Don't tell the Fundies or Bush

[malaise]

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/197101/the.great.good.luck.of.mister.smith.htm

It was a fortunate chance that the tablets he studied came from the library of 30,000 "volumes" King Assurbanipal had collected 25 centuries before. That cultured young monarch, grandson of the bloodthirsty Sennacherib, was the world's first encyclopedist. His domain corresponded to the territory of modern Iraq and much of Syria, and its history runs back to ancient Sumer, first of all cities. The region had produced the first civilization in history, the first architecture, and the first science. Assurbanipal wanted to preserve in his capital all the knowledge men anywhere in the known world had gained.

"Seek out and bring to me the precious tablets for which there are no copies in Assyria," the King ordered his agents as far away as India and Egypt.

Works on farming and irrigation were especially interesting to the King. The land between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers was made fertile in his day—as it had been for several centuries before him—by a network of well regulated canals, and Assurbanipal wanted to make sure the methods he was sponsoring were as modern as any the Egyptians were using along the Nile.

The tablets poured in and were filed away in the King's vast new library which stood with equally splendid palaces and office buildings in a long row along the east bank of the Tigris. Already catalogued in the royal library were some astonishing books: a treatise on geometry as advanced as the one Euclid wrote 1,500 years later (and which is still in use today); and an astronomical work on the Saros, or cycle of 223 lunar months over which eclipses repeat themselves. The Assyrians were keen astronomers, and had compiled at that time a continuous record of planet positions and eclipses which covered a far longer span of time than any similar record of our own era. They were good at arithmetic too. They divided the circle into 360 degrees of 60 minutes each, as we do today, and they found out that by giving numbers a value according to position, they could make a few symbols indicate enormous quantities. Other systems in use in antiquity were much more cumbersome, as anyone who has tried to multiply Roman numerals must know.