No wonder they say that the most valuable today is information. Having the necessary information, a person can do anything. Our ancestors also knew about this. Clay books created thousands of years ago prove that they tried to fix on them everything that was more or less valuable.
By the way, what are clay books? If you do not know the answer to this question, we suggest you read this article. In it you will find answers to all your questions from this area.
Historical reference
Today, scientists believe that Mesopotamia was the most ancient human civilization, which reached its peak unprecedented for its time. It originated about seven millennia before the birth of Christ in a surprisingly well-chosen place, in the valley of the confluence of the great rivers - the Tigris and Euphrates. It was this land that was inhabited by amazing and mysterious Sumerians who called themselves “the people of blackheads”.
Information Breakthrough
The Sumerians are known as the oldest astronomers. It is astronomers, not astrologers, which allows us to consider them the oldest scientists in our world. Cuneiform writing became their outstanding invention. This is a writing system in which the signs resembled ordinary dashes, wedges. Due to this, their alphabetical system got its unusual name.
In those centuries, clay was the only material available for writing. Of course, something could be written on the skin. But! Firstly, worn leather is not an expensive thing, even by today's standards. Secondly, people were well aware that a leather scroll would not survive a fire, a rodent invasion, or a rainy season. Particularly worried about this were tax collectors, money-lenders, doctors ... In a word, all those people whose work depended directly on the safety of the information they received. But what are clay books? Of course, there is much less data on their surface ...
Technical information
In fact, these are burnt clay tablets, on the surface of which scribes applied information even before they put a soft blank into the furnace. Modern bricks, on the surface of which there are brands of the manufacturer, are essentially the same "books".
The first "media" of this type were created four thousand years before the beginning of our era. The shape and size of these "books" were very different. There were flat, convex, oval and square “books” ... Some of them were the size of a regular notebook, but the diagonal of the others was more than 45 centimeters! That's what clay books are.
How were such books created?
The technology was simple, even very: first, the scribe laid the prepared and formed blank on a solid and even surface, and then, armed with a pointed wand, he began to extrude cuneiform letters on the tablet. The ancient scribe held his “pen” in approximately the same way as we hold a pencil in our hands today. Look at the children who play, trying to write something in the sandbox: in fact, they are likened to the ancient masters.
To ensure the evenness and parallelism of the symbols applied to the clay, before starting work, the tablet was often marked with a tightly stretched thread. Often the scribe filled not only both sides of the book, but even managed to put information on its ends. The ancient "office workers" burned the finished document in the oven. However, often unimportant “papers” were simply dried in the sun. If for some reason the clerk did not have time to finish his work in one go, he wrapped the blank in a wet rag.
How did people navigate a lot of plates?
Sumerian cuneiform writing was not a compact form of writing. Naturally, to create a more or less extensive collection of decrees, a list of goods, or something like that, dozens, if not hundreds, of clay tablets were gone. How was the "content" of such books arranged? After all, there was no intuitive search then !?
The average Sumerian book actually consisted of dozens of burnt tablets. They simply got out of the situation - under the last character on the page put a deep cross line, and under it they wrote the number of the book in which the continuation of this text is located. Names were often formed from their first words. Does it not resemble the option of saving the default document in the same Microsoft Word?
So we learned what clay books are. And where was all this wealth of the Ancient World stored? As at present, libraries existed for these purposes. So the profession of a librarian is one of the most ancient and respected in the world.
Ancient libraries
All this is extremely important ... But where was the clay book library? The one that was the first in the history of mankind?
Back in 1841, the French capital was shocked by a telegraph message from Arabia: “I believe that I have discovered the oldest structures. Perhaps they can be rightfully attributed to the heyday of Nineveh. ” The person sending the message was Paul-Emile Botta. He was ordered by the Asian Society of France to open the biblical Nineveh. Oddly enough, but he was able to do this, and the first library of clay books again became available to mankind.
In just a few hours, all the major newspapers of that time were full of sensational headlines, reporting the greatest archaeological discovery. And there was every reason for such a stir: after all, until that day, official science did not have any data that would at least go back a little from the times of the ancient Egyptian pyramids. Among Bott's finds was a library of clay books. The city of Nineveh not only proved its reality, but also enriched mankind with the most valuable information contained on the "pages" of unique clay tablets.
Assyria Library
In 1852, one of the greatest archaeologists of his time, Henry Austin Layard, also surprised the whole world with a unique discovery. He was able to unearth the palace of the last king of Assyria, Ashurbanipal, whom contemporaries respectfully called the “House of Instructions and Advice.” It was there that the greatest intellectual value of those times was - the great library of clay books that the kings of Assyria collected throughout their reign.
Historical paradox: for almost three decades, the most valuable written monuments of bygone centuries lurked in the basements of the British Museum. And only after the first steps were taken to decipher the writing of the ancient peoples, did the historians finally understand how valuable (what is there, priceless!) Treasure aimlessly collects dust in storage ... Since then, a systematic decoding of all the books found has begun.
The great achievements of Ashurbanipal
More than three millennia separate us from the moment when the last king of the warlike people dictated to his obscure scribe the words that came to our time from the very depths of centuries. He says that he ordered to stone letters, works of verbal art that his predecessors did not study and read. The king noted how proud he was of his ability to read and his command to divide the library into sections.
By the way, what was the organization of the clay book library? In principle, it was not much different from the modern one. Of course, there was no division by genre, but books were sorted in the same way by authors, countries, etc. All written sources were placed on huge shelves. The library was run by superintendents. This is where the clay book library was located, which was first discovered by modern civilization.
I must say that not much has been preserved from it. Most of the books at that time were divided into separate shards, so decryption is still ongoing.
Great Book Depository
It must be said that the name Ashurbanipal did not survive the millennia in vain. The fact is that the king showed himself to be an extremely talented organizer, an intelligent politician and a man who was really interested in culture and sciences. It seems that at that difficult time for Assyria, another sovereign would hardly have found time for such an occupation.
He made truly titanic efforts to ensure that the best clay book library at that time appeared in his state. The city of Nineveh became the scientific and cultural center not only of Assyria, but of all the countries that existed then. He issued a special decree according to which hundreds of scribes began to travel around the country, looking for all available examples of verbal art. Finding those, they copied them exactly and sent them to the capital for storage. This is how the clay book library in Nineveh got its priceless book fund.
This included exact copies of texts written in ancient times in Egypt and Assyria itself, in Babylon and Akkad. When the library was discovered by Bott, there were about 20,000 tiles left in it. Modern scholars who have analyzed the surviving data are deeply saddened: most likely, initially there were at least 100,000 texts in the storage rooms of this repository! Alas, all of them are surely lost for our civilization forever. The famous library of clay books was powerless in front of the overwhelming power of time.
The most valuable samples from the ancient repository
It soon became clear that the Assyrians and Babylonians knew mathematics very well. Already two millennia before the beginning of our era, their scientists were able to solve very complex geometric problems. In principle, it would be unrealistic to create the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon without such calculations, so that scientists only established themselves in their guesses.
Of great value were works on astronomy. Many of them were written almost a millennium before the time of Ashurbanipal. The value of these books is that they could easily track the development of astronomical science from ancient times. It turned out that the ziggurats, which were praised by many modern science fiction writers, were the first observatories in the world. From year to year, the priests made observations with them of the movement of celestial bodies, accumulating invaluable knowledge. They were recorded with the greatest trepidation in clay books, photos of which are in the article.
Ancient calendars
According to the information that scientists received from ancient books, the inhabitants of Assyria and Babylon were able to predict lunar and solar eclipses, perfectly knew the orbits of all celestial bodies, which could be seen with the naked eye. Planets from stars in those distant times, they also have already learned to distinguish. There are many tables with calculations of interstellar distances. Surprisingly, many of them are pretty accurate. Not so long ago, even the famous Kazakh writer Suleimenov wrote about this. The Clay Book, his latest work, is about just those old times.
On the basis of centuries-old observations of the Moon and the Sun, the priests compiled their calendar. It was incredibly valuable for those times, as it allowed to know the time of the beginning of sowing and harvesting crops. It is not surprising that the astronomers of Assyria and Babylon enjoyed such respect and honor in the Ancient World.
Geographical knowledge of the ancients
Historians were very interested in the ancient "geographical atlases", also found among the surviving books. Although the maps were very primitive, it was quite possible to recognize the outlines of lands from Egypt to Urartu from them. The Assyrians turned out to even have real geographic guides, which indicated the names of countries, their capitals, the names of rivers and large geographical areas. However, they knew very little about the structure of the world around them, mainly guided by fantastic theories.
So, clay first books on geography considered our world as the center of everything. However, scientists of the Middle Ages had almost the same thoughts, so there is nothing to be surprised at.
Medical industry
Even better, this turned out to be noticeable in the preserved medical treatises. The civilizations of the Assyrians and Babylonians still believed that diseases were caused solely by evil spirits. The books cited many spells to expel the latter. Historians even found the opinion of an authoritative healer of those times, who reported on the need to fashion from clay the image of the demon that torments the patient's body. After that, the doll was strongly advised to destroy.
Oddly enough, but in such conditions, surgery has reached amazing heights. So, medical books on clay tablets consider even very complicated (including by modern standards) abdominal operations. However, the Assyrians did not achieve such heights in everything: for example, in the work of physicians of that period, the heart was considered as a "repository of the soul", and people did not suspect anything about the role of the brain.