You were never supposed to be here
You were born in Chelsea in 1840, in a working-class family, and at fourteen you were apprenticed to learn banknote engraving — a life of careful lines and small tools. But on your lunch breaks you kept slipping into the British Museum, to the rooms full of broken clay from the buried city of Nineveh. While other men ate their bread, you taught yourself to read cuneiform — the oldest writing on Earth, wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay — from grammar books and sheer stubbornness. The Museum noticed. In 1870 they gave you a job.
The clay on your table came from the library of King Ashurbanipal, an Assyrian ruler who collected tens of thousands of tablets 2,500 years ago. When his city of Nineveh was sacked and burned in 612 BC, something wonderful and strange happened: the fire that destroyed the palace baked the clay tablets hard, like pottery in a kiln. The catastrophe preserved the library. Excavators shipped it to London in crates — tens of thousands of pieces, shattered and jumbled, a 2,500-year-old jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box.
Your job is to sort it. Piece by piece. And this afternoon, one broken tablet is about to change everything.
Join the broken pieces
A tray of fragments sits before you, lamplight pooling on the clay. Some pieces clearly belong together — the fractured edges match like torn paper. Tap each floating shard to fit it into place.
Now read it — line by line
The tablet is whole enough to read. You lean into the lamplight. The wedges resolve into words — Akkadian words, and your heart begins to knock at your ribs, because you know these images. Tap each line of cuneiform to translate it. Keep an eye on your pulse.
“I am the first man to read that…”
A flood. A ship aground on a mountain. A dove sent out that finds no rest. You are holding a version of the Flood story — written down centuries before the oldest known copies of the Book of Genesis — and you are the first human being to read it in more than two thousand years.
According to a colleague’s famous account, you leap up, rush about the room in a state of tremendous excitement — and, to the astonishment of everyone present, begin taking off your clothes. (Historians wink at that detail — it was told years later by E. A. Wallis Budge, a man fond of a good story. But everyone agrees on the excitement.)
On December 3, 1872, you stand before the Society of Biblical Archaeology and read your translation aloud. The Prime Minister of Britain, William Gladstone, sits in the audience. Newspapers around the world carry the story. The oldest epic on Earth — the Epic of Gilgamesh — has begun to wake up.
How a story survives everything
What you found was already ancient when Rome was young. Drag the slider and watch the story travel from a Sumerian courtyard to a glass case in London.
Find the missing piece
Your flood tablet has a hole in it — a maddening gap, seventeen lines or so, right in the middle of the story. So The Daily Telegraph newspaper does something magnificent and slightly absurd: it pays 1,000 guineas to send you — a museum assistant who has never dug anything — to Ottoman Iraq to find one missing piece of clay in a mound containing millions.
The world says: impossible. You arrive at the ruins of Nineveh in March 1873 and start digging on May 7. Brush away the dirt below (drag across it) and see how your luck holds.
The Society of Biblical Archaeology has questions
Before they let you lecture next to the Prime Minister, the learned members would like a word. Seven questions. No pressure — only your reputation as the greatest self-taught scholar in London.