The Why Files: Operation Podcast

In 1849, Laird recruited a crew and dug, and dug, and dug, and then he hit stone.

He expected a palace, but he broke into room after room full of clay tablets, stacked and shelved and catalogued the largest library of the ancient world.

It belonged to King Ashurbanipal, who wanted every piece of knowledge on Earth under one roof.

He sent scribes across the empire to copy anything they could find, medical texts, star charts, royal letters, 30,000 tablets, including the oldest version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

We still have these documents because of King Ashurbanipal.

Ashurbanipal.

Ashurbanipal.

Ashurbanipal bragged about it, in his own inscriptions, in his own voice.

He claimed he read texts written before the flood.

Scholars filed that under royal trash talk.

Then, in 612 BC, Nineveh's enemies burned the city to the ground.

The fire should have destroyed everything.

but it didn't.

The clay tablets baked harder.

The collapsed roof sealed the rooms.

The library went underground for 2,500 years, preserved by the same disaster that was supposed to erase it.

Layard shipped the tablets to London.

Then the hard part started.

Cuneiform, the wedge-shaped writing of ancient Mesopotamia.

That was a code nobody could fully read yet.