THE LIBRARY OF ANCIENT WISDOM

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 Ashurbanipals 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...[Read more]