Layard and other explorers. At the British Museum, which he visited
regularly to pore over the Assyrian inscriptions, he attracted the
attention of Sir Henry Rawlinson. So greatly impressed was Sir Henry
by the young man's enthusiasm and remarkable intelligence that he
allowed him the use of his private room and provided casts and
squeezes of inscriptions to assist him in his studies. Smith made
rapid progress. His earliest discovery was the date of the payment of
tribute by Jehu, King of Israel, to the Assyrian Emperor Shalmaneser.
Sir Henry availed himself of the young investigator's assistance in
producing the third volume of _The Cuneiform Inscriptions_.

In 1867 Smith received an appointment in the Assyriology Department of
the British Museum, and a few years later became famous throughout
Christendom as the translator of fragments of the Babylonian Deluge
Legend from tablets sent to London by Rassam. Sir Edwin Arnold, the
poet and Orientalist, was at the time editor of the _Daily Telegraph_,
and performed a memorable service to modern scholarship by dispatching
Smith, on behalf of his paper, to Nineveh to search for other
fragments of the Ancient Babylonian epic. Rassam had obtained the
tablets from the great library of the cultured Emperor Ashur-bani-pal,
"the great and noble Asnapper" of the Bible,[5] who took delight, as
he himself recorded, in

The wisdom of Ea,[6] the art of song, the treasures of science.

This royal patron of learning included in his library collection,
copies and translations of tablets from Babylonia. Some of these were
then over 2000 years old. The Babylonian literary relics were, indeed,
of as great antiquity to Ashur-bani-pal as that monarch's relics are
to us.