The Library of Ancient Wisdom

by Selena Wisnom

Synopsis:

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.

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.

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.

Selena Wisnom’s The Library of Ancient Wisdom examines the world of ancient Mesopotamia by using the famed library of Ashurbanipal as a jumping-off point. This isn’t as futile as you might think: the ancient baked clay tablets have survived beautifully, with even shattered tablets being pieced back together, so we actually have quite a wide spread of literature available to us. The British Library wouldn’t survive nearly as well in the same circumstances: paper might be more versatile, but baked clay has serious staying power.

There’s a range of texts in what we have from that ancient library, in any case: medical texts, religious texts, literature, letters both domestic and foreign. It’s necessarily a somewhat limited picture, all the same, focusing primarily on the king and his family, so it’s important to remember that the extraordinary level of preservation still doesn’t tell us anything about the world further afield.

I liked that Wisnom reminds the reader several times that the Mesopotamian world wasn’t primitive; though they had beliefs that seem to us wild superstition, they didn’t believe them in spite of the world they could readily observe around them. Their gods were capricious and imperfect, and could make mistakes and change their minds — and thus the omens and portents they saw around them were warning and possibilities, not set in stone. Lamentations, prayers and sacrifices could avert evil. And in fields like astronomy and maths, they knew things which took “Western civilisation” millennia to recover.

Given my interests, I was especially interested to note their views on hygiene, including carefully washing your hands. They didn’t attribute it to microbes, of course, but to curses which could be transferred between people — but that’s a pretty good understanding for practical purposes! Contrast with the modern Western world, where Ignaz Semmelweiss was literally treated as insane for suggesting an evidence-based approach to pueperal fever. No, I’m not kidding: he proposed that doctors should wash their hands with disinfectant between performing autopsies on rotting bodies and delivering babies, and he literally died in an insane asylum (of septic shock; you can’t make it up, can you?).

My only caveats here would be that obviously it’s a deeply biased way to see Mesopotamian society since you only really see what concerns the king (even if that does give you glimpses of his family and advisors, they’re all high ranking too), and that it can be difficult to keep track of the geopolitics sometimes if you don’t have a good head for it — keeping a map handy and writing notes might have helped me a bit there!

Rating: 5/5 (“loved it”)