but there were many gaps in them, and it was not until December, 1872,
that George Smith published his description of the Legend of Gilgamish,
and a translation of the "Chaldean Account of the Deluge." The interest
which his paper evoked was universal, and the proprietors of the
"Daily Telegraph" advocated that Smith should be at once dispatched
to Nineveh to search for the missing fragments of tablets which would
fill up the gaps in his texts, and generously offered to contribute
1,000 guineas towards the cost of the excavations. The Trustees
accepted the offer and gave six months' leave of absence to Smith,
who left London in January, and arrived in Môsul in March, 1873. In
the following May he recovered from Kuyûnjik a fragment that contained
"the greater portion of seventeen lines of inscription belonging to
the first column of the Chaldean account of the Deluge, and fitting
into the only place where there was a serious blank in the story." [6]
During the excavations which Smith carried out at Kuyûnjik in 1873
and 1874 he recovered many fragments of tablets, the texts of which
enabled him to complete his description of the contents of the Twelve
Tablets of the Legend of Gilgamish which included his translation
of the story of the Deluge. Unfortunately Smith died of hunger
and sickness near Aleppo in 1876, and he was unable to revise his
early work, and to supplement it with the information which he had
acquired during his latest travels in Assyria and Babylonia. Thanks
to the excavations which were carried on at Kuyûnjik by the Trustees
of the British Museum after his untimely death, several hundreds of
tablets and fragments have been recovered, and many of these have been
rejoined to the tablets of the older collection. By the careful study
and investigation of the old and new material Assyriologists have,
during the last forty years, been enabled to restore and complete
many passages in the Legends of Gilgamish and the Flood. It is now
clear that the Legend of the Flood had not originally any connection