Smith, George

Smith, George

(born March 19, 1824, London, Eng.—died April 6, 1901, Byfleet, near Weybridge, Surrey) British publisher. He took over his father's bookselling and publishing business in 1846. Under his leadership the firm issued works by such noted Victorian writers as John Ruskin, the Brontë sisters, Charles Darwin, William Thackeray, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wilkie Collins, Matthew Arnold, Harriet Martineau, and Anthony Trollope. His most important publication was the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, 66 vol. (1885–1901), later continued by Oxford University Press. He also began the illustrated literary journal Cornhill Magazine (1860) and the Pall Mall Gazette (1865), a literary newspaper.

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Smith, George 

Born Mar. 26, 1840, in London; died Aug. 19, 1876, in Aleppo, Syria. English Assyriologist and archaeologist. As a young man, Smith worked as an engraver. Later, after mastering cuneiform through independent study, he became a senior assistant at the British Museum. In 1872, while examining tablets from the library of Ashurbanipal, he discovered an Akkadian version of the legend of a flood which was the prototype of the biblical legend of the great flood. He also discovered the epic of Gilgamesh and an epos about the creation of the world. Between 1873 and 1876 he directed excavations at Nineveh. Smith took part in the publication of the Assyrian texts in the series The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia issued between 1861 and 1884.

WORKS

The History of Assurbanipal. London, 1971.
The Assyrian Eponym Canon. London [1875].
The Chaldean Account of the Deluge. London [1873].

REFERENCE

Lloyd, S. Foundation in the Dust. [Bristol, 1955.]