The Library of Ashurbanipal survived because it burned. In 612 BCE a coalition of Babylonians, Scythians and Medes destroyed Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, and fire is thought to have swept through the palace library. The heat partly baked its clay tablets. Whatever was written on wax-covered writing boards, a large share of the collection, was lost. The clay remained: more than 30,000 tablets and fragments from the 7th century BCE, among them the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enûma Eliš creation story.

The library was built on purpose. Ashurbanipal, the last great king of Assyria, had trained as a scribe in Akkadian and Sumerian. He wrote to cities across Mesopotamia asking for copies of their texts, sent scribes to collect old ones, and took others as war loot or under threat. Divination, omens and incantations interested him most. Texts were identified by coloured marks, short descriptions or their opening words, an early answer to the question every library catalogue still has to solve.

Excavation undid some of that order. The first tablets were found in 1849 at Kouyunjik, the mound of ancient Nineveh in today’s Mosul, in the palace of Sennacherib. Three years later Hormuzd Rassam found a second group in Ashurbanipal’s palace, but made no record of it. In Europe the two finds were mixed with each other and with tablets from other sites.

Most are now in the British Museum. Its Ashurbanipal Library Project, begun in 2002 with the University of Mosul, has photographed the tablets and published the images online: a digital library of texts more than 2,600 years old.