There is a famous story amongst Assyriologists. It concerns a man named George Smith, who was working at the British Museum in the mid-nineteenth century but who was by no means someone you’d expect to be working at the British Museum and studying and deciphering cuneiform tablets since he was, in fact, born in working class circumstances in London in 1840, and managed, somehow, to teach himself to read Akkadian and Sumerian, which anyone who has ever looked at a cuneiform tablet will reali...
