the Americans to get it printed—but it sank almost without trace.
Rassam died in modest obscurity in 1910. He had played an important role in bringing the Epic of Gilgamesh back into the light, and now his own story would be forgotten—or ignored—for generations. Instead, George Smith and Austen Henry Layard would be credited as the “discoverers” of the Epic.
It’s only since about the 1990s that Assyriologists have begun to correct the record and acknowledge the great debt they owe to Hormuzd Rassam, but there’s a long, long way to go before he’s fully vindicated.
That’s the story behind the rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Again, I strongly recommend picking up David Damrosch’s The Buried Book if you’re interested in learning more. In addition to more detail about George Smith and Hormuzd Rassam, there’s an entire section on some of the hijinks Henry Rawlinson engaged in while trying to decipher cuneiform, a look at what’s known about life in Ashurbanipal’s palace, and much more.
I also read Austen Henry Layard’s A Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh and Hormuzd Rassam’s Asshur and the Land of Nimrod for this. In spite of the affection I have for Rassam, Layard is the better writer here—if you can bear the long sentences common to 19th-century English writing, you may enjoy looking that up online. There are lots of free versions of it hosted on various library websites, and a cheap version you can buy for your e-reader if you prefer that format.
Now, however, it’s time to leave Gilgamesh and Mesopotamia behind—RIP Enkidu, you should never have left the sex pond. In our next episode we move on to Ancient Egypt, where we’ll cover the next work on our list, a zero-to-hero story about a scribe. Anyway, episode three, The Tale of Sinhue is coming on Thursday, March 28th.
Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.
Reading List:
Budge, E.A. Wallis. The Rise and Progress of Assyriology. Richard Clay, 1925. Available online: https://archive.org/details/RiseAndProgressOfAssyriologyByEAWallisBudge/
Damrosch, David. The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh. Henry Holt and Company, 2008.
George, Andrew. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Penguin Publishing Group, 2003.
Harmand, Carine. “Sparking the Imagination: The Rediscovery of Assyria’s Great Lost City.” The British Museum, 1 Feb. 2019, http://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/sparking-imagination-rediscovery-assyrias-great-lost-city.
Layard, Austen Henry. A Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh. Forgotten Books, 2018.
Rassam, Hormuzd, and Robert William Rogers. Asshur and the Land of Nimrod. Curts & Jennings, 1897.
Reade, Julian. “Hormuzd Rassam and His Discoveries.” Iraq, vol. 55, 1993, pp. 39–62, https://doi.org/10.2307/4200366.
Robson, Eleanor. “From ‘Ashurbanipal’s Library’ and the ‘Stream of Tradition’ to New Approaches to Cuneiform Scholarship.” UCL Press, 2019, pp. 10–48. A Social Geography of Cuneiform Scholarship in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvhn0csn.11. Accessed 12 Mar. 2024.
Books Of All Time 
Leave a comment