Irving Finkel

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.

So what did they find?

They found the tablets higgledy-piggledy all over the floor of a huge room in the corridors and everything, and lots of them broken and lots of them burnt.

So ever since then, until really quite recently, seriologists have spent all their, a lot of people who work on these Nineveh tanzas, but all the time joining the bits together.

And you have the story about Gilgamesh and the goddess who falls in love with him in the garden and she wants to seduce him and dot, dot, dot, you can't find the bit.

So you look for another bit, you look for another bit.