PROGRAMM

If the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once famously said that “we are all Greek,” then in her new book, The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World (Penguin, 2026), SELENA WISNOM makes the powerful argument that we are all Mesopotamian. In a conversation with CLEMENA ANTONOVA, Research Director of IWM’s The World in Pieces Program, the renowned historian will delve into the story of one of the largest libraries in the ancient world and open a window into the fascinating millennia-old Near Eastern civilization to which we owe writing, science, and the idea of the value of preserving knowledge. 

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SELENA WISNOM is a lecturer in the heritage of the Middle East at the University of Leicester. A specialist in the interpretation of Mesopotamian cultural sources, Wisnom’s previous work includes Weapons of Words: Intertextual Competition in Babylonian Poetry (Brill, 2019). She has also written three plays set in ancient Assyria; the most recent, Ashurbanipal: The Last Great King of Assyria, was staged at London’s Crypt Gallery in 2019.