Early Life and Early Career
As the son of a working-class family in Victorian England, Smith was limited in his ability to acquire a formal education. At age fourteen, he was apprenticed to the publishing house of Bradbury and Evans to learn banknote engraving, at which he excelled. From his youth, he was fascinated with Assyrian culture and history. In his spare time, he read everything that was available to him on the subject. His interest was so keen that while working at the printing firm, he spent his lunch hours at the British Museum, studying publications on the cuneiform tablets that had been unearthed near Mosul by Austen Henry Layard, Henry Rawlinson, and their Iraqi assistant Hormuzd Rassam, during the archeological expeditions of 1840-1855. In 1863 he married Mary Clifton (1835-1883), and they had six children.
Read more about this topic: George Smith (assyriologist)
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