Library of Ashurbanipal

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Library of Ashurbanipal
Location	Nineveh, capital of Assyria
Established	7th century BC
Collection size	over 20,000 cuneiform tablets[1]

The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, named after Ashurbanipal, the last great king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, is a collection of thousands of clay tablets and fragments containing texts of all kinds (royal inscriptions, chronicles, mythological and religious texts, contracts, royal grants and decrees, royal letters, assorted administrative documents, and even what would be today called classified documents, reports from spies, ambassadors, etc.) from the 7th century BC. The materials were found in the archaeological site of Kuyunjik (then ancient Nineveh, capital of Assyria) in northern Mesopotamia. The site would be found in modern day Iraq.

It is an archaeological discovery credited to Austen Henry Layard; most texts were taken to England and can now be found in the British Museum.

The ancient library actually comprised several smaller collections. A first discovery was made in late 1849 in the so-called South-West Palace, which was the Royal Palace of king Sennacherib (705 – 681 BC). Three years later, Hormuzd Rassam, Layard's assistant, discovered a similar "library" in the palace of King Ashurbanipal (668 - 627 BC), on the opposite side of the mound. Unfortunately, no record was taken for the findings, and soon after reaching Europe, the tablets appeared to have been irreparably mixed with each other and with tablets originating from other sites. Thus, it is almost impossible today to reconstruct the original contents of each of the two main "libraries".

The whole set is known as the "Library of Ashurbanipal" as it is known that this king was literate and was a passionate collector of texts and tablets. He believed that the possession of a library would lead to good governance. He hired scholars and scribes to copy texts, mainly from Babylonian sources. Many of these would have been inscribed onto wax boards which because of their organic nature have been lost.Kingship. The texts were principally written in Akkadian in the cuneiform script. Many of the texts deal with divination, but also with medicine, astronomy and literature. The epic of Gilgamesh,a masterpiece of ancient Babylonian poetry, was also found in the library.The library was destroyed in 612 B.C.by the Medes, an ancient Persian race.A great fire must have ravaged the library which caused the clay cuneiform tablets to become partially baked. This act of destruction paradoxically helped with the preservation of the tablets.

The British Museum’s collections database counts 30,943 "tablets" in the entire Nineveh library collection, and the Trustees of the Museum propose to issue an updated catalog as part of the Ashurbanipal Library Project. If all smaller fragments that actually belong to the same text are deducted, however, it is likely that the "library" originally included some 10,000 texts in all.The original library documents however, which would have included leather scrolls,wax boards and possibly papyri, contained perhaps a much broader spectrum of knowledge than what we know from the surviving clay tablet cuneiform texts.

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