The largest library of the ancient world has as its explicit purpose to gather all existing knowledge pertaining to good governance. It was king Ashurbanipal's library of the 7th Century BCE. Larger than the library of Alexandria it was eventually forgotten because of having been sacked and burned down by the joint coalition of several vassal states. The library was located at Nineveh ("Ninua" or "Ninwe" in the Romanization of the Akkadian name for the city), and was explicitly formed with the purpose of collecting the whole world's knowledge regarding good governance. The king would send orders for merchants to buy all literature they could find, for scribes and toll masters to collect and transcribe the books that were brought in to the kingdom.
The project's explicit purpose inspires awe and admiration in me, and though the works of the time were hardly scientific, I was taken with the idea and it serves as a source of inspiration for my own consulting and scholarship. Thus I indulge in the science pertinent to what is needed to make a sustainable transformation of society. And thus Ninua Consulting (Ninua Scholar AB) became the name of my company.
Learn more about the library of Ashurbanipal here with Lord Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time - The Library at Nineveh.
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