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fore Ashurbanipal's rule. It could not be considered coincidence; Smith kept finding more
and more evidence corroborating a prebiblical flood story.
Smith thought more than ten thousand inscribed tablets were originally housed in the
upper floors of the ruined palace. Apparently arranged by subject, some tablets formed a
series, the longest of which consisted of over a hundred individual tablets. Each shared the
title that began its series, and each was numbered with its position in the series and started
with the last phrase of the preceding tablet.
This once well-organized library lay in ruins. Scorch marks showed that many tablets
broke apart during the fiery destruction of Nineveh. Subsequent treasure seekers also took
a toll, tossing tablets aside in the quest for better loot. Finally, cycles of rain and drying
splintered most tablets into piles of clay shards.
Smith shipped crates and crates of fragments back to London. As he fitted them back
together he discovered that the flood story was the eleventh of a twelve-tablet series. Dif-
ferent tablets revealed several distinct versions. One nearly complete tablet revealed that
the gods sent a great flood to destroy the city of Shuruppak. This version referred to the
flood survivor as Atrahasis, who, like Sisit, built a ship, sealed it with bitumen, and loaded
it with his wealth, family, and beasts of the field. As in the other version, the great flood
raged over the surface of the earth for seven days and nights, killing all living things. After
the ship came to ground on a mountain, Atrahasis sent out a dove, then a swallow, and fi-
nally a raven before disembarking after the waters receded.
Henry Rawlinson, Smith's mentor who, decades before, stumbled onto the key to deci-
phering cuneiform, seized upon the twelve tablets as proof that the flood story was a solar
myth tied to zodiac symbols in which each tablet corresponded to a different sign. The tab-
let that contained the flood story corresponded to the eleventh month, the rainiest time of
the year, the month ruled by the storm god.
But Smith thought this ancient story from Ashurbanipal's library recorded an ancient
catastrophe dating back long before the Bible. Maybe the Jews adapted an older Babyloni-
an story to monotheism. Smith composed a table showing how basic elements occurred in
the same order in the biblical and Babylonian narratives. However, he saw enough differ-
ences in the details to believe the stories represented distinct traditions recording the same
events. Perhaps the mountaintop on which the ark landed was a Mesopotamian temple,
