Located in modern-day Iraq, Mesopotamia was the first human civilisation and the birthplace of writing. Selena Wisnom is one of the few people alive today who can read the cuneiform tablets that tell its story.
Mesopotamian civilisation filled more than half of human history: a culture with advanced mathematics and astronomy, a religion that influenced both ancient Greece and the Bible, and a literature that continues to inspire the blockbuster movies of 2025. Yet few of us today know anything about it. Taking us into the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, scholar and playwright Selena Wisnom reveals a world of gods and monsters, poets and bureaucrats that is both utterly strange and strangely familiar.
