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By Permission of the Trustees of the British Museum

George A. Smith (1840–1876). An amateur Assyriologist, Smith was hired by the British Museum to catalogue cuneiform inscriptions discovered by Austen Henry Layard at Kyunjik (ancient Nineveh). He gained international attention when he announced his discovery of a Babylonian Deluge story similar to the biblical account of Noah’s Flood. He subsequently pieced together Enūma Eliš, which he dubbed “The Chaldean Genesis”—“Chaldean” being a biblical term for “Babylonian.”