Selena Wisnom. The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, 2025. $30.00, 400 pp.
It is the dead of night, but the king cannot sleep. At last, tired of tossing and turning, he requests that a book be brought and read to him—the chronicle of his own rule. Listening to it does put him to sleep, although not before offering some productive food for thought.
We know this story from Esther 6, where this moment is the key to turning events in favor of the Jews. But what usually goes unnoticed here is the comfortable relationship Persian King Xerxes has with books. His casual book request in the middle of the night and the swift fulfillment of this request suggest the presence of a library in the palace, perhaps not far from the king’s bedchamber.
If this was the case, Xerxes wasn’t the only ancient Mesopotamian or Near Eastern king to have his own palace library, but we know very little about most of these. Xerxes’s own library hasn’t survived, so we cannot say what other books he had there, aside from detailed chronicles of his own rule and, presumably, those of the previous kings of Persia. But Selena Wisnom’s new book, The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World, tells the story of another king’s spectacular library that survived as a sort of unplanned time capsule, giving us a glimpse not only of the reading habits of kings but of entire civilizations about which most of us today know too little—the world of Ancient Mesopotamia, and especially the Assyrian Empire, to which first the Babylonian Empire and then Xerxes’s Persian Empire were successors. For Bible readers, the knowledge of this world is essential for understanding the civilizations that surrounded the Jews and shaped their history in various ways, some more violent than others.
Wisnom’s story begins in the year 612 BC, a little over a century before Xerxes’s rule. That year, the magnificent palace library assembled by Assyrian King Ashurbanipal (ruled 668-631 BC) went up in flames, when the Babylonians sacked Nineveh and ended the Assyrian Empire’s centuries-long dominion. (Yes, that Nineveh, the one where Jonah went after whale touring.) But the Ninevites’ tragedy turned out to be modern historians’ boon. Made not of flammable paper or papyrus but of clay, Ashurbanipal’s library baked solid in the fire, ensuring the preservation of those tablets that did not get broken in the process of the building’s collapse.
The library’s holdings, thousands of tablets rich, shelved double-deep on appropriately-sized storage niches, included all the masterpieces of ancient Mesopotamian literature, boasting no fewer than five different editions of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The library was also an incredible repository of knowledge, containing medical manuals, reference texts on astronomy and astrology and omens and extispicy (animal entrail reading for divination—especially liver reading), historical books, collections of prayers and laments for every occasion, and more.
Religion is one thread connecting all these texts and framing this society’s worldview: “If you asked Sennacherib whether he believed in the gods, he would be baffled by the question. Belief was not a choice; the gods were just a part of the world that everyone took for granted. It would be like asking whether we believed in the sun.” The gods were constantly communicating with the people, and especially with the kings, but experts alone could accurately interpret their messages. Thence the existence of professional entrail readers, astrologers, and omen interpreters. An added (though related) problem is that the Mesopotamian gods were generally not seen as friendly to humans. Thus they required much coaxing and persuasion to be brought over to the humans’ side. The library is filled with guidelines, therefore, for rituals that had to be performed for particular emergencies, but also just in case on a regular basis, all to ensure the safety of the king, the smooth turnover of seasons, and more.
The king had his own exorcist, in fact, whose job was to perform various rituals—both regularly scheduled and others on an as-needed basis. For instance, “Once every year the king’s exorcist performed a special ritual to cleanse the king of any witchcraft. So likely was it that the king would be a target of bewitchment that this ritual was performed whether or not he was showing any signs of it.” On a related note, professional lamenters performed laments at the temple and at other locations on a regular basis, sometimes to the accompaniment of special musical instruments, whether a disaster was in progress or not, with the belief that vividly spelling out horrific events in the lament might avert such disasters happening in real life.
Lest we forget how difficult it was to learn to write and read the non-alphabetic cuneiform script in which the tablets were inscribed, the library also included vocabulary lists for training apprentice scribes—“the equivalent of ‘My First 3,000 Words in Sumerian.’ It is likely that pupils were expected to memorise them all.” And then there is the royal correspondence—like the stern letter from King Ashurbanipal’s sister to her brother’s new bride, admonishing her for her poor literacy skills in another letter. Later evidence suggests that the berated future queen improved. The exchange offers a personal insight into the dynamics of the royal court. It also presents us with a surprising revelation: In this culture where much of reading and writing was the sole purview of scribes, kings and women of the royal family were expected to be scholars too. Ashurbanipal himself prided himself more on his credentials as a scholar than as a warrior king.
Wisnom’s book is, put simply, delightful. As she tells engaging stories of the lives of real people from the tablets they left behind in the library, we get to know both specific individuals and the responsibilities of groups of people who regularly used this library. Considering that only several hundred people in the world today can read cuneiform script, this work is a real gift to those of us who cannot.
But this library’s story, going back intellectually over a millennium before its destruction, is much greater and more significant than the sum of its holdings. It is a reminder of how many events and civilizations from antiquity we don’t sufficiently think about—and why we should care about our ignorance of them. The world of the Assyrians that Wisnom so vividly brings to life through its books, reminds us just how much ancient history there already was by the time the more familiar upstart Romans were only beginning to build their little village on the malaria-mosquito-ridden Tiber in the mid-eighth century BC.
It can be tempting to think of the Mesopotamian world as irrelevant to us because of its remoteness—temporal and geographic. And it can be tempting to fixate on the bizarre and unusual, reducing ancient Mesopotamia to the realm of the circus of history. But its significance is more fascinating and unsettling than sheer entertainment value: “One of the great pleasures of encountering the past is seeing how similar ancient people were to us. In the grand scheme of things, not all that much has changed. Then, as now, people experienced grief, love, anxiety, and joy. They had concerns about job security, disputes with in-laws, jealous rivalries, and profound friendships, and questioned the meaning of life.”
For Christians, furthermore, Ancient Mesopotamia, whence Abraham and Sarah moved in obedience to God’s call to the nearby land of Canaan, is firmly part of the world of the Old Testament. We read about the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and of course, the Persians, as part of the story of God’s people, who struggled for a time surrounded by these larger empires, and later on conquered by them.
In other words, we have come back full circle to Xerxes’s middle-of-the-night book escapade of Esther 6. Understanding this historical context makes the Old Testament come alive in a new way, pointing out significant details we are otherwise likely to miss. So many elements in the Old Testament, including the tradition of laments in Jeremiah’s Lamentations, echo literary genres of the Mesopotamian world. Awareness of such details brings to the fore the uniqueness of God’s people and their faith in the polytheistic context all around—while also showing why so many people could fall away and be seduced by this polytheistic world. To be different is always harder than following the herd, especially when the herd can claim the support of a mighty empire.
This is also a reminder that brilliance alone cannot save anyone. The snobbery of modernity is real, existing often with the naïve belief in the myth of progress. But just because we have all the knowledge in the world accessible to us on glowing squares that fit in our pockets doesn’t mean that we have mastered the world. The library of Ashurbanipal displays an intellectually flourishing society, ruled by kings who delighted in the acquisition of knowledge. But Assyria (and its library) too collapsed, subject to the same conquest and decay as all man-made empires.
A well-ordered love of knowledge, ultimately, is a love of divine wisdom and a recognition that we are finite. No matter how much we learn, there will always be much more that we do not know. But what a delight this process of learning is.