In 1891 he was elected professor of Assyriology at Oxford.
Thanks to their efforts, the new science of Assyriology came into being, and before long the message of the Assyrian books had ceased to be an enigma.
Accordingly, in 1867, Smith was appointed assistant in the Assyriology department, and the earliest of his successes was the discovery of two inscriptions, one fixing the date of the total eclipse of the sun in the month Sivan in May 763 B.C., and the other the date of an invasion of Babylonia by the Elamites in 2280 B.C. In 1871 he published Annals of Assur-bani-pal, transliterated and translated, and communicated to the newlyfounded Society of Biblical Archaeology a paper on "The Early History of Babylonia," and an account of his decipherment of the Cypriote inscriptions.
In 1835 the difficult and almost inaccessible cliff was first climbed by Sir Henry Rawlinson, who copied and deciphered the inscriptions (1835-1845), and thus completed the reading of the old cuneiform text and laid the foundation of the science of Assyriology.