The Library of Ancient Wisdom

This thought-provoking and well-written book reveals how Ashurbanipal’s 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 <i>Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East</i>

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, author of <i>Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic</i>

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 <i>Once There Was a Place: Settlement Archaeology at Chagar Bazar 1999–2002</i>

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 world’s earliest empire

Grant Frame, coeditor of <i>The Correspondence of Assurbanipal, Part II: Letters from Southern Babylonia</i>

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 ground—and have been excavated since the nineteenth century. Highly entertaining and broad in scope and vision, Wisnom’s book brings Ashurbanipal’s 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 Ashurbanipal’s 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 <i>Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire</i>

In this book, Wisnom brings the ancient Mesopotamian past to life. She throws open the doors of Ashurbanipal’s library and lets us experience the bustle of activity that took place within its walls. We even get to meet the Great King himself! In Wisnom’s book, the past is not distant, dust-covered, and disconnected from us, but a vibrant world in which we can discover a wealth of ideas and sometimes even recognize parts of ourselves. Wisnom’s narrativizing style does not take away from the solid scholarship underlying this work, which will engage anyone who is interested in learning about cuneiform culture

Céline Debourse, author of <i>Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture</i>

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 <i>Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Reader</i>

Selena Wisnom illuminates an extraordinary survival - one of the greatest libraries of the ancient world, but one that was forgotten until the middle of the 19th century, when it began to emerge from the earth of central Iraq. Ashurbanipal’s library preserved by accident a wealth of knowledge from the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia - texts which still speak to us today

Richard Ovenden, author of <i>Burning the Books</i> and Librarian at the Bodleian Library, Oxford

Fascinating and rich in detail… 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 Odyssey… 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

Bijan Omrani, Literary Review

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

Alison George, New Scientist