digging in these mounds (and at Nimrud, 30 kilometres south) had revealed a spectacular ancient world. The largest mound, called Kuyunjik, was a mile long. In 1847, the British explorer Austen Henry Layard, with Rassam as his assistant, tunnelled into its southwest corner and unearthed the ruins of a great palace, built in the seventh century BC. The luxurious riverside residence had at least eighty rooms and passages, with stone doorways guarded by huge winged bulls and lions, and walls decorated with around 3 kilometres of carved alabaster friezes, showing victorious military campaigns across the Near East. It belonged to the Assyrian king Sennacherib: Layard and Rassam had discovered the great city of Nineveh, capital of the largest empire the world had ever known.
The Assyrians were famous from the Bible, which tells of Sennacherib’s failed siege of Jerusalem and describes Nineveh as a wicked city whose inhabitants repented after God sent Jonah there to preach. But before Layard’s excavations, no direct trace of this civilisation had ever been found. Now, after more than 2,000 years, its cities and palaces were emerging from the earth.
For a subsequent excavation in 1852, Layard stayed home to pursue a career in politics, persuading the British Museum to put Rassam in charge instead. Keen to prove himself, Rassam planned to investigate the northern corner of the huge Kuyunjik mound, which he was convinced must hold something else spectacular. But Britain and France were jostling for access to antiquities that could be shipped to museums back home, and when Rassam arrived he found that the British consul in Baghdad, Henry Rawlinson, had handed over digging rights of his favoured site to the French.
Rassam dug elsewhere, and by December 1853 his time and funds were running out. He was desperate to explore the site before returning to London, but if he crossed the French and found nothing, the British authorities would likely never trust him again. ‘So I resolved upon an experimental examination of the spot at night,’ he wrote later, ‘and only waited for a good opportunity and bright moonlight for my nocturnal adventure.’
He recruited a team of trusted workmen, and on the night of 20 December led them to Kuyunjik. On the second night, they uncovered part of a marble wall attached to a section of paved floor. The next morning, Rassam excitedly telegraphed Rawlinson and the British Museum with the news that he had discovered another Assyrian palace. But when his team dug further that night, the slabs came to an end after a few feet, surrounded by an ancient rubbish pile.
Rassam was distraught. News of his exploits had already ‘oozed out’ in Mosul, and he feared that the French would soon arrive to stop him, or that the Ottoman authorities would accuse him of looting. On the fourth night, he hired even more men, setting them to work at several sites close to the marble slab. After a few nail-biting hours, he finally heard a shout – ‘Sooar!’ – Arabic for ‘images’. As the men dug a deep trench, a large bank of earth had fallen away, revealing in the moonlight the perfectly preserved image of a muscular, bearded Assyrian king.
The chamber they had discovered turned out to be a long, narrow hall nearly 20 metres long by 5 metres wide. Its walls were covered with scenes of a lion hunt: the king chasing in his chariot, bow held high; spearing a lion with his attendants; thrusting his dagger through the animal’s neck. The reliefs are some of the most exquisite, life-like art ever discovered from the Assyrian civilisation. Rassam was moved by the portrayal of one lioness in particular: ‘resting on her forepaws, with outstretched head she vainly endeavours to gather together her wounded limbs’.
But the biggest discovery was beneath his feet. The floor of this chamber was covered with thousands of broken clay tablets: some completely smashed; others almost whole, up to 9 inches long. Their surfaces were crowded with tiny wedge-shaped indentations – a script known as cuneiform, made by pressing the end of a reed into the clay while it was still wet. Rassam really had discovered another palace – built by Sennacherib’s grandson Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian empire’s most powerful king. And this was his library.
It was a crucial find. We heard in chapter 2 how the origin of farming, around 8000 BC, was a key turning point in human history: people were no longer part of nature; they were beginning to shape and control it. A few millennia later, these same fertile plains between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers1 witnessed another great human revolution: the invention of writing.
The earliest written tablets known were produced by the Sumerian civilisation of southern Mesopotamia, at the end of the fourth millennium BC. Their cuneiform script was later adopted by the Babylonians and Assyrians and spread further north. By allowing everything from debts and taxes to the will of the king to be permanently recorded, the written word supported the machinery and bureaucracy of ever-more complex cities, states and even empires. And, of course, with written records, history can begin. Archaeological remains can hint at what past cultures thought and believed, but words tell us directly.
Ashurbanipal’s library is the first systematic insight we have into the mental universe of an ancient civilisation. It contained thousands of texts from throughout his empire, which covered all of Mesopotamia and beyond, some of them copies of texts dating back to the third millennium BC. They range from receipts (for oxen, slaves, casks of wine) to prayers to legal documents, literature and medicine: essentially ‘the forerunners of everything’, says Jeanette Fincke, an expert in cuneiform texts who has catalogued the library’s Babylonian tablets at the British Museum. ‘And I honestly mean everything.’
What this archive reveals more than anything, though, is a society built around a fascination – if not an obsession – with the heavens. The tablets describe the movements of the sun, moon and planets as a divine script, carrying messages from the gods which shaped behaviour and decisions in every area of human life. ‘When in the month Ajaru, during the evening watch, the moon eclipses, the king will die,’ reads one tablet, part of a vast compendium of around 7,000 such omens called Enuma Anu Enlil. It’s the birth of an idea that has captivated humanity ever since: that our fate is written in the stars.
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The carvings in Ashurbanipal’s palace depict him as a bloodthirsty ruler; one relief shows him enjoying a picnic in his garden while the severed head of an enemy king hangs from a nearby tree. In 612 BC, a few years after Ashurbanipal’s death, Assyria’s enemies got their revenge. A coalition of former subjects, led by the Babylonians, conquered Nineveh and burned the palaces. The heat of the fire made the clay tablets inside bubble and warp, but also baked them hard enough to survive for thousands of years.
As well as the tablets that Rassam found, Layard unearthed crate-loads more in the palace that Ashurbanipal inherited from Sennacherib. Between them, the excavators shipped tens of thousands of clay fragments to the British Museum.2 Cuneiform tablets had been found before, but the huge scale of the Nineveh finds added urgency to the task of deciphering this strange script.
One of the pioneers was Rawlinson, the British consul. A few years earlier, he had risked his life scaling a cliff face in Persia to copy the mysterious wedge-shaped letters that were carved there as a message to the gods. Repeated in three different languages including the Babylonians’ Akkadian, it was a cuneiform version of the Rosetta Stone. By 1860, he and others had achieved a working knowledge of the complex symbols, and attempts to read the tablets from Nineveh began.
They reveal Ashurbanipal not just as a military leader but as an obsessive collector of texts who worked tirelessly to gather thousands of them from across his empire. He ‘wanted to collect the written knowledge and wisdom of the known world’, says Fincke. One tablet, for example, contains a message from the king to his agents: ‘The rare tablets that are known to you and are not in Assyria. Search for them and bring them to me!’ In particular, he targeted Babylonian texts, collecting more than 3,500 dating back 1,000 years. Although ruled by Assyria since around 900 BC, Babylonia had previously been a powerful empire in its own right. Its capital, Babylon, remained an important cultural and
