Old Testament and other ancient texts

A paragraph from Samuel Noah Kramer's enjoyable biography, In The World of Sumer, helps to answer my question about how the translation of neighbouring ancient languages affected the study of the Old Testament:

"Toward the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, a new and unexpected field of study was opened for comparative mythology. For it was about this time that the Egyptian hieroglyphic and the Babylonian cuneiform scripts were deciphered, and much new mythological material was gradually recovered in the years that followed. What added impetus and excitement to this area of research was the fact that it offered a new approach to the study of the Hebrew Old Testament. For it soon became evident that some of the Old Testament contents were mythological in character, since they presented a number of clear parallels to the myths recovered from Egyptian and Babylonian sources. And so the study of comparative mythology, following in the footsteps of philology and linguistics, was no longer restricted to the ancient Indo-Europeans: it now included the ancient Semites and Egyptians."

ETA: Searching for the story of George Smith - who got so excited when he translated the cuneiform Flood story that he ran about taking off his clothes - I came across an ABC transcript: The Sexy Epic of Gilgamesh. (George Smith is not the sexy part.)