The Library of Ancient Wisdom cover art

The Library of Ancient Wisdom

Mesopotamia and the Making of History

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

The Library of Ancient Wisdom

By: Selena Wisnom
Narrated by: Catherine Bailey
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

The story of the ancient world’s most spectacular library, and the civilization that created it
When a team of Victorian archaeologists dug into a grassy hill in Iraq, they chanced upon one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge ever seen: the library of the Assyrian emperor Ashurbanipal, seventh century BCE ruler of a huge swathe of the ancient Middle East known as Mesopotamia. After his death, vengeful rivals burned Ashurbanipal’s library to the ground - yet the texts, carved on clay tablets, were baked and preserved by the heat. Buried for millennia, the tablets were written in cuneiform: the first written language in the world.
More than half of human history is written in cuneiform, but only a few hundred people on earth can read it. In this captivating new book, Assyriologist Selena Wisnom takes us on an immersive tour of this extraordinary library, bringing ancient Mesopotamia and its people to life. Through it, we encounter a world of astonishing richness, complexity and sophistication. Mesopotamia, she shows, was home to advanced mathematics, astronomy and banking, law and literature. This was a culture absorbed and developed by the ancient Greeks, and whose myths were precursors to Bible stories - in short, a culture without which our lives today would be unrecognizable.
The Library of Ancient Wisdom unearths a civilization at once strange and strangely familiar: a land of capricious gods, exorcisms and professional lamenters, whose citizens wrote of jealous rivalries, profound friendships and petty grievances. Through these pages we come face to face with humanity’s first civilization: their startling achievements, their daily life, and their struggle to understand our place in the universe.

'In this remarkable book, Wisnom takes her readers on a spell-binding 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

©2025 Selena Wisnom (P)2025 Penguin Audio Ancient Archaeology Civilization Words, Language & Grammar World Ancient History Mesopotamia Middle East

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character cover art
What Is Ancient History? cover art
Peak Human cover art
Roman Britain cover art
1177 B.C. (Revised and Updated) cover art
Blood and Mistletoe cover art
Weavers, Scribes, and Kings cover art
The Roman Revolution: Crisis and Christianity in Ancient Rome cover art
Perdurabo (Revised and Expanded Edition) cover art
The First Ghosts cover art
Tutankhamun and the Tomb That Changed the World cover art
Ancient Mesopotamia cover art
The Oxford History of the Biblical World cover art
Egypt, Greece and Rome cover art
Europe Between the Oceans cover art
This Is the Night They Come for You cover art

Critic reviews

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 (Augusta McMahon, author of Once There Was a Place: Settlement Archaeology at Chagar Bazar 1999–2002)
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 (Grant Frame, coeditor of The Correspondence of Assurbanipal, Part II: Letters from Southern Babylonia)
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 similar concerns 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)
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)
All stars
Most relevant  
This book is a delight, it will not give you a series of dates, rulers, battles, rise and falls. That has already been done to death. What it will give you is every facet of Mesopotamia: religion, gastronomy, pastime, superstition, military tactics, astrology, personal history, a real gamut of culture you’d never believe would survive 2600 years. If I gave a criticism it’s that the story focuses heavily on superstition. Magic and horoscopes and gods feature heavily alongside everything that goes with them. It’s only half a criticism because that is ultimately what must have preoccupied the assyrians, nonetheless I found that the least interesting factor of the book. Still, brilliant and worth a read for anyone interested in Assyriology or anyone who thinks that the pre-classical world is just Egyptians and the Trojan war.

The widest history of Mesopotamia

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I fear I mostly fall into the trap of assuming ancient people were rather different to myself, but this book really opened my eyes. By showing us the actual words these people wrote, I really felt I knew them all. Sure, there was a lot of what we would call superstition, but when one of the tablets was a letter of complaint from a government worker that he had too much to do, I realised humans haven’t changed much at all in 2500 years! Eye opening and very enjoyable.

I needed to slow the narrator down, but she was nonetheless very capable.

Eye opening!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
There is so much unexpected here. Who would have thought that clay tablets - which we might regard as primitive - would outlast all the writing technologies that followed. Papyrus and paper will decay. But clay dug up from the ground can last for thousands of years. Especially after the library that contained them burned to the ground, firing them to hard ceramic.

As a result, we get to glimpse intimate moments in the lives of people who died in the remote past. Just astounding!

I might not normally go for this kind of nonfiction through audiobook. The detail is something that deserves reading and re-reading on the page. But the audiobook narrator here is superb. Everything is clear and beautifully delivered. She understands the rhythm and cadence of the excellent writing.

A window into the beginning of history

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.