The baked clay tablets and portions of tablets which describe theviews and beliefs of the Babylonians and Assyrians about the Creationwere discovered by Mr. (later Sir) A.H. Layard, Mormuzd Rassam andGeorge Smith, Assistant in the Department of Oriental Antiquities inthe British Museum. They were found among the ruins of the Palace andLibrary of Ashur-bani-pal (B.C. 668-626) at Ḳuyûnjiḳ (Nineveh),between the years 1848 and 1876. Between 1866 and 1870, the great"find" of tablets and fragments, some 20,000 in number, which Rassammade in 1852, was worked through by George Smith, who identified manyof the historical inscriptions of Shalmaneser II, Tiglath-Pileser III,Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and other kings mentioned in theBible, and several literary compositions of a legendary character,fables, etc. In the course of this work he discovered fragments ofvarious versions of the Babylonian Legend of the Deluge, and portionsof several texts belonging to a work which treated of the beginning ofthings, and of the Creation. In 1870, Rawlinson and Smith notedallusions to the Creation in the important tablet K.63, but the textsof portions of tablets of the Creation Series at that time availablefor study were so fragmentary that it was impossible for thesescholars to find their correct sequence. During the excavations whichSmith carried out at Ḳuyûnjiḳ in 1873 and 1874 for the proprietors ofthe Daily Telegraph and the Trustees of the British Museum, hewas, he tells us, fortunate enough to discover "several fragments ofthe Genesis Legends." In January, 1875, he made an exhaustive searchamong the tablets in the British Museum, and in the following March hepublished, in the Daily Telegraph (March 4th), a summary of thecontents of about twenty fragments of the series of tablets describingthe creation of the heavens and the earth. In November of the sameyear he communicated to the Society of Biblical Archaeology1copies of:--(1) the texts on fragments of the First and Fifth Tabletsof Creation; (2) a text describing the fight between the "Gods andChaos"; and (3) a fragmentary text which, he believed, described theFall of Man. In the following year he published translations of allthe known fragments of the Babylonian Creation Legends in his"Chaldean Account of Genesis" (London, 1876, 8vo, with photographs).In this volume were included translations of the Exploits of Gizdubar(Gilgamish), and some early Babylonian fables and legends of the gods.
The publication of the above-mentioned texts and translations provedbeyond all doubt the correctness of Rawlinson's assertion made in1865, that "certain portions of the Babylonian and Assyrian Legends ofthe Creation resembled passages in the early chapters of the Book ofGenesis." During the next twenty years, the Creation texts werecopied and recopied by many Assyriologists, but no publicationappeared in which all the material available for reconstructing theLegend was given in a collected form. In 1898, the Trustees of theBritish Museum ordered the publication of all the Creation textscontained in the Babylonian and Assyrian Collections, and the lateMr. L. W. King, Assistant in the Department of Egyptian and AssyrianAntiquities, was directed to prepare an edition. The exhaustivepreparatory search which he made through the collections of tablets inthe British Museum resulted in the discovery of many unpublishedfragments of the Creation Legends, and in the identification of afragment which, although used by George Smith, had been lost sight offor about twenty-five years. He