How a Palace Fire Saved the World's Oldest Library

Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria from 668 to 631 BCE, was an unusual sort of monarch — literate in Sumerian, Akkadian, and his own Assyrian dialect, and obsessed with collecting the written word. He sent agents across his empire with letters demanding tablets from temple archives in Babylon, Borsippa, and Nippur. Some of his orders, preserved on the tablets themselves, are simply lists: "every tablet that exists, send to me."

The library he built into his palace at Nineveh held something on the order of 30,000 fragments by the time British excavators reached it in the 1850s. The tablets cover medicine, astronomy, omens, lexicography, royal correspondence, treaties, and literature, including the most complete surviving copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Then in 612 BCE, a coalition of Medes and Babylonians sacked Nineveh and burned the palace. For most ancient libraries — papyrus rolls in Alexandria, parchment in monasteries — fire is a death sentence. For Ashurbanipal's library, it was preservation. The clay tablets were unbaked or only sun-dried; the conflagration kiln-fired them. They lay buried in the ash of the collapsed roof for 2,500 years.

Austen Henry Layard and his successor Hormuzd Rassam dug them out in 1849 and 1853 and shipped them to the British Museum. It took decades to realize what they had. In 1872, George Smith, a banknote engraver turned cuneiform reader, was sorting fragments when he noticed lines describing a flood, a boat, and a dove sent out to find dry land. He reportedly began stripping off his clothes in excitement. The Mesopotamian flood story predated Genesis by more than a thousand years.