Ashurbanipal was king of Assyria from 669 to 631BC. He was a warrior poet, a scholar who carried a pen in his belt while decimating foes with cruel and unusual punishments. In a miraculous twist of history, the fire that destroyed his famous library is the very thing that ensured its survival. The fire solidified his 30,000+ clay tablets.

Those clay tablets, lost to history for 2,400+ years, now mostly reside in the British Museum, where Cuneiform scholars work their way through works of astrology, exorcism, medicine, entrail divination, lamentation, and literature. The most and best preserved copies of The Epic of Gilgamesh come from Ashurbanipal’s library.

This book looks at three main things: Cuneiform, Ashurbanipal, and the contents of Ashurbanipal’s Library. The author, Dr. Selena Wisnom, connects ideas from the surviving works to our own. We see how ideas that seem completely foreign to us are not that far removed from our experience. She shows how the Mesopotamians discovered many things long before others. In turn, these discoveries made our modern world. We’re continually learning more and more from what was discovered in Ashurbanipal’s Library.

In this podcast episode, I talk about the book, Cuneiform, Ashurbanipal, and the contents of his library.

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