The Library of Ancient Wisdom

Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World

De: Selena Wisnom

Narrado por: Catherine Bailey

This is an audiobook version of this book.

A tour of an ancient library transports us to Mesopotamia, introducing us to its people, their ideas, and their humanity.

The library of Ashurbanipal, Assyria’s last great king, held an astonishing collection at the forefront of knowledge in its day, from ancient traditions in religion and literature to the latest developments in magic and medicine. When the Assyrian empire fell, the library burned to the ground, and its contents, clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing, lay buried for thousands of years until a team of Victorian archaeologists discovered the remnants in modern-day Iraq. The clay had baked and hardened; the very fire that consumed the library had helped its texts to survive for millennia.

In The Library of Ancient Wisdom, scholar Selena Wisnom, one of only a few hundred experts able to read cuneiform script today, guides us inside this important collection and, through its contents, brings ancient Mesopotamia and its people to life. Introducing us to Ashurbanipal and his family, scribes, astrologers, physicians, and more, Wisnom explores the library’s tablets and the details they divulge about how these ancient people thought about the world. Like us, they had concerns about job security, jealous rivalries, and profound friendships, and questions about the meaning of life. Wisnom ushers us into a world where magic was commonplace, where the gods spoke to you in dreams, and where the secrets of the universe were revealed through puns—taking us to the heart of what it means to be human.

Offering a close look at a major historical landmark as well as an understandable account of the world’s earliest civilizations, The Library of Ancient Wisdom lays bare the ideas, hopes, fears, and desires that survive on humble clay.

©2025 Selena Wisnom (P)2025 University of Chicago Press

Reseñas de la Crítica

“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 concerns similar 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 “Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East”

“In this remarkable book, Wisnom takes her readers on a spellbinding 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”

“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 “Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire”