“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 concerns similar 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”

“In this remarkable book, Wisnom takes her readers on a spellbinding 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”

“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”