The first modern literary adaptation of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" was "Ishtar and Izdubar" (1884) by Leonidas Le Cenci Hamilton, an American lawyer and businessman. Hamilton had rudimentary knowledge of Akkadian, which he had learned from Archibald Sayce's 1872 "Assyrian Grammar for Comparative Purposes". Hamilton's book relied heavily on Smith's translation of the "Epic of Gilgamesh", but also made major changes. For instance, Hamilton omitted the famous flood story entirely and instead focused on the romantic relationship between Ishtar and Gilgamesh. "Ishtar and Izdubar" expanded the original roughly 3,000 lines of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" to roughly 6,000 lines of rhyming couplets grouped into forty-eight cantos. Hamilton significantly altered most of the characters and introduced entirely new episodes not found in the original epic. Significantly influenced by Edward FitzGerald's "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" and Edwin Arnold's "The Light of Asia", Hamilton's characters dress more like nineteenth-century Turks than ancient Babylonians. Hamilton also changed the tone of the epic from the "grim realism" and "ironic tragedy" of the original to a "cheery optimism" filled with "the sweet strains of love and harmony".