In 1872, a young archaeologist at the British Museum made a tremendous discovery. George Smith, a self-taught cuneiform expert, stumbled across a Babylonian version of what was obviously Noah's Flood from the Old Testament. His research suggested that his 'Deluge Tablet' narrative pre-dated the writing of Genesis by a millennium or more. Smith had found what would later become The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest and most complete works of literature from any culture. This book is about Smith's exciting discoveries, but also about the much broader tensions concerning history and time that they highlight in Victorian culture. The controversy and media excitement that the rediscovery of Gilgamesh generates is, Cregan-Reid argues, symptomatic of a larger crisis in the Victorian psyche and its complex relationship with time. Looking at the principal modes of historical narrative's dissemination in Victorian culture (such as the novel, historiography, painting and photography), this book shows that the Victorians' sense of their place in history was undeniably complicated. It also demonstrates how the Epic of Gilgamesh influenced models of time in late-Victorian geology. Against the backdrop of innovative readings of (amongst others) Turner and Dyce, Dickens, Eliot and James, Macaulay and Carlyle, Discovering Gilgamesh will be of interest to students and researchers in literary studies, Victorian studies, history, intellectual history, art history and archaeology.