Among the tablets which Rassaam unearthed and sent to the British Museum were the ones which were later found to contain Assyrian copies of the Babylonian flood and creation stories (pp. 28, 50). The identification and decipherment of these particular tablets was the work of George Smith, then a young assistant in the British Museum. In 1872, while engaged in the sorting and classification of the Kuyunjik tablets, he noticed pieces containing portions of mythical stories. "Commencing a steady search among these fragments," Smith afterward related, "I soon found half of a curious tablet which had evidently contained originally six columns. . . . On looking down the third column, my eye caught the statement that the ship rested on the mountains of Nizir, followed by the account of the sending forth of the dove, and its finding no resting-place and returning. I saw at once that I had here discovered a portion at least of the Chaldean account of the Deluge.
- from page 182, Light from the Ancient Past