The British Museum holds an invaluable collection of approximately 32,000 cuneiform tablets from the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, considered the first library in the ancient world. These clay tablets contain a wide variety of texts, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, legal documents, omens and astronomical records. King Ashurbanipal wished to gain power over his rivals from this knowledge by using this writing from the past to divine what would happen in the future. Discovered in what is now northern Iraq, the library is one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made. Ancient Nineveh was consumed by fire from invaders around 612 BCE. While paper books are usually destroyed by fire, the clay tablets were actually baked harder, making them among the best-preserved documents from thousands of years of Mesopotamian history. Before the discovery of the Library, almost everything we knew about ancient Assyria came from stories in the Bible or classical historians. With the discovery of the Library, we can now read the Assyrians story in their own words. Thanks to the work of researchers from around the world, translations of many thousands of texts are available. The British Museum is slowly piecing the tablets back together to better understand how the Library functioned in its heyday.