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, 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.
Further reading;
John Malcolm Russell, Sennacherib's Palace Without Rival at Nineveh (1991)
Jean Bottéro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods (University of Chicago Press, 1992)
John Curtis and Julian Reade, Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum (British Museum Press, 1995)
David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (Henry Holt & Co, 2007)
Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Divination and Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History (Heinemann, 2003)
Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (Yale University Press, 2001)
R. MacLeod (ed.), The Library of Alexandria, Centre of Learning in the Ancient World (I B Tauris, 2000) {despite its title, includes essays on other ancient libraries too}
Olof Pedersén, Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East, 1500-300 BC (CDL Press, 1998)
James Raven (ed.), Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections Since Antiquity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ISBN1403921199)
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