Page 114 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

century BCE, discovered in Nineveh by British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in 1849, and preserved in the British Museum. The deciphering of the twelve tablets in 1872 enabled this epic to be rediscovered by the world. Chiefly because of the durability of the clay tablets, a sufficient percentage of the library of Ashurbanipal survived for it to be considered the earliest systematically collected library as distinct from an archive. Originally it is thought to have consisted of 20,000-30,000 clay tablets. It is believed that at least 13% of Ashurbanipal’s library survived to the present partly because the clay tablets were baked in fires set during the Median sack of Nineveh in 612 BCE. This and the library of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum preserved in lava after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, are the only libraries of which I am aware that were ever preserved, rather than destroyed, as the result of fire!
Though a significant percentage of the clay tablets in Ashurbanipal’s li- brary survived by burning, non-ceramic elements of his records were lost. Bas-reliefs at Ashurbanipal’s Southwest Palace in Nineveh show scribes with writing-boards and scrolls.53 None of these were thought to have survived from ancient Assyria until sixteen ivory and wood writing boards were ex- cavated in 1953 from a well in the “North-West” Palace of Ashurnasirpal in Nimrud. These boards, which were joined together to form a polyptych, contain residual amounts of wax in which cuneiform letters were inscribed.54
Perhaps as many as one to one and a half million papyrus fragments, of which most are routine records of business or government, have been exca- vated from the dry sands of Egypt; nevertheless, only a small percentage of information from the ancient world that was originally recorded seems to have survived. One estimate of the percentage of classical literature that sur- vived through the Middle Ages to the present is 10%. Because papyrus was relatively expensive, and valued for its permanence for archival records and books that were intended to last, whatever information that was recorded
53 The bas reliefs depicting the scribes are in room XVIII, panels 9-11, middle register (BM ANE 123955-7), and court XIX, panel 12 (BM ANE 123825).
54 Wiseman, “Assyrian Writing-Boards,” Iraq 17 (1955): 3-13.
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