The story of the ancient world's most spectacular library and the civilization that created it
'A thrilling trip back to Mesopotamia birthplace of horoscopes and algorithms ... via the
abundant records they left behind written on clay tablets... absorbing... hums with life' -
Mathew Lyons Daily Telegraph 'Fascinating and rich in detail... provides an excellent
survey of Mesopotamian literary classics.. and offers snippets of daily life' - Literary Review
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 king
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.
