Irving Finkel

because they were dumped when they were no longer needed in some kind of room.

And the archaeologists in the 19th century came down on these, and then all the locals came and they dug them up and they sold them all over the place, and they got all over the world, thousands and thousands of them, out of probably two storage rooms, which is not a whole culture or a whole country or their whole history or their belief systems.

So our view of it is slewed.

by the nature of the material.

And sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent, but not always.

And sometimes the people who work with slude material don't even realize how slude it is.

I mean, you know, it's quite remarkable.

Yes, I can imagine.

I can imagine easily.

Because once in a while, a library is discovered.

In the 1850s, at Nineveh, which was the Assyrian capital, there was a fat king, king of the world, called Ashurbanipal.

And he had a fantastic library.

And he promoted it.

He impounded tablets.

He had them brought to Nineveh.

He wanted all the prevailing knowledge and all knowledge from before under one roof.

It's a kind of like Alexandria thing.

So he was a trained scholar, and this is what he did.

And they found it in the 19th century.

They dug it up, Layard and those people.