Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: NBN Book of the Day
Episode: Selena Wisnom, "The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Description: 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 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 hu...