Yorkshire Philosophical Society

Event Information

Reasembling the library of Ashurbanipal, How we can use Engineering to reassemble the world’s oldest library

Issy Langdon, University of York

The ‘Library of Ashurbanipal’ is the name given to a collection of over 30,000 clay tablets and fragments inscribed with cuneiform – a type of writing used in Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq). Texts were written by pressing a reed pen into soft clay. The characteristic wedge-shaped strokes give the writing its modern name (cuneiform means simply ‘wedge-shaped’). The tablets were discovered in the ruins of the city of Nineveh (now northern Iraq), once capital of the mighty Assyrian empire, ruled by Ashurbanipal from 669–c. 631 BC. They were excavated in a series of digs from the 1840s through to the 1930s, and form the remains of the Assyrian royal collections of scholarly literature and archives. Nineveh was consumed by fire in around 612 BC. But while paper books are destroyed by fire, the clay tablets were in most cases baked harder, making them among the best preserved documents from thousands of years of Mesopotamian history.

Image:  British Museum (Creative Commons) part of the collection of the Library of Ashurbanipal

We are holding this free Cafe Scientifique session on Wednesday 22 April 2026 with doors open from 7pm, talk starting at 7.30pm at City Screen Basement, Coney Street, YO1 9QL   Lift access available. No Booking necessary.

Please buy a drink in the basement bar, take your seats and be ready for a presentation and Q and A.

Member’s report:

This was certainly a lecture in two halves by Issy a final year PhD student in the School of Physics, Engineering and Technology at the University of York.

In the first half she described the collection of over 30,000 clay tablets, covered in cuneiform writing, from the ‘Library of Ashurbanipal’ excavated from the ruins of the city of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal’s (c.669-631 BCE) empire. The digs lasted between 1851 and 1932 with the texts from the tablets, now in the British Museum, having been central to the modern study of Assyrian and Babylonian scholarship for almost two centuries. Issy briefly covered a recent multidisciplinary project Reading the Library of Ashurbanipal led by the British Museum which ‘analysed the Library based on detailed, systematic and thorough surveys of the textual and archaeological evidence.’   Although this project allowed for a significant number of joins to be made among the fragments, particularly by digital means, there were still many left over awaiting their partners(s).

In the second half of the lecture Issy described how her research would allow for greater numbers of tablet fragments to be grouped together based on their dielectric properties, that is, ‘the ability to store and dissipate electrical energy through polarization when exposed to an electric field’.   She described some of the problems encountered in investigating the true dielectric resonance of irregular shaped objects which were countered using tests on 3D modern shapes and in different reverberation chambers.  She also discussed the challenge of systemic errors in her early research using Bland-Altman plots but also the usefulness of ‘power law correction’ in putting her back on the right track.  The archaeologists in the audience were on more familiar ground when she discussed using fragments of pottery from excavations at Heslington and Torksey Ware in her experiments.

One highlight of the talk was the panache with which Issy read a couple of tablets including the well-known complaint about the allegedly sub-standard copper provided by the trader Ea-nāṣir  (UET V 8).

Jeff Taylor