The fire that saved a library

Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria in the seventh century BC, did something extremely rare for a monarch of his era: he learned to read and write. And he built a monumental library at Nineveh, with tens of thousands of clay tablets on medicine, astronomy, ritual and literature.

In 612 BC, the Babylonians and Medes razed Nineveh and the palace went up in flames. Any library of papyrus or parchment would have ended right there. But clay doesn't burn: it fires. The blaze that destroyed the building hardened the tablets and helped them survive underground for more than two thousand years.

Among the finds, excavated from the nineteenth century onwards and largely kept at the British Museum, came the jewel: the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of humanity's oldest works of literature.

The library survived thanks to the very thing meant to destroy it.