09/07/2026
Inspiring story of saving archives.💚
In the 1990's, I visited a beautiful exhibition of cuneiform books made of clay at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris💙🤍❤️.
It was an enchanted visit ❤️🔥. Some of these clay books have the size of my hands. They are dictionaries, stories, and historical accounts.
A warrior king who ran one of history's most brutal empires also built the ancient world's greatest library — and the fire that was meant to destroy it ended up saving it instead.
Ashurbanipal ruled the Assyrian Empire from roughly 668 to 627 BC. He was feared across the known world as a military conqueror, but behind palace walls he was something unusual for a king of his era: a man obsessed with knowledge.
He sent agents across his entire empire to gather texts from temples, older archives, and conquered cities. The goal was to pull together everything written in cuneiform — every myth, medical recipe, omen, ritual, and royal decree — into one centralized royal library in his capital city of Nineveh. 📜
The result was staggering. More than 30,000 clay tablets were collected and stored, each marked with a colophon — a kind of ancient library label identifying the text, the series it belonged to, and often Ashurbanipal's name as owner. It was the largest and most systematically organized collection of written knowledge assembled in over 3,500 years of cuneiform culture.
Among those tens of thousands of tablets was a copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh — one of the oldest works of literature ever written. It had been passed down for centuries before Ashurbanipal had scribes copy it into his collection.
Then in 612 BC, the walls came down. Enemy forces sacked and burned Nineveh, toppling the Assyrian Empire once and for all. The royal palace and its great library were engulfed in flames.
Here is the part no one expected. The fire that was supposed to erase everything actually preserved it. 🔥
Clay tablets don't burn like paper. The intense heat of the destruction essentially kiln-fired them, turning soft records into hardened ceramic objects. Thousands of years of Mesopotamian knowledge were accidentally baked into permanence, buried under the rubble of a fallen empire.
They stayed there for more than two thousand years.
In the 1850s, British archaeologists began excavating the mound of Kouyunjik near modern-day Mosul, Iraq. They found the tablets — still there, still readable. Cuneiform was deciphered, and suddenly voices from 2,600 years ago started speaking again. 🏛️
Nearly 31,000 tablets and fragments from Ashurbanipal's library now reside at the British Museum, where they remain one of the most important windows into the ancient world ever discovered.
The last great king of Assyria was gone within a generation of building it. His empire collapsed. His capital was leveled. But his library outlasted all of it.
