The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History

(Hardback)

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The story of the ancient world's most spectacular library, and the civilization that created it When a team of Victorian archaeologists dug into a grassy hill in Iraq, they chanced upon one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge ever seen- the library of the Assyrian emperor Ashurbanipal, seventh century BCE ruler of a huge swathe of the ancient Middle East known as Mesopotamia. After his death, vengeful rivals burned Ashurbanipal's library to the ground - yet the texts, carved on clay tablets, were baked and preserved by the heat. Buried for millennia, the tablets were written in cuneiform- the first written language in the world. More than half of human history is written in cuneiform, but only a few hundred people on earth can read it. In this captivating new book, Assyriologist Selena Wisnom takes us on an immersive tour of this extraordinary library, bringing ancient Mesopotamia and its people to life. Through it, we encounter a world of astonishing richness, complexity and sophistication. Mesopotamia, she shows, was home to advanced mathematics, astronomy and banking, law and literature. This was a culture absorbed and developed by the ancient Greeks, and whose myths were precursors to Bible stories - in short, a culture without which our lives today would be unrecognizable. The Library of Ancient Wisdom unearths a civilization at once strange and strangely familiar- a land of capricious gods, exorcisms and professional lamenters, whose citizens wrote of jealous rivalries, profound friendships and petty grievances. Through these pages we come face to face with humanity's first civilization- their startling achievements, their daily life, and their struggle to understand our place in the universe.

Reviews

This thought-provoking and well-written book reveals how Ashurbanipals library was used in its heyday by ancient scholars with expertise in religion, magic, witchcraft, astrology, literature, and medicine. Wisnom shows how these Assyrian thinkers perceived their world and made decisions. We are reminded that they shared similar concerns to our own and that their views were not unsophisticated or cynical. Their conclusions and explanations, though different from ours, were well thought out -- Amanda H. Podany, author of Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East
In this remarkable book, Wisnom takes her readers on a spell-binding tour through one of antiquitys great monuments to knowledge: the Library at Nineveh. As she surveys the clay tablets that were buried in a blaze millennia ago, a lost world of learning and literature comes back to life * Sophus Helle, author of Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic *

Author Bio

Selena Wisnom is Lecturer in the Heritage of the Middle East at the University of Leicester. A specialist in the interpretation of Mesopotamian cultural sources, Selena's previous works include Weapons of Words- Intertextual Competition in Babylonian Poetry. She has also written three plays set in ancient Assyria; the most recent, Ashurbanipal- The Last Great King of Assyria was staged at the London's Crypt Gallery in 2019.