Gilgamesh

There is a famous story amongst Assyriologists. It concerns a man named George Smith, who was working at the British Museum in the mid-nineteenth century at the time our story takes place but who was by no means someone you’d expect to be working at the British Museum and studying and deciphering cuneiform tablets since he was, in fact, born in working class circumstances in London in 1840, and then worked for some years as a banknote and seal engraver and yet also managed, somehow, to teach himself Near Eastern history and also how to read Akkadian and Sumerian, which anyone who has ever looked at a cuneiform tablet will realize is not such an easy thing to do.