Ashurbanipal's Library at Nineveh

Around 650 BCE, King Ashurbanipal assembled a vast library at his palace in Nineveh, collecting over 30,000 clay tablets covering literature, science, medicine, astronomy, and religion. His collection preserved works like the Epic of Gilgamesh (with its famous flood narrative) that might otherwise have been lost. When Nineveh fell in 612 BCE, the burning palace ironically baked and preserved the tablets for archaeologists to discover over 2,000 years later.