Library of Ashurbanipal: The Great Royal Library of Nineveh

The Library of Ashurbanipal was a vast collection of cuneiform clay tablets assembled at Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, mainly during the reign of King Ashurbanipal (668–c. 631 BC). It gathered the learning of Mesopotamia in one place: omens, spells, medical texts, word lists, hymns and epics such as Gilgamesh. Buried when Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BC and rediscovered by British excavators between 1849 and 1854, it became the single most important source for reading and understanding the civilisations of ancient Iraq.

Ashurbanipal, the scholar king

Ashurbanipal was a younger son of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria. In 672 BC his father named him crown prince of Assyria, while an older brother, Shamash-shum-ukin, was to rule Babylon. Because he had not originally been expected to become king, Ashurbanipal may have received an unusually thorough scribal education.

In one of his inscriptions he boasts of this training. He says that he learned the hidden secrets of the scribal art, could solve difficult problems of division and multiplication, read complex tablets in obscure Sumerian and Akkadian, and studied stone inscriptions from before the Flood. Royal boasting must be treated with caution, but it is clear that he took a genuine interest in scholarship and valued learning as a sign of kingship.

Ashurbanipal ruled at the height of Assyrian power. His armies held Egypt for a time, sacked Susa, the Elamite capital, and crushed his brother’s rebellion in Babylon in 648 BC. His palace walls showed his victories and his royal hunts, as in the famous Lion Hunt reliefs. The library was the intellectual counterpart of these displays of power.

Why a king needed a library

The library was not a public library in the modern sense. It was a working collection for the king and his scholars: astrologers, diviners, exorcists, physicians and lamentation priests who advised the ruler on the will of the gods.

In Mesopotamian belief, the gods wrote their intentions into the world through signs: the movements of stars, the shape of a sacrificed sheep’s liver, the behaviour of animals, unusual births. Interpreting these signs correctly could save the king from danger. To do so, scholars needed complete and accurate copies of the great reference works of omens, rituals and incantations. A king who owned the best texts had the best protection.

The library was also a statement of prestige. By collecting the traditional learning of Babylonia, the old cultural heart of Mesopotamia, the Assyrian king showed himself to be its heir and guardian.

How the collection was built

Earlier Assyrian kings had kept tablet collections. Tiglath-Pileser I had one at Assur around 1100 BC, and Sargon II and Sennacherib gathered texts at their capitals. Ashurbanipal enlarged these collections on a new scale.

Scribes at Nineveh, both Assyrian and Babylonian, copied texts onto fine clay tablets, often in an elegant Assyrian script. Many tablets end with a colophon, a closing note naming Ashurbanipal as owner. Some colophons add curses on anyone who would steal the tablet or erase the king’s name.

The king also had texts brought from elsewhere, especially from Babylonia. Letters ordered officials and scholars to search temple and private collections for particular works. One well-known letter, preserved in later copies, instructs an official to collect rare tablets in Borsippa and send them to the king, though its authenticity is debated.

After Ashurbanipal defeated his brother in Babylonia in 648 BC, the confiscation became systematic. Records studied by the Assyriologist Simo Parpola list about 2,000 tablets and some 300 writing boards taken from the homes of Babylonian scholars, some of them men who had sided with the rebels. Writing boards, hinged panels of wood or ivory coated with wax, were common at the time, but they have not survived in the ruins.

What the library contained

Divination made up the largest single part of the collection. It included Enuma Anu Enlil, a great series of astrological omens on about 70 tablets; Shumma alu, a series of omens from everyday events; and long manuals for reading the entrails of sacrificed animals.

There were also many incantations and rituals to drive out demons and cure illness, medical texts describing symptoms and treatments, prayers, hymns and laments, often in Sumerian with a line-by-line Akkadian translation. Lexical lists, dictionaries of signs and words in Sumerian and Akkadian, were essential tools for scribes and later for modern scholars.

Literature formed a smaller but now very famous part. The library preserved the standard version of the Epic of Gilgamesh in twelve tablets, the creation epic Enuma Elish, the flood story of Atrahasis, the Epic of Erra and wisdom texts. Royal letters, reports from scholars, treaties and administrative records were kept in the same palaces, and today they are usually studied alongside the library itself.

Destruction in 612 BC

After Ashurbanipal’s death around 631 BC, the Assyrian Empire collapsed within two decades. In 612 BC an alliance of Babylonians and Medes besieged and sacked Nineveh, as told in the article on the fall of Nineveh. The palaces were burned, their roofs and upper storeys fell in, and the tablets were smashed and buried beneath the debris.

That catastrophe helped preserve them. Wax boards, leather and papyrus perished, but clay tablets, many of which had been deliberately baked hard when they were made, lay protected under the ruins for more than 2,400 years.

Rediscovery

In 1849–1851 the British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard dug into the mound of Kuyunjik at Nineveh and found two rooms in Sennacherib’s Southwest Palace piled deep with tablets and fragments. In 1853–1854 his former assistant Hormuzd Rassam excavated Ashurbanipal’s North Palace and found another great mass of tablets, together with the Lion Hunt reliefs.

The tablets were packed and shipped to the British Museum, where finds from the two palaces became mixed, so it is often impossible to tell exactly where a tablet was found. Later excavations at Nineveh, by George Smith in 1873–1874, Rassam again in 1878–1882 and others, added thousands more fragments. Together they form the Kuyunjik collection, which today numbers more than 30,000 tablets and fragments.

Reading the tablets

When the tablets arrived in London, Akkadian cuneiform was only beginning to be deciphered. Scholars such as Henry Rawlinson and Edward Hincks used the library’s bilingual word lists and sign lists, which ancient scribes had compiled for their own students, as keys to the language. In 1857 a famous test by the Royal Asiatic Society asked four scholars to translate a newly found Assyrian inscription independently; their versions broadly agreed, showing that decipherment had succeeded.

The library’s greatest public moment came in 1872. George Smith, a self-taught assistant at the British Museum, was sorting fragments when he recognised an account of a great flood, a ship resting on a mountain and a bird sent out to find dry land. On 3 December 1872 he announced to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London that he had found a Babylonian flood story strikingly similar to that of Noah. The Daily Telegraph paid for him to return to Nineveh, where in 1873 he found more fragments of the story.

The discovery caused a sensation in Victorian Britain. It showed that biblical stories had ancient Near Eastern parallels and opened a new field of comparative study that continues today.

Myths and facts

• Myth: it was the world’s first library. Earlier collections of texts existed at Ebla in Syria, Hattusa in Anatolia and Assur, among others. Ashurbanipal’s library is the largest and best-known surviving one from the ancient Near East.
• Myth: the fire of 612 BC baked all the tablets and saved them. Fire may have hardened some tablets, but many had already been baked when they were made. Burial under collapsed buildings was just as important.
• Myth: Ashurbanipal personally wrote the tablets. He claimed to be literate and probably was, but the tablets were copied by professional scribes in his service.
• Myth: the library inspired the Library of Alexandria. There is no direct evidence of this link, although both reflect the ambition of rulers to gather all knowledge.

Timeline

• c. 1100 BC: Tiglath-Pileser I keeps a collection of tablets at Assur.
• 672 BC: Esarhaddon names Ashurbanipal crown prince of Assyria.
• 668 BC: Ashurbanipal becomes king of Assyria.
• 648 BC: Babylon falls to Ashurbanipal; tablets are confiscated from Babylonian scholars.
• c. 631 BC: Ashurbanipal’s reign ends.
• 612 BC: Nineveh is sacked; the library is buried in the ruins.
• 1849–1851: Layard finds tablets in the Southwest Palace at Nineveh.
• 1853–1854: Rassam finds tablets in Ashurbanipal’s North Palace.
• 1857: Royal Asiatic Society test confirms the decipherment of Akkadian.
• 3 December 1872: George Smith announces the discovery of the Babylonian Flood story.

Why it matters

Without the Library of Ashurbanipal, much of Mesopotamian literature and science would be unknown. Its tablets taught modern scholars to read cuneiform, restored lost works such as Gilgamesh to world literature, and revealed how ancient people tried to understand their world through signs, ritual and learning. Work on the collection continues today, as scholars join fragments and publish texts that have not been read for more than 2,600 years.