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Ashurbanipal at one point. Some 2,600 years after his death, the king of Assyria was the subject of a major exhibition in London, presented in the best -selling novel by Elif Shafak, There are rivers in the skyAnd now the shelves of his library have opened up to the inspection in the new study by Selena Wisnom.
The Ashurbanipal library is now stored at the British Museum (hence its wonderful survey in 2018), but it took almost 180 years for its secrets to be revealed by a careful scholarship. Wisnom's book recounts the work of the excavators who discovered more than 30,000 clay tablets and fragments in the mound of the earth that covered the ancient city of Nineveh (not far from the city of Mosul in modern days Iraq) and its magnificent royal palace. Austen Henry Layard (later known as “Lion of Nineveh”) led the excavations, but it was his colleague less famous Hormuzd Rassam Rassam who made the most important discoveries. The Wisnom also pays attention to linguistic experts who have deciphered the cuneiform script and the Akkadian language in which the tablets were written. It was their work that made it possible to understand in detail the mental world of this former sovereign.
Given the great antiquity of the Ashurbanipal library, we know an extraordinary quantity on this subject, not only of its content, but the way in which it was managed, partly thanks to many letters which were also discovered by the ruins of Nineveh. We know, for example, that he was formed from the libraries of his immediate ancestors, Sargon II, Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, but that Ashurbanipal was the first of his dynasty to have real learned interest in its content. He actively sought to add new texts and even wrote equipment to add the riches of the library itself.
Books – clay tablets – were preserved in the temple libraries, in particular those dedicated to Nabu, the god of the scribes and the guards of these collections were priests of the temple. The library was essentially the King's personal resource and his closest advisers, all men. No woman had access.
This librarian wanted to know much more about the organization of knowledge in the library of Ashurbanipal, because there is a lot of evidence, but the Wisnom does not try to reconstruction. Its strength is to walk along the library shelves and discover what books tell us about the ideas that circulate in front of the Nineveh Court. The prediction of the future is strongly presented: astrology, medicine and divination, trying to give meaning to an unpredictable world and to impose a kind of control.
We learn that Mesopotamian civilizations have retained data on celestial movements for more than 600 years. All this observation and a collection of careful information were there to help astrologers advise the king. The same goes for health care: the vast collection of the library on the subject, now known as Nineveh Medical Recarandiumwas made available online by the British Museum. This Mesopotamian link between personal health and the prediction of the future has now completed the loop. Anyone who follows his biometric data via a portable device to help predict his future health follows a tradition of millennia.
There were large sections devoted to lamentation, such as a means of expressing emotions concerning the deep events that affected their lives – dead, conflict and natural disaster. There is also an important section on literature. Perhaps the most famous literary work to survive ancient Mesopotamia is the Gilgamesh EpicA story that survives today because of the copies discovered in the library of Ashurbanipal. Other fragments of history appear in other excavations, but in Nineveh, the most important copies have been the most important and best preserved.
Ashurbanipal inherited the heart of the collection, but it was assiduous to add, partly by convulsions of the libraries of his great enemy, the Babylonians. He understood the link between knowledge and power: he built his library to make himself more powerful, and taking texts from his enemies, he made them lower. The Ashurbanipal library is a useful reminder that the authoritarian rule has always meant controlling knowledge, whether by entering clay tablets or by deleting websites.
The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the creation of history by Selena Wisnom, Allen Lane £ 30 / University of Chicago Press $ 30 448 pages
Richard Ovenden is the Bodley librarian and author of “ Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge subjected to the attack '' (John Murray)
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