Book 1 – Inside the The Library of Ashurbanipal

by Sondra Wilson. Updated 2/8/2024.

    Bringing this textbook to a more scholarly level was my Fall 2022 discipline project for Des Moines Area Community College’s (DMACC’s) Honors program, with supervision and input by Professor Charles Irwin during his Ancient to Mod. Western Civ. class. I was also able to travel to Europe for my spring 2024 semester in order to take photos of many of the artifacts from within the book: you can read about that experience within my London Abroad blog.

     This textbook is about shows the archaeological evidence of humanity’s oldest known writings and the cultures who created them – Sumerian, Egyptian, Haltamti (aka Elamite), Akkadian, and several others. To put this into perspective, many of these languages appeared around 4000-3000 BCE, while Proto-Hebrew only begins to appear around 900 BCE.  The books teaches about the earliest archaeological evidence of money, commerce, government, and law tablets – and thus – the beginnings of the modern day legal system. Humanity’s first known empire was created (and overthrown) in this region of the world, however all of these artifacts – from languages to money to law tablets – were buried underground from around 600 BCE until the 1850s CE.  Many of them were only translated within the past 20 years at the University of Oxford, and now AI is helping us to decipher them faster than ever.

     This book sets up the Hidden History of Law series, setting up a crucial part of the overall timeline which helps to understand why and how Europe and then North America became colonized, as discussed in Book 2 – The Colonization of Pre-Christian Europe, and the Birth of Civil Law.

     Offering a unique, beautiful layout – this book is not just for schools.  This is the type of book you’ll want to keep on your coffee table to impress your friends. Wow them with fantastic photos of humanity’s known origins, shown like never before in Inside the Library of Ashurbanipal.

Preview pages for Inside the Library of Ashurbanipal:
click to enlarge