When a vast library of texts amassed by Mesopotamian King Ashurbanipal was burned to the ground about 2700 years ago, the ...

The great library of the seventh-century B.C. Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, shown in this 1910 illustration, was unearthed in Nineveh in the 1850s, and thousands of tablets found there were ...

pieces together a vivid portrait of Mesopotamian life from the shattered remnants of the 30,000 or so tablets in Ashurbanipal's library. Written in cuneiform, the world's oldest form of writing ...