Ashurbanipal, the self-styled “King of the World,” designed Nineveh to be not only the political center but also the intellectual heart of the Middle East. He sent his agents and scribes to the far reaches of Mesopotamia to collect or copy everything from religious texts and magical spells to medical records and astronomical observations. Even when he suppressed the Babylonian revolts, one of his top priorities was to seize the city’s rich libraries, adding the millennia-old Babylonian heritage to his Nineveh treasury. The discovery of the library in the 19th century by Austen Henry Layard and his successor Hormuzd Rassam revealed a world that had previously existed only in legend. Amid the ruins of Nineveh’s palaces, archaeologists found rooms with floors paved with thousands of clay tablets; The tablets had been inadvertently baked and hardened by the Great Fire of Nineveh during the fall of the empire, which allowed the delicate cuneiform writing on them to survive for 2,500 years.