纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 016洪水纪念碑（2）

"There's a really kind of a hymn to the beauty and the fragility of human culture, caught between the world of the gods and the world of an unforgiving nature." (David Damrosch)

"And without that Jewish break with the world of myth, we would never have had science." (Jonathan Sacks)

It's lunchtime at the British Museum and the place, as usual, is bustling with visitors. Locals from Bloomsbury are dropping in as they regularly do for any number of reasons and, just over 140 years ago, one of those locals, a regular lunchtime visitor, was a man called George Smith. He was an apprentice to a printing firm not far from the museum, and he'd become fascinated by the museum's collection of ancient clay tablets. He was so engrossed by these, that he taught himself to read them and, in due course, he became one of the leading translators of his day. In 1872, Smith was studying a particular tablet from Nineveh (modern Iraq) and that's what I want to look at now.

I've walked across the museum, and I'm now sitting in the library where we keep the clay tablets from Mesopotamia; a room filled with shelves from floor to ceiling, and on each shelf a narrow wooden tray with up to a dozen clay tablets in it - most of them fragments. The fragment that George Smith was particularly interested in, in 1872, is about five or six inches (130 - 150mm) high, it's dark brown clay and it's covered with very densely written text organised in two very close columns. From a distance, it looks a bit like the small ads column of an old-fashioned newspaper. But this fragment, once George Smith had realised what it was, was going to shake the foundations of one of the great stories of the Old Testament, and indeed raise big questions about the role of scripture and its relationship to truth.