The tablet that made a man start undressing
In 1872 George Smith, a young British Museum assistant who had taught himself to read cuneiform, was piecing together clay fragments from the ruined Assyrian city of Nineveh when he realised he was reading about a flood. A man is warned by a god to build a great boat, loads it with his family and animals, rides out the deluge and sends out a dove, a swallow and a raven to look for dry land. According to a colleague's later account, Smith leapt up, rushed around the room in excitement and, to the astonishment of everyone present, began taking his clothes off.
The fragment was part of the Epic of GILGAMESH. Its likeness to the story of Noah caused a sensation, and a newspaper paid for Smith to travel to Nineveh to search for the missing pieces. Scholars still discuss how the two stories are related.
The hero who lost to a snake
GILGAMESH was probably a real king of the city of Uruk nearly 5,000 years ago, but the epic makes him two-thirds god and a bully to his own people. The gods send him a match: a wild man called Enkidu, who fights him, loses, and becomes his best friend. Together they kill HUMBABA, the monster guarding the Cedar Forest.
Then Enkidu dies, and the rest of the story is GILGAMESH trying not to. He crosses the world in search of everlasting life and finds a plant on the sea floor that makes the old young again. On the way home he stops to bathe, and a snake slips off with it, shedding its skin as it goes — the story's explanation for why snakes do. He arrives back in Uruk with nothing to show but the city's great walls, and for many readers that is the point: no one lives forever, but what people build can last.
Seven gates down
INANNA, known to the Babylonians as ISHTAR, was goddess of both love and war. In her most famous story she goes down into the underworld, ruled by her sister ERESHKIGAL. At each of its seven gates she must hand over something she is wearing — crown, necklace, robe — until she arrives with nothing and is struck dead. The clever god ENKI arranges her rescue, but the underworld demands someone in her place, and she picks her husband DUMUZI, whom she finds sitting on his throne, not mourning her in the slightest. In the end he and his sister share the sentence, half a year each.
Some of the oldest hymns to INANNA were written by the first author in history whose name we know: Enheduanna, daughter of King Sargon of Akkad and high priestess of the moon god SIN at the city of Ur, around 2300 BC.
Why the palace guardians have five legs
The LAMASSU that guarded the gateways of Assyrian palaces had a man's head, eagle's wings and the body of a bull or a lion, and many were carved with five legs. From the front you see two legs planted firmly, standing guard; from the side you see four legs striding forward. Only from an angle does the extra leg give the trick away. Pairs of them, each weighing many tonnes, now stand in the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris. For the cities, kings and writing behind these stories, see our Ancient Mesopotamia puzzle in History.