NA TURE 



421 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1876 



GEORGE SMITH 



I'^HE untimely death of Mr, George Smith at the early 

 age of thirty-seven, is a loss that can ill be repaired. 

 Scholars can be reared and trained, but hardly more than 

 once in a century can we expect a genius with the heaven- 

 born gift of divining the meaning of a forgotten language 

 and discovering the clue to an unknown alphabet. The 

 marvellous instinct by which Mr. Smith ascertained the 

 substantial sense of a passage in the Assyrian inscrip- 

 tions without being always able to give a philological 

 analysis of the words it contained, gave him a good right 

 to the title of " the intellectual picklock," by which he 

 was sometimes called. The pioneer of Assyrian research, 

 and the decipherer of the Cypriote inscriptions, he could 

 be all the less spared at the present moment, when a key 

 is needed to the reading of those Hamathite hieroglyphics 

 to which the last discoveries he was destined to make 

 have given such an unexpected importance. 



Mr. Smith was born of poor parents, and his school- 

 education was consequently broken off at the age of 

 fifteen, when he was apprenticed to Messrs. Bradbury 

 and Evans to learn the art of engraving. While in this 

 employment he often stole half the time allowed for 

 dinner for visits to the British Museum, and saved his 

 earnings to buy the works of the leading writers on 

 Assyrian subjects. Sir Henry Rawlinson was struck with 

 the young man's intelligence and enthusiasm, and after 

 furnishing him with various casts and squeezes, through 

 which Mr. Smith was led to make his first discovery (the 

 date of the payment of tribute by Jehu to Shalmaneser (he 

 proposed to the trustees of the Museum that Mr. Smith 

 should be associated with himself in the preparation of 

 the third volume of the "Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western 

 Asia." This was in 1867, and from this year Mr. Smith 

 entered upon his official life at the Museum and definitely 

 devoted himself to the study of the Assyrian monuments. 

 The first fruits of his labours were the discovery of two 

 inscriptions, one fixing the date of a total eclipse of the 

 sun in the month Sivan or May, B.C. 763, and the other 

 the date of an invasion of Babylonia by the Elamites in 

 B.C. 2280, and a series of articles in the Zeitschrift fiir 

 yEgyptische Sprache, which threw a flood of light upon 

 later Assyrian history and the political relations between 

 Assyria and Egypt. 



In 187 1 he published the "Annals of Assur-bani-pal," 

 or Sardanapalus, transliterated and translated, a work 

 which involved immense labour in the preparation of the 

 text and the examination of variant readings. This was 

 followed by an excellent little pamphlet on the chronology 

 of Sennacherib's reign and a list of the characters of the 

 Assyrian Syllabary. About the same time he contributed 

 to the newly-founded Society of Biblical Archaeology a 

 very valuable paper on " The Early History of Baby- 

 lonia " (since republished in the " Records of the Past "), 

 as well as an account of his decipherment of the Cypriote 

 inscriptions which had hitherto been such a stumbling- 

 block and puzzle to scholars. The Cypriote Syllabary as 

 determined by him has been the basis of the later labours 

 of Birch, Brandis, Siegismund, Deecke, Schmidt, and 

 Hall. 



Vol. XIV.— No, 359 



It was in 1872, however, that Mr. Smith made the dis- 

 covery which has caused his name to be a household 

 word in England. His translation of the " Chaldean 

 Account of the Deluge " was read before the Society of 

 Biblical Archaeology on the 3rd of December, and in the 

 following January he was sent to excavate on the site of 

 Nineveh by the proprietors oi\}[i& Daily Telegraph. After 

 unearthing the missing fragment of the Deluge story, he 

 returned to England with a large and important collec- 

 tion of objects and inscriptions. Among these were frag- 

 ments which recorded the succession and duration of the 

 Babylonian dynasties, a paper on which was contributed 

 by the discoverer to the Society of Biblical Archaeology. 

 It was in connection with these chronological researches 

 that Mr. Smith's invaluable volume on the "Assyrian 

 Eponym Canon " was written for Messrs. Bagster in 1875. 

 Shortly afterwards he again left England to continue his 

 excavations at Kouyunjik for the Trustees of the British 

 Museum, and in spite ot the difficulties and annoyances 

 thrown in his way by the Turks, he succeeded in bringing 

 home a large number of fragmentary tablets, many of 

 them belonging to the great Solar Epic in twelve books, 

 of which the episode of the Deluge forms the eleventh 

 lay. An account of his travels and researches was given 

 in his " Assyrian Discoveries," published at the beginning 

 of 1875. The remainder of the year was occupied in 

 piecing together and translating a number of fragments 

 of the highest importance, relating to the Creation, the 

 Fall, the Tower of Babel, &c. The results of these 

 labours were embodied in his book, "The Chaldean 

 Account of Genesis." 



The great value of these discoveries induced the Trus- 

 tees of the Museum to despatch Mr. Smith on another 

 expedition in order to excavate the remainder of Assur- 

 bani-pal's library at Kouyunjik, and so complete the col- 

 lection of tablets in the British Museum. Mr. Smith 

 accordingly went to Constantinople last October, and 

 after some trouble succeeded in obtaining a firman for 

 excavating. He set out for his last and fatal journey to 

 the East in March, taking with him Dr. Eneberg, a Finnic 

 Assyriologue. While detained at Aleppo on account of 

 the plague, he explored the banks of the Euphrates from 

 the Balis northward, and at Yerabolus discovered the 

 ancient Hittite capital, Carchemish — a discovery which 

 bids fair to rival in importance that of Nineveh itself. 

 After visiting Devi, or Thapsakus, and other places, he 

 made his way to Bagdad, where he procured between two 

 and three thousand tablets discovered by some Arabs in 

 an ancient Babylonian library near Hillah. From Bag- 

 dad he went to Kouyunjik, and found, to his intense dis- 

 appointment, that owing to the troubled state of the 

 country it was impossible to excavate. Meanwhile Dr. 

 Eneberg had died, and Mr. Smith, worn out by fatigue 

 and anxiety, broke down at Ikisji, a small village about 

 sixty miles north-east of Aleppo. Here he was found by 

 Mr. Parsons, and Mrs. Skene, the consul's wife at Aleppo, 

 and a medical man having been sent for, conveyed him 

 by easy stages to Aleppo, where he died August 19th. He 

 has left behind him the MS. of a " Historj' of Baby- 

 lonia," intended to be a companion volume to his " His- 

 tory of Assyria," published by the S.P.C.K. last year. 



Mr. Smith's obliging kindness was only equalled by his 

 modesty. Shortly after his return from his first expedition 



