The Great Library at Nineveh

Enthusiastic online lecture from the British Museum on the cuneiform tablets discovered at Nineveh, the remains of Ashurbanipal’s Great Library.

Irving Finkel talked us through some of the most important tablets including the one shown here which is a non-biblical version of the story of the Great Flood. He explained how the emperor commissioned copies of documents which were produced by the scribes in the library as well as demanding originals from other libraries around the empire.

He talked about how the tablets are displayed at the British Museum and how they were used in the wonderful Assyria exhibition and showed us relief sculptures which showed scribes in the field recording details of a battle.

It was a bonus to find the event was chaired by Edmund de Waal to mark his installation at the museum “Library of Exile”. 

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