Irving Finkel

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.

And gradually they piece together the literature.

And the assumption has always been that if you put them all together again, you're going to have the whole library.

But it's the absolute opposite.

Because what happened was that the Babylonians in the south, in my opinion, they worked hand in glove with the Elamites from Iran.

They had a pincer movement and they beat Assyria.

They conquered Assyria.

And they ran through the capital and they set fire to everything, pinched all the women and took all the jewelry and all the gold.

And people say that in a fit of pique, they destroyed the library.

But

But they wouldn't destroy the library because it was the giant brain from which the Assyrians ran a world empire and it had all the knowledge in the world.

They destroyed that.

They spoke the same language.

They had the same writing system.

They'd have taken them all safely home.

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