Room 55 at the British Museum, showing tablets from the Library ofAshurbanipal. This display i
Room 55 at the British Museum, showing tablets from the Library ofAshurbanipal. This display includes the most famous cuneiform tabletof all – the Flood Tablet from the Epic of Gilgamesh.The British Museum has about 130,000 cuneiform tablets, and isperhaps the largest collection of them outside southern Iraq.The centrepiece of this collection is the Library of Ashurbanipal,named after the last great king of the Assyrian Empire. It hasthousands of tablets dating from the 600s BC, including historicalinscriptions, letters, administrative and legal texts, literary andlexical documents, and divinatory, magical and medical texts.The first fragments were excavated at Nineveh in the 1850s. AustenHenry Layard, the site’s excavator, immediately recognized theirsignificance: “They furnish us with materials for the completedecipherment of the cuneiform character, for restoring the languageand history of Assyria, and for inquiring into the customs, sciences,and…literature, of its people.” -- source link
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