George Smith was funded to go to Nineveh to re-open the Excavation in 1873, to find the missing pieces of the Epic. He did not succeed in finding the correct one, but instead found another account of the flood story which resembles that of Noah in Genesis. At the same time, local Arab entrepreneurs recognised that Western Museums wanted the cuneiform tablets, and tablets showed up in the Antiquities markets in Baghdad. In 1876, George Smith went on to publish "Izdubar Legend" translations in the Chaldean account of Genesis. On his way back to the British Museum from his 3rd trip, he died in Aleppo. There were too many fragments (estimated now to be around a quarter of a million at the British Museum) and not enough people to translate them. Victorian interest in the Epic seemed to decrease following these events.
George (2009) traces how the "tangled threads" of the epic continued to be pieced together in late 19th and early 20th centuries, drawing attention to particular features of various early translations, such as the German scholar Paul Haupt's pen-and-ink drawings of the cuneiform text of the Epic (Haupt 1884–91). George commends Peter Jenson's transliterated (Romanised) translation of the Epic (1900) as "an extraordinary feat of scholarship" (p.2) noting that this is founded upon systematic, methodical knowledge of the language and informed by Haupt's drawings.
During the 20th century with further discovery of cuneiform tablets, the complexity of the process of recovery of the Gilgamesh epic became more apparent. Tablets were recovered from throughout Mesopotamia, and included Assyrian, Old Babylonian, Neo-Babylonian and Persian tablets from a range of periods and dates from the third millennium to the first century BC. The next major translation of the Gilgamesh epic was produced in 1930 by Regan Campbell Thompson which included older tablets from the 2nd Millennium B.
