The Library of Ancient Wisdom

Author Selena Wisnom
Narrator Catherine Bailey
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Publish Date 13 March 2025
Run Time 12 hours
Format Audio
Genre Ancient history, Archaeology by period / region, Middle Eastern history, Writing systems, alphabets.

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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.

'In this remarkable book, Wisnom takes her readers on a spell-binding tour through one of antiquity’s 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, translator of Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic

© Selena Wisnom 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

Fascinating and rich in detailu2026 provides an excellent survey of Mesopotamian literary classics, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the ways in which they influenced later cultures and texts, such as the Iliad and the Odysseyu2026 she also offers snippets of daily life, including an account of Ashurbanipal's father, Esarhaddon, getting into a panic because a mongoose had run under his chariot (was it a fatal omen?) and the actual agenda of a meeting

Literary Review

Wisnom's strength lies in taking a walk along the shelves of the library and discovering what the books tell us about the ideas circulating in the court of Nineveh

The FT

The Library of Ancient Wisdom pieces together a vivid portrait of Mesopotamian life from the shattered remnants of the 30,000 or so tablets in Ashurbanipal's library... which not only bring kings and queens to life, but also priests, traders and professional lamenters

New Scientist

A fascinating book about the contents of the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal... An excellent bibliographical essay, useful timelines, maps, and illustrations, and a helpful list of the historical figures who people this story enhance Wisnomu2019s tour of an astounding collection

Library Journal

Selena Wisnom shows how an ancient library was the motor of the world's most advanced civilisation. Her book is a great work of revelatory history, but I was also unexpectedly moved by its measured optimism about the future - for the preservation of the heritage of Mesopotamia, for the ways history rhymes across millennia, and for the library as the heart of any culture worth remembering

Emma Smith, author of Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Reader

In this remarkable book, Wisnom takes her readers on a spell-binding tour through one of antiquityu2019s 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

Wisnom makes the past come alive with descriptions of powerful personalities, daily life, and the hopes, fears, and rivalries of Assyrian elites. Her humanizing account takes us on an exciting journey, with stops at the invention of writing, the Mesopotamian school curriculum, the gods and their complicated relationships and powers, the practice and purpose of magic, the causes and treatments of diseases, and the interpretations of omens. We learn about the grand concepts of evil, suffering and justice, as well as precise details about marks on sheep livers and their implications for the outcome of battles

Augusta McMahon, author of Once There Was a Place: Settlement Archaeology at Chagar Bazar 1999u20132002

The Library of Ancient Wisdom is both immensely readable and informative. Focusing on the so-called Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, the book ranges from how to write on clay tablets using the cuneiform script to the practice of celestial divination and from magic and witchcraft to great literature, including the flood story. Wisnom has presented a fascinating glimpse into ancient Mesopotamia and the worldu2019s earliest empire

Grant Frame, coeditor of The Correspondence of Assurbanipal, Part II: Letters from Southern Babylonia

This thought-provoking and well-written book reveals how Ashurbanipalu2019s 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

Few ancient libraries have left any traces. Repeatedly burned down and eventually abandoned, even the famous Library of Alexandria has been lost to posterity. The palaces housing the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh were destroyed as well, by Babylonians and Medes in 612 BC. But since the texts collected by the monarch were written on clay, which does not disintegrate, thousands of them have survived in the groundu2014and have been excavated since the nineteenth century. Highly entertaining and broad in scope and vision, Wisnomu2019s book brings Ashurbanipalu2019s library back to life by telling us which text types it included, who the scholars were who wrote them, and why its eccentric royal patron created the library in the first place. And because Ashurbanipalu2019s tablet collecting was so comprehensive, the book is also a literary and cultural history of ancient Mesopotamia during the first millennium BC

Eckart Frahm, author of Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the Worldu2019s First Empire

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