Archaeologists searching through the ruins of the very ancient past are always happy to come across an epic poem or a historical chronicle, but very often the hardest documents to find are the ones that tell historians something about everyday life. About what it was like to be a bureaucrat in Egypt’s middle kingdom, or a soldier in the Persian Army, or a farmer in ancient Sumeria. It’s not that these societies didn’t produce lots of everyday communications. Frequently, they did. But it’s often the most common, ordinary documents that don’t survive. Either because no one thought to preserve them or their society was conquered, or they were written down on a medium that wasn’t meant to last. But in the 1840s archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Nineveh, in what is today northern Iraq, discovered an incredible stash of 2500 year old ephemera that did manage to survive. {listen}