The Discovery of Gilgamesh Man's Oldest Epic Although the Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest stories ever recorded, it remained hidden to the modern world until the 19th century, when archeological expeditions were undertaken to several sites in the Near East. In 1843 Paul-Émile Botta began to excavate at the ancient Assyrian site at Khorsabad, in today's Iraq, and in 1845 Austin Henry Layard began excavations at Nimrud (See Aramco World, May/June 1994). Constructed by Sargon II and Ashurnasirpal II, respectively, these well-preserved eighth-century BC sites soon began to yield huge limestone slabs and giant stone panels depicting horses with riders, archers on chariots, sieges and captives—even lion hunts. Many of these enormous artifacts were inscribed with the wedge-shaped characters we now call cuneiform script. While still working at Nimrud, Layard began another excavation at ancient Nineveh, where he and his assistant, Hormuzd Rassam, were independently to discover the royal libraries of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal. Altogether, some 25,000 fragments of tablets were unearthed from these libraries, all inscribed with the same cuneiform writing. Over the next several years similar tablets were found at other sites in Mesopotamia and Syria. The discovery of the artifacts prompted a strong interest in ancient Assyria, an interest intensified when, in 1857, Edward Hincks and Henry Rawlinson confirmed that they had found the key to the Akkadian language, also written in cuneiform script. Yet it took another 15 years before George Smith, an unschooled engraver who had been swept up in the universal enthusiasm, succeeded in translating a collection of Akkadian tablets from the Ashurbanipal library—and discovered the story of Gilgamesh and its references to the Great Flood (See Aramco World, January/February 1971). The news of his discovery created a sensation. Almost immediately, the owner of the London Daily Telegraph, Sir Edwin Arnold, offered the British Museum, where Smith had become a staff member, a thousand guineas to allow him to go to Nineveh and see what more he could find. With uncanny luck, Smith picked up a tablet on his fifth day at the site that contained 17 missing lines from the first column of the Flood tablet. The tablet, he wrote, fitted "into the only place where there was a blank" in the story of Gilgamesh. The tablets found at Nineveh were not the only ones to tell the story of Gilgamesh. Other copies of the epic were found at Nippur in Mesopotamia as well as at Boğazköy in Anatolia, at Megiddo in Palestine, at Ugarit in Syria and at Elam in present-day Iran. Most of the tablets found in ancient Babylon and Assyria, in central and northern Mesopotamia, were written in Akkadian: Both Babylonian and Assyrian are forms of the Akkadian language. The tablets found at Nippur, however, were inscribed in the earlier Sumerian language, which was also written in cuneiform script. The tablets found at Boğazköy had been translated into Hittite and Hurrian, and those at Elam into Elamite. None of the collections is complete: In all cases some tablets are broken or missing. The most famous and most complete collection remains the one found at Nineveh and translated by Smith, which had been copied, and very probably edited, by a scribe named Sinleqi-unnini. His version is the one on which John Gardner and John Maier based their translation, and it is primarily on their translation that Ludmila Zeman based her Gilgamesh trilogy.