Join Sam Leith, the Spectator's literary editor and host of this podcast for The Book Club Live,

an evening with Lady Anne Somerset on the 27th of March. This live podcast will celebrate the

paperback release of Lady Anne's Queen Victoria and her prime ministers, a personal history,

and they will focus on Queen Victoria's interactions with ten premiers and give a fresh look at how she ruled and the

politicians who served her. A signed copy of the book is included with each ticket, so go to

spectator.com.uk forward slash books live to get yours. We look forward to seeing you there.

Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of the spectator.

My guest this week is a scholar Selina Wisdom,

whose new book is The Library of Ancient Wisdom, Mesopotamia,

and the making of history.

And this is a book that tells us all about something that most of us will know very little about indeed, which is to say, cuneiform culture.

And cuneiforms, as a world's first writing system. But, Celina, can you kind of explain a bit

what the territory we're looking at is? Because here's something that, you know, a system that covers thousands of years and multiple languages and multiple civilizations under one kind

of wedge-shaped umbrella. Yeah, it's mind-boggling in its extent, really. I mean,

Mesopotamia is an ancient name for what is now modern-day Iraq. It's Greek for between the rivers. And those rivers

are the Tigris and Euphrates, which run through the fertile crescent in the Near East, which is where

agriculture took off, where we have the world's first mega-cities, where writing is invented,

and all of that starts. So writing is invented about 3,100 BC and Keneurform

continues to be used right up until the first century AED. So it is more than 3,000 years time span

that it was used. And in that time, lots of different people are using it. So the Sumerians

invent writing originally in the turn of the fourth millennium BC, but then the writing system is

...