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.