Editing Gilgamesh (section)

===Modern rediscovery===
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| footer            = In 1880, the English [[List of Assyriologists|Assyriologist]] [[George Smith (Assyriologist)|George Smith]] (left) published a translation of Tablet XI of the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' (right), containing the Flood myth,{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|pages=1–25}} which attracted immediate scholarly attention and controversy due to its similarity to the [[Genesis flood narrative]].{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|pages=20–28}}
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The Akkadian text of the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' was first discovered in 1849 AD by the English archaeologist [[Austen Henry Layard]] in the [[Library of Ashurbanipal]] at Nineveh.{{sfn|Mark|2018}}{{sfn|Rybka|2011|pages=257–258}}<ref name="Norton Anthology">{{Cite book|title=The Norton Anthology of World Literature|date=2012|publisher=W. W. Norton & Company|edition=3rd|volume=A}}</ref>{{rp|95}} Layard was seeking evidence to confirm the historicity of the events described in the [[Hebrew Bible]], i.e. the Christian [[Old Testament]],{{sfn|Mark|2018}} which was believed to contain the oldest texts in the world.{{sfn|Mark|2018}} Instead, his and later excavations unearthed much older Mesopotamian texts{{sfn|Mark|2018}} and showed that many of the stories in the Old Testament may be derived from earlier myths told throughout the ancient Near East.{{sfn|Mark|2018}} The first translation of the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' was produced in the early 1870s by [[George Smith (Assyriologist)|George Smith]], a scholar at the [[British Museum]],{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|pages=1–25}}{{sfn|Rybka|2011|page=257}}{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2011}} who published the Flood story from Tablet XI in 1880 under the title ''The Chaldean Account of Genesis''.{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|pages=1–25}} Gilgamesh's name was originally misread as ''Izdubar''.{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|pages=1–25}}<ref>{{Cite book |last=Smith |first=George |title=Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, Volumes 1–2 |publisher=Society of Biblical Archæology |volume=2 |location=London |pages=213–214 |chapter=The Chaldean Account of the Deluge |year=1872 |author-link=George Smith (assyriologist) |access-date=12 October 2017 |orig-year=3 December 1872 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CEgPAQAAIAAJ&pg=RA1-PA213}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Jeremias |first=Alfred |url=https://archive.org/details/izdubarnimrodein00jere |title=Izdubar-Nimrod, eine altbabylonische Heldensage |date=1891 |publisher=Leipzig, Teubner |language=de |author-link=Alfred Jeremias |access-date=12 October 2017}}</ref>

Early interest in the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' was almost exclusively on account of the flood story from Tablet XI.{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|pages=23–25}} It attracted enormous public attention and drew widespread scholarly controversy, while the rest of the epic was largely ignored.{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|pages=23–25}} Most attention towards the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from German-speaking countries,{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|pages=28–29}} where controversy raged over the relationship between ''Babel und Bibel'' ("Babylon and Bible").{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|pages=23–25, 28–29}}

In January 1902, the German Assyriologist [[Friedrich Delitzsch]] gave a lecture at the [[Sing-Akademie zu Berlin]] before the [[Kaiser]] and his wife, in which he argued that the Flood story in the Book of Genesis was directly copied from the ''Epic of Gilgamesh''.{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|pages=23–25}} Delitzsch's lecture was so controversial that, by September 1903, he had managed to collect thousands of articles and pamphlets criticizing this lecture about the Flood and another about the relationship between the [[Code of Hammurabi]] and the biblical [[Law of Moses]].{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|page=25}} The Kaiser distanced himself from Delitzsch and his radical views{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|page=25}} and by the fall of 1904, Delitzsch was reduced to giving his third lecture in [[Cologne]] and [[Frankfurt am Main]] rather than in Berlin.{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|page=25}} The putative relationship between the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' and the Hebrew Bible later became a major part of Delitzsch's argument in his 1920–21 book ''{{lang|de|Die große Täuschung}}'' (''The Great Deception'') that the Hebrew Bible was irredeemably "contaminated" by Babylonian influence{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|pages=23–25}} and that only by eliminating the human Old Testament entirely could Christians finally believe in the true, [[Aryan#19th and early 20th century|Aryan]] message of the [[New Testament]].{{sfn|Ziolkowski|2012|pages=23–25}}