Documentary · 8:60 · Neo-Assyrian Nineveh to the Victorian excavations
The Library That Should Never Have Survived
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Watch the full documentary on YouTubePublished on YouTube as HOW SAVING NINEVEH DESTROYED HISTORY. We catalogue it here under the title that describes what it argues.
Synopsis
In 612 BCE the palace of Ashurbanipal burned. The fire should have destroyed the library inside it. Instead it fired the clay, and the tablets survived. Two and a half thousand years later they were rescued a second time — and that rescue is why we can no longer say where most of them were found.
What the record cannot say
Stated because it is part of the evidence, not despite it.
Where in the palace were most of the tablets actually found?
The nineteenth-century excavations recovered them faster than they recorded them. Findspot data for the bulk of the collection was never written down and cannot now be reconstructed.
In the film Stated directly as the film's second paradox, and carried by the colophon graphic: the tablet records where it belongs; the record cannot say where it was found.
Rooms 40 and 41 as a findspot
Three sources stack rather than conflict. The recorded findspot is a disused bathroom suite with no archival features, which describes where tablets were deposited, not where the library was kept.
In the film Presented as the contradiction it is, without resolving it into a tidier answer than the evidence supports.
Gallery
Authentic historical material only. Every item states its source and its licence.
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Authentic evidence
Austen Henry Layard, Monuments of Nineveh
Layard's folio record of the palace reliefs - the excavation that destroyed the context produced the finest public-domain record of it.
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Authentic evidence
Austen Henry Layard, Monuments of Nineveh
A second Layard plate, showing the scale and quality of the sculptural programme the library sat inside.
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Authentic evidence
Austen Henry Layard, Monuments of Nineveh
The royal hunt reliefs: the imagery Ashurbanipal chose to be remembered by, beside the library he is actually remembered for.
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Authentic evidence
Nineveh expedition drawing, Wellcome Collection
A nineteenth-century expedition drawing of cuneiform - the script whose decipherment made the library readable at all.
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Authentic evidence
F.C. Cooper, c.1849-50, V&A
How Assyrian sculpture left Nineveh. Evidence that SCULPTURES travelled by raft - never used to imply the tablets did.
People, places and things
- person Ashurbanipal
- person Austen Henry Layard
- person Hormuzd Rassam
- person George Smith
- place Nineveh
- civilisation Neo-Assyrian Empire
- artefact Library of Ashurbanipal
- artefact Epic of Gilgamesh
- event Fall of Nineveh