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The Library of Ancient Wisdom

Mesopotamia and the Making of History

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The Library of Ancient Wisdom

By: Selena Wisnom
Narrated by: Catherine Bailey
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Brought to you by Penguin.

The story of the ancient world’s most spectacular library, and the civilization that created it
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.
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.
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.

'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, translator of Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic

© Selena Wisnom 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Ancient Archaeology Civilization Middle East Words, Language & Grammar World Ancient History Mesopotamia

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Critic reviews

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)
A thrilling trip back to Mesopotamia, birthplace of horoscopes and algorithms … via the abundant records they left behind, written on clay tablets… absorbing… hums with life (Mathew Lyons)
Wisnom's strength lies in taking a walk along the shelves of the library and discovering what the books tell us about the ideas circulating in the court of Nineveh (Richard Ovenden)
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)
A fascinating book about the contents of the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal... An excellent bibliographical essay, useful timelines, maps, and illustrations, and a helpful list of the historical figures who people this story enhance Wisnom’s tour of an astounding collection (Ellen Gilbert)
A fascinating account of the daily lives lived by people thousands of years ago (Terry Freedman)
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 Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Reader)
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 Burning the Books and Librarian at the Bodleian Library, Oxford)
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 Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic)
All stars
Most relevant
So much information to take in. Presented in an easy-to-follow manner, it was fascinating.
Only downside was that I genuinely had a dream last night where I was walking down the street carrying a table, and now I think I’m going to die:)

Well I didn’t know any of that!

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I fear I mostly fall into the trap of assuming ancient people were rather different to myself, but this book really opened my eyes. By showing us the actual words these people wrote, I really felt I knew them all. Sure, there was a lot of what we would call superstition, but when one of the tablets was a letter of complaint from a government worker that he had too much to do, I realised humans haven’t changed much at all in 2500 years! Eye opening and very enjoyable.

I needed to slow the narrator down, but she was nonetheless very capable.

Eye opening!

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The book is very engaging and educational at the same time. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history of Mesopotamia, especially in the neo-Assyrian period.

Highly Recommended

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There is so much unexpected here. Who would have thought that clay tablets - which we might regard as primitive - would outlast all the writing technologies that followed. Papyrus and paper will decay. But clay dug up from the ground can last for thousands of years. Especially after the library that contained them burned to the ground, firing them to hard ceramic.

As a result, we get to glimpse intimate moments in the lives of people who died in the remote past. Just astounding!

I might not normally go for this kind of nonfiction through audiobook. The detail is something that deserves reading and re-reading on the page. But the audiobook narrator here is superb. Everything is clear and beautifully delivered. She understands the rhythm and cadence of the excellent writing.

A window into the beginning of history

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This book is a delight, it will not give you a series of dates, rulers, battles, rise and falls. That has already been done to death. What it will give you is every facet of Mesopotamia: religion, gastronomy, pastime, superstition, military tactics, astrology, personal history, a real gamut of culture you’d never believe would survive 2600 years. If I gave a criticism it’s that the story focuses heavily on superstition. Magic and horoscopes and gods feature heavily alongside everything that goes with them. It’s only half a criticism because that is ultimately what must have preoccupied the assyrians, nonetheless I found that the least interesting factor of the book. Still, brilliant and worth a read for anyone interested in Assyriology or anyone who thinks that the pre-classical world is just Egyptians and the Trojan war.

The widest history of Mesopotamia

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