# Wars in the Middle East, Ancient Libraries, Museums in Iraq and a Film by Galina Tsaryova



## Mosaic (Oct 30, 2021)

Hi everyone, I became aware of an article mentioning an interesting Russian documentary and wanted to ask if anyone of you have enough Russian language skills to give a short summary in English?

First of all, here are some paragraphs from the article, which I translated with the help of DeepL:



> The Library of King Assurbanipal of Babylon, the largest surviving library in the ancient world and the oldest known library, was found in Iraq in 1864. It is believed to have been compiled over 25 years in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh on behalf of King Assurbanipal (7th century BCE). It also served as a state archive. The part of the library found by archaeologists consists of 25,000 clay tablets with cuneiform texts. It is important to note that no records were kept of the tablets when they were recovered from the rubble. The tablets are (attention!) in the British Museum. Let's double our attention: scientists are still working to sort and catalog the individual fragments and decipher the texts. Incredible! It's been 155 years! And they are still sorting the library of Nineveh!? Do you know how many such libraries have been found in the Middle East? Read on and you will be amazed. But that's not all either!
> 
> Let's triple the attention: the British Museum is about to build a museum library in Iraq together with Iraqi scholars, where reproductions (!?) of the original tablets will be exhibited! Try to imagine that! No, they are not returning the originals, they are "donating" copies to the indigenous people!!!! Who will swear on the Bible/Quran that all the tablets were also "copied"? Are you convinced that the copies will be 100% identical to the originals? And why don't they keep the copies for themselves?
> Let's see some other libraries found by the archaeologists in the Middle East.
> ...



And now here is the excerpt from the Russian documentary: 
_View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak_IRk7xu8Y_


Unfortunately, I haven´t found any information in English about Galina Tsaryova and her research.


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