In Our Time - The Library at Nineveh

Episode Date: May 15, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Library at Nineveh, a treasure house of Assyrian ideas from the 7th Century BC. In 1849 a young English adventurer called Henry Layard started digging into a small hill on the banks of the River Tigris in Northern Iraq. Underneath it he found the ancient city of Nineveh. Layard unearthed extraordinary things - wonderful carved reliefs, ancient palace rooms and great statues of winged bulls. He also found a collection of clay tablets, broken up, jumbled around and sitting on the floor of a toilet. It was the remnants of a library and although Layard didn’t know it at the time, it was one of the greatest archaeological finds ever made.Conceived to house the sum of all human knowledge the library was built in the 7th century BC as the grand Assyrian Empire entered its last years. The clay tablets have proved to be a window into all aspects of Assyrian life, its literature, politics, religion and medicine – practises that are both deeply alien to us and alluringly familiar. With Eleanor Robson, Senior Lecturer at Cambridge University and Vice-Chair of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq; Karen Radner, Lecturer in the Ancient Near Eastern History at University College London; Andrew George, Professor of Babylonian at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1849, a young English adventurer called Henry Layard started digging into a small hill. It was on the banks of the River Tigris in northern Iraq, and underneath it was the ancient city of Nineveh. Layard found extraordinary things, wonderful carved reliefs, ancient palace rooms, and great statues of winged bulls. He also found a collection of clay tablets broken up and jumbled around on the floor of the ante room to the Royal Chamber. It was the remnants of a library, and although Leard didn't note at the time, it was one of the greatest archaeological finds ever made. With me to discuss

the Library of Nineveh, our Eleanor Robson, Senior Lecturer at Cambridge University, and the Vice Chair of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, Karen Radner, lecturer in ancient near Eastern History at University College London, and Andrew George, Professor of Babylonian. at the School of Oriental and African studies at the University of London. That's a bit of a fib because Andrew George isn't yet here but we know he's on his way. Right. Eleanor Robson, can you explain

why the Library in Nineveh is such an important find? It's an extraordinary find. It's 28,000 or so original documents that give us a direct window into the political and intellectual lives of the centre of power of one of the ancient

world's most incredible empires. It ruled all of the Middle East from the 7th century BC and was formative in shaping Western intellectual history and political history very influential directly and indirectly to Greek and Roman civilisation as well and to the Bible of course.

But we'll be talking about the library with the king who built it up in the 7th century BC but as a place as a kingdom as it was Syria had been going for 700 years before then, hadn't it? Yes, it was a very well-established, but even ancient kingdom by this point. So our window into it is the very last generations. I mean, we also can go back further, but the library is very much from one of the last kings.

And so it builds on centuries of knowledge, of intellectual inquiry and of political success, and that's what makes it such a rich and exciting source of evidence for the ancient world. Can you tell us how long this library took to build up? Again, we're going to talk about what was found, and therefore we're actually talking most about the king who did the final stage. But had it been built up over the centuries? We know that this Assyrian empire was beginning to flourish in 1,300 BC,

and maybe even before then. Was it built up all along the line? There are different ways of looking at it. Physically the objects in it are no more than 200 years old at the maximum just because that's roughly how long a clay tablet can survive. But there are witnesses to textual and intellectual traditions that go back even further than the 13th century BC, perhaps even to the 18th century and beyond.

So it's the witness to a thousand-year-old intellectual tradition already in the 7th century BC. And the man who's who are, good morning. Andrew has arrived. The man who was discovered who was Austin Henry Lillard, can you tell us something about him? Well, he was quite a character,

a young man who was supposed to be training as a solicitor's clerk in London, very bored, an uncle in Singapore offered to take him on in his offices, and so he persuaded the family that he would do this only on a condition

that he could travel over land rather than taking the boat. Took a friend with him, And to cut a very long story short, they got rather sort of stuck in the Middle East, sort of rather attracted to what was then these wild edges of the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire. Friend ran out of money and went home in the end. Lear attached himself to Stratford Canning, who was then the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire,

and persuaded Canning to fund him to start to explore these ancient ruin mounds around what's now northern Iraq around the modern city of Mosul and working or taking his inspiration from the French consul there who was also exploring the mounds, really struck lucky and then he and Canning managed to persuade the British Museum to start funding their digs too. It is. Or in the 1840s. I mean with no experience of archaeology could sort of get a shovel,

hire a few locals and dig in. Well, very few people had experience of archaeology then. It wasn't yet an academic discipline. There were no standards of what to do. There were no expiration standards, no publication standards. It really was a sense of digging for treasures. And the French consul there, Emil Bota, was trained as a botanist, and he was used to going around collecting plant samples for collections.

And I think they thought of collecting archaeological artefacts, rather like collecting plants or trees. Karen Radna, the other important person in this story, the most important really, is King Ashabane Pau, King of the Assyrian Empire at the time the library is burned, which we're coming to. Well, not at the time of the library, just before the library was burned down. He extended the library massively about two and a half thousand years before Lear discovered it. What do you know about his background?

Well, he was the last great king of Assyria, and he was on the throne for 40 years, which is unusual, to say the least. his father had been on the throne just for 11 years, his grandfather for about 20, so he was on the throne for longer than his two predecessors combined. That, of course, implies that he came to the throne as a very young man, perhaps even as a boy. He was made a crown prince by his father three years before he then effectively took over upon his father's death. and he was not the first choice for being the crown prince. His father is called Issa Haddon. All these Assyrian kings unfortunately have very unwieldy names,

but there are only two we have to remember Aferbanipal and Isahadden. And Isahadden himself also was not the first selected crown prince. So father and son came to the throne because of different circumstances is that we don't really know exactly, but perhaps Asurbanipa's unusual interest in the arts, let's call them, can be explained by the fact that he was not originally meant to be king, yeah? So he'd be trained as a priest, was he? Well, we don't really know what he was trained for.

We just know how he was trained, which is slightly different, of course. And while I think we can safely say that all Assyrian kings were literate and were educated to a certain standard, Asurbanipal was certainly unusual in the depth of his education. And we don't know whether he was destined for priesthood or scholarship with no idea. He ended up on the Assyrian throne. And his education continued certainly after he was made crown prince. So whatever he was originally destined for,

as soon as he was made crown prince, this education went on. He was then appointed a tutor who was one of the most senior scholars in the Assyrian Empire. So his father, Isohadan, certainly supported his interest in higher education. And also Barnipal never lost this interest throughout his reign. That's very clear. This library was really a long-time term project, and we can trace his efforts to build it up for more than 25 years. So this was not just a fad, not something that he did for a little while.

This was really something that he took a deep interest in. The King of Assyria claimed to be the ruler of the whole earth. How did they justify that claim? Well, lots of people had this claim. The only interesting thing about this claim at that time, all kings really claimed to be the representatives of their gods and destined for rule over the whole universe. The only unusual thing about the claim was at that time that Asurbanipal indeed almost did it.

He ruled over a kingdom that encompassed the Mediterranean coast, so Lebanon, Israel, Syria, and the Torres mountain range in Turkey, the Sagos mountain range in Iran, a kingdom that was well three times the size of the UK one and a half times the size of France so that's quite big everyone is familiar these days

with the geography of the Middle East there is nothing like this at the moment it's very difficult to maintain a state of that size Asoban Nepal didn't contribute much to this he inherited it he didn't squander away

his heritage. He was not the first Assyrian king who really could claim to be in effect also the ruler of the world. That started already 50 years before. Thank you. Andrew George, glad to see you. Sorry, a bit of a rough time getting here. When we talk about the clay tablets that were found, the cuneiform tablets, what are we actually talking about? Can you describe one in detail, one or two in detail? Well, we're talking about effectively flat pillow-shaped lumps of clay, which could be

anything from a centimeter in dimension to 20 or 25 centimeters at the time that we're talking about in the 7th century BC. These were inscribed on both surfaces, the front and the back and sometimes on the edges as well, in Cuneiform script. The Cuneiform script written on clay was an exceedingly old technology by this time. It had been running for about 2,700 years or so. Before the year 700 BC. Before the year 700 BC, the invention of Cuneiform is sometime in the late 4th millennium BC. That's something like 3,400 BC, some very, very ancient technology then that scribes of the Neo-Assyrian period were using. We call it Cuniform because it's a technology in which a stylus is impressed upon damp clay, the damp clay of the tablet, the writing surface.

Though as we will see, there are other technologies, also other surfaces, used. it also. The stylus left a wedge-shaped impression, hence cuneiform, and different combinations of these wedge-shaped impressions made different signs. Some signs had values as words, some as syllables, some as both. But a combination of word-writing and syllable-writing is what we find on most tablets in Ashabarnapal's library. Were they difficult to crack? Was the cuneiform as a language difficult to crack? Well, cuneiform is a writing system rather than a language. It

can be used to write any language in the world, and in the course of its time, as the main writing technology of the ancient world, it was used to write many different languages like Acadian, the language of the Babylonians and Assyrians, Sumerian, the first language, so far as we can see of writing, and other languages like Urarthian, old Persian, and Hittite, and so on, the list is quite long. The decipherment of Cuneiform began with several of these languages at the same time, particularly old Persian, where the names of kings in short inscriptions were compared with the names in Greek tradition of the kings of Persia.

And bit by bit, some progress was made. But the real breakthrough came with the discovery of Ashabarnapal's library, which supplied so much more material to what was already known. And people began seriously then to decipher what they call Assyrian, what we call now Acadian. Do we have any sense of what Ashabarabar was trying to achieve, with this library? Well, he tells us himself, in inscriptions that have recently been recovered,

he tells us that he set out to collect Kulat Tupsharuti, which means all of the scribal tradition, everything that was written down in Babylonian scholarship. And here we have to note the distinction between Assyrian and Babylonian. Ashibonipal was the king of Assyria. The Assyrians were rather like the Romans. They looked to a neighbor for most of their cultural

inheritance. Babylonia in the south, the land below Baghdad, had a very long cultural tradition and the Assyrians were very keen on this. They had some culture and written literature of their own, but mostly they imported Babylonian culture. So what Ashobanipal means by Kulat Tupsharuti, all of the scribal tradition, is essentially the body of scribal literature, scholarly literature, amassed and assembled over many hundreds of years in Babylonian. Have we any idea of what motivated him what drove him to do this on such a scale? Well, he tells us that also. He tells us that he was collecting the scribal tradition

because it was good for kingship, which he means, in other words, it was an aid to good governance. And we'll see when we come to discuss the contents of the library, why that should be so. Well, let's start that now, then, Eleanor Robson. Let's talk about what was written on these clay tablets. A lot of other things were discovered. We have the great winged ball in the British Museum,

and an enormous number of other things. But we're sticking with these tablets for the moment. Can you give us an overview of the library, as we see from what we have, the thousands and thousands of tablets? Yeah, so we can divide them into different genres, as we would now think of them. A lot of them are to do with divination, to do with predicting the future.

And that is predicting or trying to anticipate the will of the gods and to ensure that Ashabana Pahl was acting in accordance with the wishes of the gods. So essentially the library is a means of ensuring that Ashibanapal is both successful and pious as a king. So divination can take the form of astrological observation of the movements of the heavenly bodies, particularly the planets and the moon and the sun. But also if Ashabanapal wanted to make a political decision, particularly important ones about going to war, he would ask the gods a question.

and his diviners would then summon the gods to inscribe an answer in the entrails were sacrificed ram and the diviners would examine the entrails and look for positive and negative omens. And this means was a very formalised means of helping the king weigh up really quite difficult decisions and of using his scholarly diviners to help him reach that decision without being seen to be seeking human. advice. So there's a, perhaps 30% of the library is the theoretical text behind astrological and sacrificial divination. But there are also rituals. There's a lot of, so, no, just how one should go about communicating with the gods on a regular basis, and a lot of mythology

and epic related to the gods. But then also, There are other medical texts. There are, yes, medicine. And practical instructions like blast blowing. Yes, except they look practical, but in fact, it's very unlikely that any scholar actually went out and made glass and that the technology described is about 500 years old. So it is about, again, collecting all encompassing knowledge.

But yes, the medicine is also very important as well. And as I understand it under George, we learned a bit about the scholars themselves, talking about each other in some of these tablets or referring to each other? Well, we do because the libraries of Ashibonipal, apart from containing copies of the scribal tradition, also contained a lot of archival documents which related to the day-to-day goings on of the empire, the running of the Assyrian state under a succession of kings, but chiefly Isoh Haddon and Ashabonipal.

And here we come across advisors to the king, writing letters to the king, and responding to his demands. and there's a certain amount of backbiting and rivalry that can be seen amongst these individuals, most of whom are senior scholars in service of the king. Literature is a small part of the library, but it captured the imagination when those tablets were brought back to this country,

not least because of the flood myth that was discovered there, which obviously tied in with Nozac and the flood of the Old Testament. Can you explain the Assyrian flood myth and how it caused that much excitement? Well, we shouldn't call it an Assyrian floodmuth for reasons I've already explained, it's a Babylonian floodmeath. When the tablets came back to London, sent by Laird, they sat in the museum for some time

before anyone was employed to deal with them. Eventually a young man called George Smith was employed to sort them and start translating them if he could, and he organised the material into mythological, historical and religious and other. amongst the mythological he started to find tablets belonging by their subscripts to an ancient text which he called the poem of

Izdubar. We know that now that Isdubar is to be read Gilgamesh. This was discovered in about 1899, some 40 years later. And the poem of Isdubar he discovered towards its end included a tale of the flood, a poem which gave the story of the flood and in many details this was a story very, very similar to the story that everyone knew,

the story of Noah's flood in Genesis. This, of course, caused enormous excitement. Now we know that the flood story, the Babylonian flood story, is very, very old, like most of this mythological literature in the library. It goes back 1100 years beyond the date of Ashabarnipal, and it survives in different literary context. That's to say there's more than one literary text which employs the story of the flood.

Do we know where it started? You say go about 1100 years as if, and that's when it started. Well, no, but that's when we have the earliest literary texts that tell the story, and they're from Babylonia in two languages, in Sumerian, and in the Babylonian dialect of Acadium. And Gilgamesh has been called the first great book in world literature, isn't it? It is indeed, yes. It's a wonderful epic poem, surely the masterpiece of ancient Babylonian poetry.

We know it not only from Ashabarnipal's libraries, from the Assyrian copies there, but also from later copies from Babylonia, and also earlier copies from the second millennium reaching from the time of about 1800 BC to 1200 BC. It's a poem that evolves then over a long period, but it's not a national epic. It's an epic that deals with very human individual concerns,

the desire for fame, the fear of death. And this is one of the reason, apart from its great purple passages of poetry in the flood myth. This is one of the reasons why people respond to it so well even now that it talks to people as individuals and it isn't culturally bound within Babylonian society. Karen Radner, the Assyrians, as I understand, felt that the flood had separated mankind from the gods. Can you describe what they thought the world was like before the flood, before the waters came? Yeah, well, the world was rather like it's now, or like it was perceived

to be 700 BC. but populated by humans, but these humans lived to ripe old age. They didn't die of disease or child birth or anything like this. They died of only natural causes, which meant that the lifespans ran into thousands of years. So that's the one thing. On the other hand, communication with the divine world was facilitated by the fact that there were messengers of the god walking among

the humans in the shape of fish creatures these fish creatures spent their nights in the ocean beneath the ocean the sweetwater ocean conceived to be in the Persian Gulf but their days they spent

with the humans these exceptionally long-lived humans and advised them and these fish creatures taught humankind everything worth knowing. They taught the people about having kings, about divination, about agriculture, about law, everything that we today perceive to be the hallmarks of Mesopotamian culture. And at some point there was the flood and two things changed. People were susceptible to disease and all related matters. So unfortunately,

didn't live anymore to the old age of 12,000 years, but had to content themselves with, say, 40 years. And the fish creatures did not return anymore. So this direct communication with the divine sphere was interrupted. And that's why people had to do with human scholars. The human scholars replaced the fish creatures, and the human scholars started by, writing down everything that they remembered from before the flood.

That's the idea, the concept that the Mesopotamians of the first millennium, the second millennium had about their past. This flood was conceived to have happened thousands of years ago, and it sort of separated the golden age from the age that they themselves were living in. The idea of fish persisted, as I understand it, that the scholars dressed as fish. That's right, yes. Well, we have marvelous images of the scholars in fish cloaks. So if you can imagine hats rather like bishops miters,

so that the top of the hat is the open mouth of the fish. And there are eyes just above the human's ears and these lovely long cloaks with the fins around about upper arm level and the tail sort of round about the knees. So we have images carved in stone of scholars performing rituals dressed in these fish cloaks from the temples and from the palaces.

And we also have some of the letters that Andrew was talking about which directly, from the scholars, directly flatter the king in particular and sometimes also the queen mother and saying that you are as wise as Adipur, the fish sage. And so substituting these anti-diluvian

intellectual figures with the king, so the king now stands in their plays. Karen. One should perhaps point out that fish in Assyria, in Babylonia, they were not thinking about goldfish. They were thinking about the Tigris carp, which is very, very impressive fish as big as a human. And of course, fish are very mysterious. They live in the water that's inaccessible to mankind. Gilgamesh was the one who even ventured into the depth of the sea.

and so, you know, it's the one animal that you cannot observe so easily. So they are mysterious. And fish to the Mesopotamians were majestic creatures. And of course also very long lived, carp and lived for 100 years or so. So that also adds to their aura of antiquity and wisdom. Andrew. This topic of antedaluvian knowledge may seem far removed from the Library of Ashabarnapal, but Ashabarnapal himself explains about his education.

that he learnt all sorts of learning, but particularly he learnt the most difficult, which was knowledge that came from before the flood. And there were various traditions as to how that knowledge had survived. One of them was that before the flood, all human knowledge had been buried as cuneiform tablets under one of the Babylonian cities and then had been retrieved. Another tradition is that Gilgamesh himself, by visiting the flood hero at the end of his quest for immortality, which is where he learnt the story of the flood, then brought back to a... to later people, the knowledge of anti-Diluvian culture and scholarship.

Karen, is there any sense, do we get any sense at all about how, let's call them ordinary people were living at the time from these tablars? Yeah, the library is what sort of we want to focus on today, but the library was found together with the Royal Archives. and the Royal Archives concern, you know, taxes, property, lawsuits, and also these letters between the king and his scholars, but also his advisors, his political advisors, his governors. And so there's always this lens of the cuneiform tablet, the clay tablet,

that we have to use in order to recreate the living conditions of, of the past and it favors of course the elites that's clear. But we have a good sense of what it was like to live in Assyria. We know that it was a rural society, that there are big cities, but that it was more common to live in the countryside to be a farmer than to live in a big, large city like Nineveh, that we must imagine rather like Heathrow, and busy security problems,

hard to navigate, stressful. The typical Assyrian lived in the countryside and led their life of a farmer. And from the mid-eighth century onwards, it was nice to be an Assyrian farmer because compulsory army service had been abandoned in favor of a professional army. So from that moment onwards,

it was effectively a very nice life to be an Assyrian farmer. Before that, it had to go on campaign, military campaign, for three months every year. it was perhaps the low point. And I guess it sounds like the life of a farmer has very little to do with the Assyrian court,

but in fact the scholars working for the king weren't paid salaries, but we can see from their letters were given land that they were expected to earn their livings from and often they would contract it out to a tenant farmer to work. What's about some of the scholars being in chains? Ah, no, that's the Babylonians. So, yeah, we've got two different sorts.

There are the native Assyrians who are very much of the elite. But Babylonia was a territory of Assyria during the time of Easter Hadan and Ashabana Pala, and often a very rebellious one, did not want to be ruled by the Assyrians. And one means of keeping the Babylonians under control and also a means of getting materials for the library

was to requisition not only the uniform tablets from the temple libraries of Babylonia, but also the scholars themselves. And we have documents, or just reports to the king that says that such and such a Babylonian scholar is in chains, in the library, writing out everything he can from memory. So it's only the Babylonians, as far as we know, they've got chained up. Andrew George, can you give us some sense of how, from these tablets we understand the

Australians understood illnesses, for instance? Well, there are many, many texts which, in the Babylonian scribal tradition, which deal with illness, essentially these texts are trying. to resolve the problems of illness and trying to identify them in the first place. Illness was seen as a problem that had to be dealt with by two means. The first means was magic

and the second means was therapy. And for us, those are two different disciplines, as it were. But I think for the Babylonians and Assyrians, these things worked in tandem. An exorcist who knew about magic influences and knew how to identify them and dispel them would identify in a patient from the learning that was in his head and on his tablets what was wrong with the patient.

And this was in terms usually of a seizure of the patient by some demon or other, some evil influence had overtaken that patient. And once he'd identified the problem and identified that he could treat it rather than that it was fatal, then he could use incantations and spells in combination with magic rituals to try and avert or get rid of the evil that was inhabiting the body. At the same time, medical men would use more therapeutic rituals rubbing and the applying of poultices and so forth to treat the symptoms also.

What's also interesting is we have these theoretical texts describing how things ought to be. But when you look at the letters from the healers, the medics to the king, often they're much more reliant on experience and common sense. So they say to the king, the king's saying, oh, I've got this terrible illness, please treat it. And they say, oh, it's just a seasonal cold. Don't worry, you'll get over it.

So there's often quite a gap between the often very elaborate rituals and prescriptions that are laid out in the library and what the scholars, in fact, actually advised the king to do. Karen Rodner, how did Asimanihal put the library together? Did he have a network of agents? Did he buy the stuff? Did he steal it? Well, as I said, it was a long-term project. This was going on for dozens of years. And he was not the first Assyrian king to cultivate an interest in books, as it is. His father also did this and the predecessors as well.

So there was a long-standing tradition. Everybody knew that the Assyrian kings were interested in acquiring knowledge, in acquiring books, in acquiring manuscripts. So lots of them didn't do much. They just waited for manuscripts to come round. But Asurbanipal really actively looked for missing texts and he sent out shopping lists throughout the empire and people knew what they were meant to get for him.

That's the one thing. On the other hand, he had also libraries' conference. He bought them, who knows, but in any case there was certainly an element of force involved. And he had people copy existing manuscripts. The Babylonian scholars working in shackles are not the only ones who are copying our texts. Effectively, there was a program of copying manuscripts running throughout the empire, not just in Babylonia. We know that Aso Banipal was not only interested in Babylonian, knowledge. That's what

survives primarily because we have only the clay tablets of the library. We don't have any of the other writing materials. He also had Egyptian scholars in his employer, Anatolian scholars. So he was really a very, very big project.

He used people that copied existing text. He acquired existing manuscripts and he used all sorts of methods to get people to collaborate, not just brutal force, the scholars in

Schekyll, but also very effective tax privileges. And also he commissioned re-editions of existing works as well. He wasn't simply just collecting old knowledge. There was a lot of consolidation and innovation as well. Although a lot seems to come from

Babylon, which you keep stressing quite rightly, Andrew George. From what I've been reading, there wasn't, as much discovered about of mathematics, which was one of great in the tablets. I think I'm going to pass that question to Eleanor, who is much better, more qualified

to answer a question about mathematics than I am. But yes, you're absolutely right. The Babylonians are well famous for their abilities in mathematics and particularly at this point in mathematical astronomy and yet none, there is none at all. Why is that? Well, I don't know. There are two reasons,

maybe possible reasons. Maybe that Ashabana Pahl himself wasn't terribly interested in it and it wasn't a method that his Assyrian scholars were trained in, or maybe it was just too important for the Babylonians to let go. And we know that they were keeping eclipse records, even while the Assyrians were seaging their cities. While Babylon was under siege, the astronomers in Babylon was still meticulously observing the skies

while everyone else around them was dying of starvation. It was something that was terribly important to them. So maybe this was something that they just resisted the Assyrians. And so we talked about a very great library. It's, as I understand it, even bigger than the Library of Alexandria, which people reach out for as the great library. It was an enormous thing. Can you tell us, under how it was destroyed and when and how it was destroyed?

Well, you're right to say it was enormous. Before we get onto its destruction, let's just look at that a bit. We've got something like 20,000 fragments of clay tablets from it, which probably amount to six or seven thousand whole tablets, if we could join them all up. But also, of course, there are the materials in other, there are the things in other materials. Chiefly wax-covered writing boards,

which were hugely used in the 7th century, in Assyria, and in Babylonia, which of course disintegrate. We know that Ashibar Nepal, when he was requisitioning texts, received far more on wax writing boards than he received on clay tablets. and we also know that when he set Babylonian scholars to work in Babylon and Borsippa, another Babylonian town, and paid them vast sums of gold to copy out texts from the scribal tradition, these texts were copied on waxed tablets, not on clay tablets,

on waxed wooden boards, not on clay tablets. The reason being presumably because these things were lighter and easier to transport to Assyria than clay tablets. And this library, of course, was the first such library in human history. we've got collections of literary tablets and scholarly tablets from many hundreds of years and thousands of years before. But this seems to be, to our knowledge, the first time that a king or anyone else sat down and deliberately attempted to assemble all known knowledge

in one place and to make multiple copies of it for posterity. But largely, I think, for the purposes of making sure that his own governance was effective. And then it was destroyed. And then it was destroyed. The destruction of it... Is that 616 basically? 612.

612. What happened to this library after Ashibarna Pals' death, which took place in 630 or 627, sometime like that, is that it seems to have been moved perhaps from his palace to other palaces and split up. Perhaps they were decorating or refurbishing, and that the tablets ended up in different palaces, and some of them perhaps remained to be found, I don't know.

But the empire fell. some 25 years after Ashibaripal's death to a combination of an alliance of Medes from Iran and the Babylonians themselves who'd regained control of Babylonia and become forceful and dominant in the South. And perhaps because the Syrians had dropped the idea of compulsory military service.

Well, at any rate, their time was up and the empire fell and the Meads sacked Nineveh. And during the course of the sack of Nineveh, the palaces burnt on the citadel, Kyunjik, and as the palace is burnt, they collapsed, and deeply hidden within the remains of the buildings then were the clay tablet collections of Ashabarnipal and his predecessors, and indeed, of course, of also his successors.

The whole Syrian royal libraries was then embedded in these ruins. And burnt, fortunately, as a result of the burning of the palaces, the tablets were partially baked, and some of them properly baked in the remains as they burned, which, of course, aided. their preservation because a baked clay tablet, like a brick, is an extremely hard thing to destroy. Karen Radner, how much do you think was lost? We know a great deal of what was saved. Have we any idea? Andrew has begun to give us some indication by talking about the wax boards. But how much you think was lost?

Well, the best way to guess this is, as Andrew has already pointed out, by looking at these shopping lists of Asobani Pahl and the library records. And from these it's very clear that the clay tablets constitute a minority of the books, manuscripts in this library. So we could be a conservative and say we perhaps have a third of the library. But we can also take into account what Andrew already said. The library was split up at some point and we have one part. We don't really know how much we effectively have of this part. So what we have is already enormous, the biggest library of antiquity.

And potentially it's just 10% of what was there originally. So it's really an enormously big enterprise. And we have to bear in mind that the waxed tablets and the clay tablets are not all. There is also part, let's call them leather scrolls used at that time. We know that from the late 8th century onwards, the Assyrians also used papyrus. They were very keen on Egyptian knowledge. The father of Asobanipal had effectively deported all scholars of Egypt once Assyria conquered Egypt in the early 7th century. So potentially, this vast amount of clay tablets, more than 20,000,

20,000 fragments is just, you know, a little, little bit of it. Eleanor, Ellen Robson, how long did it take for that to be another library approaching the size of Minerva? I guess the next biggest library we're talking about is Alexandria, as you mentioned. Now, the traditions in a... That's about several hundred years on. That's 300 BC onwards. And the classical and late antique traditions put that library as up to half a million scrolls, which is clearly hyperbolic.

And some very interesting recent scholarship by Roger Bagnall has actually done some calculations about how much Greek literature actually survives, how much could have been in the library, how much you physically could have contained. And he puts the Library of Alexandria to about 10 to 15,000 papyrus scrolls. So again, about half the size of Nineveh, perhaps.

But I suppose given that it was burnt down and buried until this English strolling gentleman turned up in the 1840s. It had no influence at all. None at all, no, it wasn't known, nor was the Babylonian literary tradition, the scholarly tradition. So the discovery of Ashabarnipal's libraries was the beginning of a process of uncovering the literary production and scholarly production of an entire civilization,

which before the 19th century was only understood in corrupted form through the medium of Greek historians. Karen? Well, the library was destroyed. The knowledge contained in it, of course, survived elsewhere, not in Nineveh, but Andrew already mentioned earlier on that the Gilgamesh epic is known

from later Babylonian context. So many of the texts that we have in the library of Asurbanipal are of course known also from places like Babylon, Uruk, Boasipa, from indeed the same period, the library at Alexandria from the third, second century BC. The great

thing for us is that Asobanipal's library was destroyed rather than looted, which is what normally happens when an invading army takes over a palace. I mean, this library was very precious. And we have to bear in mind

that this was a coalition between median and Babylonian forces. The Babylonians surely would have known what to do with such a masterpiece as a Zabani Pals library. The Meads, who got their first, apparently, did not value this library.

So we are a great deal to the Meads. Thank you very much. Karen Radna, Eleanor Robson and Andrew George. Next week we'll be talking about the Black Death. I'm rather surprised you haven't talked about it before. A play that killed a third of the population of Europe and transformed medieval society. Good morning.

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