The Library of Ashurbanipal

Before the Library of Alexandria there was the Library of Ashurbanipal – an Assyrian king who collected the knowledge of ancient Mesopotamia under one roof. This incredible library was forgotten for millennia, and remains largely unknown even today. Yet it contained an abundance of texts that were influential across the ancient world, and bequeathed a debt to modernity that is rarely acknowledged. Ashurbanipal assembled his library at Nineveh in the seventh century BC. Today known as Mosul in Iraq, Nineveh was then the most splendid – and largest – city on Earth, and the seat of the Neo-Assyrian empire that spanned from Turkey in the west to Iran in the east. Although it is the Persians who are usually credited with constructing the first world empire, they built on foundations laid by the Assyrians, taking over their system of provinces, network of roads, and imperial ideology. Ashurbanipal, the empire’s penultimate king, ruled from 669 to 631 BC. He expanded the empire to its greatest extent by waging campaigns in all four directions. But although he portrayed himself as a formidable military leader, he had been trained as a scholar and, as the youngest son of his father Esarhaddon, was probably never meant to be king. As Ashurbanipal tells us in his ‘biography’ – one of his inscriptions that talks about his preparation for kingship and ascension to the throne – he was educated to the same level as his advisers, and could hold his own in a debate with them: I learned the craft of the sage Adapa, the secret [and] hidden lore of all the scribal arts. I am able to recognise celestial and terrestrial omens … I can resolve complex [mathematical] divisions [and] multiplications ... I have read cunningly written texts in obscure Sumerian [and] Akkadian that are difficult to interpret. I have carefully examined inscriptions on stone from before the Deluge that are sealed, stopped up, [and] confused. Ashurbanipal laid claim to knowledge as well as territory. He collected tablets recording ancient traditions stretching back more than a thousand years, as well as keeping the library up to date with the latest research, on topics spanning everything from religion and literature to magic and medicine. As such the library is a window not only into ancient Assyria but also the even more remote past. Ashurbanipal killing a lion. Relief from the North Palace, Nineveh. Trustees of the British Museum. Unlike the Library of Alexandria, Ashurbanipal’s library is not lost to history but sits on storage shelves at the British Museum. The ancient Mesopotamians wrote on clay tablets, a durable material that does not decay in the ground, nor is destroyed by fire. When Ashurbanipal’s library burned down in 612 BC, during the sacking of Nineveh by the Babylonians, the conflagration baked the tablets like a giant kiln, hardening the clay and thus preserving them. Consequently, 33,000 of its tablets have survived – so many that academics are still dealing with the backlog, deciphering tablets that were first discovered more than 150 years ago. Other tablets have turned up from all over Mesopotamia, and it is estimated that the number of written sources from the region stands at half a million. And all the while, new discoveries are continually being made as excavations resume in Iraq. There are simply too few historians trained to read them to be able to cope with the supply. Cuneiform culture Ancient Mesopotamia covered the area of modern-day Iraq. Mesopotamia is Greek, meaning ‘between the rivers’, referring to the Tigris and Euphrates. Many different peoples are known to have lived here over the centuries, beginning with the Sumerians (approximately 3500-2000 BC), followed by the Akkadians, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians. The region was a melting pot of different peoples but nevertheless was loosely held together by a shared literary and religious tradition, expressed, first and foremost, in the use of cuneiform writing. Cuneiform is a wedge-shaped script impressed into clay that started out pictographic, but developed to spell syllables. Because of this it could be used to write any language of the Near East – primarily the core Mesopotamian languages of Akkadian (an umbrella term for both the Assyrian and Babylonian dialects) and the more ancient language of Sumerian, but it was also adapted to write Hittite in Turkey, Ugaritic in Syria, Elamite in Iran, Urartian, and Old Persian. The sources for Mesopotamian cuneiform culture span from c.3400 BC to c.AD 80, meaning that more than half of human history in this region is written in the script. It is a period so vast that those who study it specialise not by decade or century but by millennium. Assyria fell in 612 BC and was absorbed into the Babylonian empire, which ruled for another 73 years, but even after Babylon fell to the Persians in 539 BC, cuneiform culture endured. Under foreign rulers, from the Persians to the Greeks and even the Parthians, priests of the Babylonian gods continued writing calculations in Akkadian and singing to their gods in Sumerian. Though famed in antiquity for its wealth and sophistication, and remembered in the Bible as the home of Abraham, the Tower of Babel, and the Whore of Babylon, for millennia Mesopotamia remained as distant as myth. All that was known came from garbled references by classical authors such as Herodotus, who wrote of Babylon’s hundred gates (it had eight), and from polemical Biblical writers, such as the authors of the Book of Kings who delighted in Sennacherib’s failure to conquer Jerusalem. The story of the Flood, from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Neo-Assyrian, Nineveh. Trustees of the British Museum. Then, after 2,000 years of silence, Mesopotamia emerged again in the 19th century. Sensational archaeological discoveries in the Middle East uncovered the cities of Assyrian kings such as Khorsabad in 1843 and Nineveh itself in 1847, with magnificent palaces and extraordinary sculptures and reliefs – which were taken to the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris. Babylon itself was excavated by German archaeologists from 1899 and its dazzling Ishtar gate of blue-glazed bricks reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. For the first time, readers of the Bible could look upon the faces of the conquerors who appeared in its pages, such as Shalmaneser III and Sennacherib, the Assyrian ruler who preceded Ashurbanipal’s father. Even more exciting were the written sources. Bricks inscribed with cuneiform had been transported to Europe as early as 1625, and trilingual inscriptions from Achaemenid Persepolis were published in the late 18th century, but the tablets from Ashurbanipal’s library were the first known bulk collection of cuneiform documents. The decipherment of cuneiform in 1857 allowed access to the conquest of Judah from Sennacherib’s perspective, Nebuchadnezzar boasting in his own words, and a Babylonian flood story strikingly similar to the one in Genesis. George Smith, a self-taught scholar who identified the latter at the British Museum, was so excited when he read the description of a ship resting on a hilltop and sending out a dove to look for dry land that it was reported: He said, ‘I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion.’ Setting the tablet on the table, he jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself! This story was recorded by E.A. Wallis Budge, a curator who had a longstanding dislike for Smith. Most likely intended to mock him, it had the opposite effect, capturing the exhilaration of those early days of discovery. Later identified as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Babylonian account of the deluge caused such a stir that, in 1873, the Daily Telegraph funded an expedition to search for the missing parts of the tablet, which had broken into pieces as the library burned in 612 BC. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack – small pieces of clay in a site containing thousands – but, extraordinarily, another version of the story was later found by excavators in Nineveh. The chamber of records The library emerged in stages, its tablets found in several places through a series of different excavations. Since Iraq was under Ottoman rule, the site was known as Kuyunjik, a Turkish word meaning ‘little sheep’, implying that it was then used as a place for grazing. But this great mound of earth in the suburbs of Mosul covered the ancient citadel of Nineveh. French and British expeditions began digging at Kuyunjik in 1842, but, after failing to find anything, the French abandoned the site in favour of other Assyrian cities, such as Khorsabad, the new capital founded by Sargon and quickly abandoned. The first major discovery at Nineveh was of what Sennacherib had himself called his ‘Palace without Rival’, found by the British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard and his local assistant Hormuzd Rassam, working for the British Museum, between 1847 and 1851. In 1850 they made a sensational find: while tunnelling, the excavators reached a room filled with cuneiform tablets, which Layard named ‘the chamber of records’: The first doorway, guarded by the fish-gods, led into two small chambers opening into each other, and once panelled with bas-reliefs, the greater part of which had been destroyed. On a few fragments, still standing against the walls, could be traced a city on the shore of a sea whose waters were covered with galleys. I shall call these chambers ‘the chambers of records’, for … they appear to have contained the decrees of the Assyrian kings as well as the archives of the empire ... The cuneiform characters on most of them were singularly sharp and well defined, but so minute in some instances as to be almost illegible without magnifying glass.