2. COLOPHON OF THE TABLETS OF THE LIBRARY OF NEBO. (Rm. 132.)
1. To Nebo, the mighty son, director of the whole of heaven and of earth,
2. holder of the tablet, bearer of the writing reed of the tablet of destinies,
3. lengthener of days, vivifier of the dead, stablisher of light for the men who are troubled,
4. the great lord, his lord; Ashur-bani-pal, the prince, the favourite of the gods Ashur, Bê1 and Nebo,
5. the shepherd, the maintainer of the holy places of the great gods, stablisher of their revenues,
6. son of Esarhaddon, king of all, king of Assyria,
7. grandson of Sennacherib, king of all, king of Assyria,
[1. Or, probably better. "Thy lordship is beyond compare, O king the gods, Ashur."]
8. for the life of his soul, length of his days, [and] well-being of his posterity,
9. to make permanent the foundation of his royal throne, to hear his supplications,
10. to receive his petitions, to deliver into his hands the rebellious.
11. The wisdom of Ea, the chanter's art, the secrets of the sages,
12. what is composed for the contentment of the heart of the great gods,
13. I wrote upon tablets, I collated, I revised
14. according to originals of the lands of Ashur and Akkad,
15. and I placed in the Library of E-zida, the temple of Nebo my lord, which is in Nineveh.
16. O Nebo, lord of the whole of heaven and of earth, look upon that Library joyfully for years (i.e., for ever).
17. On Ashur-bani-pal, the chief, the worshipper of thy divinity, daily bestow grace,
18. his life decree, so that he may exalt thy great godhead.
The tablets from both Libraries when unbroken vary in size from 15 inches by 85/8 inches to 1 inch by 7/8 inch, and they are usually about 1 inch thick. In shape they are rectangular, the obverse being flat and the reverse slightly convex. Contract tablets, letter tablets and "case" tablets are very much smaller, and resemble small pillows in shape. The principal subjects dealt with in the tablets are history, annalistic or summaries, letters, despatches, reports, oracles, prayers, contracts, deeds of sale of land, produce, cattle, slaves, agreements, dowries, bonds for interest (with impressions of seals, and fingernails, or nail marks), chronography, chronology, canons of eponyms, divination (by astrology, the entrails of victims, oil, casual events, dreams, and symptoms), charms, spells, incantations, mythology, legends, grammar, law, geography, etc.[1]
[1. For a full description of the general contents of the two great Libraries of Nineveh. see Bezold, Catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets of the Kouyûnjik Collection, Vol. V, London, 1899, p. xviii ff.; and King, Supplement, London, 1914, p. xviii ff.]
GEORGE SMITH'S DISCOVERY OF THE EPIC OF GILGAMISH AND THE STORY OF THE DELUGE.
The mass of tablets which had been discovered by Layard and Rassam at Nineveh came to the British Museum in 1854-5, and their examination by Rawlinson and Norris began very soon after. Mr. Bowler, a skilful draughtsman and copyist of tablets, whom Rawlinson employed in making transfers of copies of cuneiform texts for publication by lithography, rejoined a considerable number of fragments of bilingual lists, syllabaries, etc., which were published in the second volume of the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, in 1866. In that year the Trustees of the British Museum employed George Smith to assist Rawlinson in sorting, classifying and rejoining fragments, and a comprehensive examination of the collection by him began. His personal interest in Assyriology was centred upon historical texts, especially those which threw any light on the Bible Narrative. But in the course of his search for stories of the campaigns of Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashur-bani-pal, he discovered among other important documents (1) a series of portions of tablets which give the adventures of Gilgamish, an ancient king of Erech; (2) an account of the Deluge, which is supplied by the Eleventh Tablet of the Legend of Gilgamish (in more than one version); (3) a detailed description of the Creation; (4) the Legend of the Descent of Ishtar into Hades in quest of Tammuz. The general meaning of the texts was quite clear, 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."[1] 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 now seems that the Legend of the Flood had not originally any connection with the Legend of Gilgamish, and that it was introduced into it by a late editor or redactor of the Legend, probably in order to complete the number of the Twelve Tablets on which it was written in the time of Ashur-bani-pal.