Arts: Arts and Culture

Mesopotamia’s Oldest Library: The Library of Ashurbanipal

ISABEL WEST | ARTS EDITOR

In the heart of the British Museum’s Mesopotamia section a number of clay tablets, discovered in the ruins of Nineveh, are displayed. These clay tablets were collected by the King, Ashurbanipal, and formed the first systematically collected and catalogued library in the ancient Middle East.

The Library was lost for over 2,000 years until the mid-1800s, when Briton Sir Austen Henry Layard discovered the palace of Sennacherib. In total, over 30,000 clay tablets were brought back from a series of digs that spanned several years after Layard’s initial discovery. The clay tablets are all that survived of this library after a fire in Nineveh destroyed the paper books but preserved the clay tablets as many were baked harder, ensuring their preservation.

Ashurbanipal was the King of the Neo-Assyrian empire, which at the time of his reign (669–c. 631 BC) was the largest empire in the world and Nineveh, it’s capital, was the largest city. Ashurbanipal was a fierce leader, but also a patron of the arts and a scholar. His palaces were decorated with carved reliefs of events, with many depictions of the King himself with a writing stylus tucked into his belt.

The majority of the texts recovered from the Library were omen texts as Assyrian scholarship focused on understanding the will of the gods. The omen texts were based on observations of events; on behaviours of men, animals and plants, and on the motions of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars. The King also collected many incantations, prayers, rituals, fables, and proverbs including the traditional Mesopotamian epics such as the stories of Creation and the Epic of Gilgamesh, now considered one of the oldest literary works in the world. The Library wasn’t just used for scholarly purposes but also for the King’s own personal literary interests, in fact many bear the royal mark of ownership. Over the years, Ashurbanipal sent out his scribes to collect or copy texts from other temple libraries and ended up with a range of medical, lexical, historical, religious, astronomical, and divination records. Also recovered are some folk tales such as The Poor Man of Nippur which is regarded as a precursor of one of the Thousand and One Nights tales of Baghdad. These texts have been translated from cuneiform; the most widespread and historically significant writing system in the ancient Middle East. They were written by pressing a reed pen into soft clay and these tablets were used to record everything from day-to-day administration (like the ones the King kept detailing his training) to science and literature.

The King’s vast collection reflected the rich culture of Mesopotamia which drastically changed the world due to the inventions of the concept of time, maths, maps, and writing. The discovery of the King’s Library similarly changed historians’ conception of ancient Assyria as previous knowledge was based on stories in the Bible or from classical historians. Although many tablets have been found at other sites over the last 170 years, Ashurbanipal’s tablets remain the primary source for most of what we know about Mesopotamian scholarly and literary work today.

Source: British Museum Blog