Eleanor Robson, Karen Radner & Andrew George on the Library at Nineveh - Treasure trove of Assyrian ideas [audio 43min]

In 1849 a young English adventurer called Henry Layard started digging into a small hill. It was on the banks of the River Tigris in Northern Iraq and underneath it was the ancient city of Nineveh. Layard found extraordinary things--wonderful carved reliefs, ancient palace rooms and great statues of winged bulls. He also found a collection of clay tablets, broken up, jumbled around and sitting on the floor of a toilet. It was the remnants of a library and, although Layard didn’t know it at the time, it was one of the greatest archaeological finds ever made. Presenter Melvyn Bragg investigates the history of ideas and debates their application in modern life with his guests Eleanor Robson, Senior Lecturer at Cambridge University and Vice-Chair of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq; Karen Radner, Lecturer in the Ancient Near Eastern History at University College London; and Andrew George, Professor of Babylonian at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Baron Bragg--historian, journalist, novelist--is Domus Fellow, St Catherine's College, Oxford; Chancellor of Leeds University; President of Britain's National Campaign for the Arts; a Governor of the London School of Economics; and Chair of Britain's Arts Council Literature Panel.