The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World
Autor Selena Wisnomen Limba Engleză Hardback – 12 mai 2025
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 a readable 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.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780226822556
ISBN-10: 0226822559
Pagini: 400
Ilustrații: 8 color plates
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
ISBN-10: 0226822559
Pagini: 400
Ilustrații: 8 color plates
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
Notă biografică
Selena Wisnom is a lecturer in the heritage of the Middle East at the University of Leicester. The author of Weapons of Words: Intertextual Competition in Babylonian Poetry, she has also written three plays set in ancient Assyria, including Ashurbanipal: The Last Great King of Assyria.
Recenzii
“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.”
“Wisnom shows how an ancient library was the motor of the world's most advanced civilization. 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Wisnom makes the past come alive with descriptions of powerful personalities, daily life, and the hopes, fears, and rivalries of Assyrian elites. Her humanizing account takes us on an exciting journey, with stops at the invention of writing, the Mesopotamian school curriculum, the gods and their complicated relationships and powers, the practice and purpose of magic, the causes and treatments of diseases, and the interpretations of omens. We learn about the grand concepts of evil, suffering and justice, as well as precise details about marks on sheep livers and their implications for the outcome of battles.”
“The Library of Ancient Wisdom is both immensely readable and informative. Focusing on the so-called library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, the book ranges from how to write on clay tablets using the cuneiform script to the practice of celestial divination and from magic and witchcraft to great literature, including the flood story. Wisnom has presented a fascinating glimpse into ancient Mesopotamia and the world’s earliest empire.”
“In this book, Wisnom brings the ancient Mesopotamian past to life. She throws open the doors of Ashurbanipal’s library and lets us experience the bustle of activity that took place within its walls. We even get to meet the great king himself! In Wisnom’s book, the past is not distant, dust covered, and disconnected from us but a vibrant world in which we can discover a wealth of ideas and sometimes even recognize parts of ourselves. Wisnom’s narrativizing style does not take away from the solid scholarship underlying this work, which will engage anyone who is interested in learning about cuneiform culture.”
“Wisnom illuminates an extraordinary survival—one of the greatest libraries of the ancient world, but one that was forgotten until the middle of the nineteenth 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 civilizations of Mesopotamia—texts which still speak to us today.”