The Akkadian text of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" was first discovered in 1849 AD by the English archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Layard was seeking evidence to confirm the historicity of the events described in the Hebrew Bible, i.e. the Christian Old Testament, which, at the time, was believed to contain the oldest texts in the world. Instead, his excavations and those of others after him revealed the existence of much older Mesopotamian texts and showed that many of the stories in the Old Testament may actually be derived from earlier myths told throughout the ancient Near East. The first translation of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" was produced in the early 1870s by George Smith, a scholar at the British Museum, who published the Flood story from Tablet XI in 1880 under the title "The Chaldean Account of Genesis". Gilgamesh's name was originally misread as "Izdubar".