The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, named after Ashurbanipal, the last great king of the Assyrian Empire, is a collection of more than 30,000 clay tablets and fragments containing texts of all kinds from the 7th century BCE, including texts in various languages. Among its holdings was the famous Epic of Gilgamesh.[2]
Ashurbanipal's Library gives modern historians information regarding people of the ancient Near East. In his Outline of History, H. G. Wells calls the library "the most precious source of historical material in the world."[3]
The library is an archaeological discovery credited to Austen Henry Layard; most tablets were taken to England and can now be found in the British Museum, but the first discovery was made in late 1849 in the so-called South-West Palace, which was the Royal Palace of king Sennacherib (705–681 BCE).
Three years later, Hormuzd Rassam, Layard's assistant, discovered a similar library in the palace of King Ashurbanipal (668–627 BCE), on the opposite side of the mound. Unfortunately, no record was made of 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.[6]
Contents
Ashurbanipal was known as a tenacious martial commander; however, he was also a recognized intellectual who was literate, and a passionate collector of texts and tablets.[7] In collecting texts for his library, he wrote to cities and centers of learning across Mesopotamia, instructing them to send him copies of all work written in the region.[8] As an apprentice scribe he mastered both the Akkadian and the Sumerian languages.[7] He sent scribes into every region of the Neo-Assyrian Empire to collect ancient texts. He hired scholars and scribes to copy texts, mainly from Babylonian sources.[4][5]
Account of Ashurbanipal's campaign in Egypt against Taharqua (translation of the cuneiform, from the Rassam cylinder of Ashurbanipal).
Ashurbanipal used war loot as a means of stocking his library. Because he was known for being cruel to his enemies, Ashurbanipal was able to use threats to gain materials from Babylonia and surrounding areas.[11] Ashurbanipal's intense interest in collecting divination texts was one of his driving motivations in collecting works for his library. His original motive may have been to "gain possession of rituals and incantations that were vital to maintain his royal power."[12]
The royal library consists of approximately 30,000 tablets and writing boards with the majority of them being severely fragmented.[13] Many of these tablets contain a stamp stating that they belonged to his palace.[14] It can be gleaned from the conservation of the fragments that the number of tablets that existed in the library at the time of destruction was close to two thousand and the number of writing boards within the library can be placed at a total of three hundred.[13] The majority of the tablet corpus (about 6,000) included colloquial compositions in the form of legislation, foreign correspondences and engagements, aristocratic declarations, and financial matters.[13] The remaining texts contained divinations, omens, incantations and hymns to various gods, while others were concerned with medicine, astronomy, and literature. For all these texts in the library only ten contain expressive rhythmic literary works such as epics and myths.[13]
The Babylonian texts of the Ashurbanipal libraries can be separated into two different groups: the literary compositions such as divination, religious, lexical, medical, mathematical and historical texts as well as epics and myths, on the one hand, and the legal documents on the other hand. The group of the legal documents covers letters, contracts and administrative texts and consists of 1128 Babylonian tablets and fragments. Within the group of the literary compositions, of which 1331 tablets and fragments are classified so far, the divination texts can further be differentiated between 759 so-called library texts, such as tablets of the various omen series and their commentaries, and 636 so-called archival texts such as omen reports, oracle enquiries and the like.[15]
Another group of literary texts is the lexical texts and sign lists. There are twenty fragments of different tablets with archaic cuneiform signs arranged according to the syllabary A, whereas one is arranged according to the syllabary B. The Assyrian scribes of the Ashurbanipal Libraries needed sign lists to be able to read the old inscriptions and most of these lists were written by Babylonian scribes. The other groups of Babylonian written texts in Nineveh are the epics and myths and the historical texts with 1.4% each. There is only one mathematical text that is said to be excavated at Nineveh.[15]
The texts were principally written in Akkadian in the cuneiform script; however many of the tablets do not have an exact derivation and it is often difficult to ascertain their original homeland. Many of the tablets are indeed composed in the Neo-Babylonian script, but many were also known to be written in Assyrian as well.[13]
The tablets were often organized according to shape: four-sided tablets were for financial transactions, while round tablets recorded agricultural information.(In this era, some written documents were also on wood and others on wax tablets.) Tablets were separated according to their contents and placed in different rooms: government, history, law, astronomy, geography, and so on. The contents were identified by colored marks or brief written descriptions, and sometimes by the "incipit", or the first few words that began the text.[2]
Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BCE by a coalition of Babylonians, Scythians and Medes, an ancient Iranian people. It is believed that during the burning of the palace, a great fire must have ravaged the library, causing the clay cuneiform tablets to become partially baked.[17] This potentially destructive event helped preserve the tablets. As well as texts on clay tablets, some of the texts may have been inscribed onto wax boards which, because of their organic nature, have been lost.
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 catalogue as part of the Ashurbanipal Library Project.[19] If all smaller fragments that actually belong to the same text are deducted, 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 that known from the surviving clay tablet cuneiform texts. A large share of Ashurbanipal's libraries consisted of writing-boards and not clay tablets.[15]
Ashurbanipal Library Project
Created in collaboration with the University of Mosul and funded by the Townley group, the British Museum has been compiling a catalogue record of artifacts from Ashurbanipal's library since 2002. The goal is to document the library in as much detail as possible in texts and images including sign-transliterations, hand-drawn copies, translations, and high-quality digital images.
The project was undertaken in three stages with published results coming out in 2003, 2004, and 2014. Dr. Jeanette C. Fincke studied ancient oriental studies, Hittitology, and Egyptology at the University of Hamburg and was involved heavily during the first two stages. During the first stage, Fincke compiled an authoritative list of the 3500 library tablets in Babylonian scripts.[20] During the second stage, Fincke also compiled several astrological texts from Nineveh. The third stage was completed with the help of professor Riekel Borger, who died mid-catalogue in December 2010, and completed with the help of Andrew Mellon Foundation from 2009 to 2013 under the direction of Jon Taylor. During this last stage, the library produced high resolution digital images of all the library tables. Each image is created using 14 images which allows a virtual two-dimensional representation of the three-dimensional tablets. The images have been released on the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative website and British Museum Collections online site.[20]
As of 2020, the project has been focusing on two endeavors: the first is concerned with reconstructing medical texts from cataloged tablets, and the second is a project that is using scribes notations at the bottom of each tablet to extrapolate the scale and scope of the tablet collection.[21] The catalogue is still being updated and was made possible by contribution of material from several colleagues and projects including: State Archives of Assyria, Cuneiform Commentaries Project, Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts, and Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period.
Akkadian literature is the ancient literature written in the Akkadian language in Mesopotamia during the period spanning the Middle Bronze Age to the Iron Age.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia. The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, some of which may date back to the Third Dynasty of Ur. These independent stories were later used as source material for a combined epic in Akkadian. The first surviving version of this combined epic, known as the "Old Babylonian" version, dates back to the 18th century BC and is titled after its incipit, Shūtur eli sharrī. Only a few tablets of it have survived. The later Standard Babylonian version compiled by Sîn-lēqi-unninni dates to somewhere between the 13th to the 10th centuries BC and bears the incipit Sha naqba īmuru. Approximately two-thirds of this longer, twelve-tablet version have been recovered. Some of the best copies were discovered in the library ruins of the 7th-century BC Assyrian king Ashurbanipal.
Sippar was an ancient Near Eastern Sumerian and later Babylonian city on the east bank of the Euphrates river. Its tell is located at the site of modern Tell Abu Habbah near Yusufiyah in Iraq's Baghdad Governorate, some 69 km (43 mi) north of Babylon and 30 km (19 mi) southwest of Baghdad. The city's ancient name, Sippar, could also refer to its sister city, Sippar-Amnanum ; a more specific designation for the city here referred to as Sippar was Sippar-Yahrurum.
Hormuzd Rassam was an Assyriologist and author. He is known for making a number of important archaeological discoveries from 1877 to 1882, including the clay tablets that contained the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's oldest notable literature. He is widely believed to be the first-known Middle Eastern and Assyrian archaeologist from the Ottoman empire. He emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he was naturalized as a British citizen, settling in Brighton. He represented the government as a diplomat, helping to free British diplomats from captivity in Ethiopia.
In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age.
Ashurbanipal was the king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 669 BC to his death in 631. He is generally remembered as the last great king of Assyria. Ashurbanipal inherited the throne as the favored heir of his father Esarhaddon; his 38-year reign was among the longest of any Assyrian king. Though sometimes regarded as the apogee of ancient Assyria, his reign also marked the last time Assyrian armies waged war throughout the ancient Near East and the beginning of the end of Assyrian dominion over the region.
George Smith was a pioneering English Assyriologist who first discovered and translated the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest-known written works of literature.
Enūma Eliš is the Babylonian creation myth. It was recovered by English archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in 1849 in the ruined Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. A form of the myth was first published by English Assyriologist George Smith in 1876; active research and further excavations led to near completion of the texts and improved translation.
Assyriology, also known as Cuneiform studies or Ancient Near East studies, is the archaeological, anthropological, historical, and linguistic study of the cultures that used cuneiform writing. The field covers Pre Dynastic Mesopotamia, Sumer, the early Sumero-Akkadian city-states, the Akkadian Empire, Ebla, the Akkadian and Imperial Aramaic speaking states of Assyria, Babylonia and the Sealand Dynasty, the migrant foreign dynasties of southern Mesopotamia, including the Gutians, Amorites, Kassites, Arameans, Suteans and Chaldeans. Assyriology can be included to cover Neolithic pre-Dynastic cultures dating to as far back as 8000 BC through to the Islamic Conquest of the 7th century AD so the topic is significantly wider than that implied by the root "Assyria".
Atra-Hasis is an 18th-century BC Akkadian epic, recorded in various versions on clay tablets, named for its protagonist, Atrahasis. The Atra-Hasis tablets include both a creation myth and one of three surviving Babylonian flood myths. The name "Atra-Hasis" also appears, as king of Shuruppak in the times before a flood, on one of the Sumerian King Lists.
Kutha, Cuthah, Cuth or Cutha, modern Tell Ibrahim, is an archaeological site in Babil Governorate, Iraq. The site of Tell Uqair is just to the north. The city was occupied from the Old Akkadian period until the Hellenistic period. The city-god of Kutha was Meslamtaea, related to Nergal, and his temple there was named E-Meslam.
The Department of the Middle East, numbering some 330,000 works, forms a significant part of the collections of the British Museum, and the world's largest collection of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq. The collections represent the civilisations of the ancient Near East and its adjacent areas.
The Neo-Assyrian Empire was the fourth and penultimate stage of ancient Assyrian history. Beginning with the accession of Adad-nirari II in 911 BC, the Neo-Assyrian Empire grew to dominate the ancient Near East throughout much of the 8th and 7th centuries BC, becoming the largest empire in history up to that point. Because of its geopolitical dominance and ideology based in world domination, the Neo-Assyrian Empire is by many researchers regarded to have been the first world empire in history. It influenced other empires of the ancient world culturally, administratively, and militarily, including the Babylonians, the Achaemenids, and the Seleucids. At its height, the empire was the strongest military power in the world and ruled over all of Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt, as well as parts of Anatolia, Arabia and modern-day Iran and Armenia.
The ancient temple-complex, perhaps of Huzirina, now represented by the tell of Sultantepe, is a Late Assyrian archeological site at the edge of the Neo-Assyrian empire, now in Şanlıurfa Province, Turkey. Sultantepe is about 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) south of Urfa on the road to Harran. The modern village of Sultantepe Köyü lies at the base of the tell.
Agum II was possibly a Kassite ruler who may have become the 8th or more likely the 9th king of the third Babylonian dynasty sometime after Babylonia was defeated and sacked by the Hittite king Mursilis I in 1595 BC, establishing the Kassite Dynasty which was to last in Babylon until 1155 BC. A later tradition, the Marduk Prophecy, gives 24 years after a statue was taken, before it returned of its own accord to Babylon, suggesting a Kassite occupation beginning around 1507 BC.
Ashurbanipal, also known as the Ashurbanipal Monument or the Statue of Ashurbanipal, is a bronze sculpture by Fred Parhad, an artist of Assyrian descent. It is located in the Civic Center of San Francisco, California, in the United States. The 15-foot (4.6 m) statue depicting the Assyrian king of the same name was commissioned by the Assyrian Foundation for the Arts and presented to the City of San Francisco in 1988 as a gift from the Assyrian people. The sculpture reportedly cost $100,000 and was the first "sizable" bronze statue of Ashurbanipal. It is administered by the City and County of San Francisco and the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Mesopotamian mythology refers to the myths, religious texts, and other literature that comes from the region of ancient Mesopotamia which is a historical region of Western Asia, situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system that occupies the area of present-day Iraq. In particular the societies of Sumer, Akkad, and Assyria, all of which existed shortly after 3000 BCE and were mostly gone by 400 CE. These works were primarily preserved on stone or clay tablets and were written in cuneiform by scribes. Several lengthy pieces have survived erosion and time, some of which are considered the oldest stories in the world, and have given historians insight into Mesopotamian ideology and cosmology.
The Rassam cylinder is a cuneiform cylinder, forming a prism with ten faces, written by Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in 643 BCE. The 7th century BCE cylinder was discovered in the North Palace of Nineveh by Hormuzd Rassam in 1854, hence its name. It is located in the British Museum.
The Assyrian conquest of Egypt covered a relatively short period of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 673 to 663 BCE. The conquest of Egypt not only placed a land of great cultural prestige under Assyrian rule but also brought the Neo-Assyrian Empire to its greatest extent.
1 2 Polastron, Lucien X.: "Books On Fire: The Tumultuous Story Of The World's Great Libraries" 2007, p. 3, Thames & Hudson Ltd, London
↑ Menant, Joachim: "La bibliothèque du palais de Ninive" 1880, p. 33, Paris: E. Leroux, "Quels sont maintenant ces livres qui étaient recueillis et conservés avec tant de soin par les rois d'Assyrie dans ce précieux dépôt? Nous y trouvons des livres sur l'histoire, la religion, les sciences naturelles, les mathématiques, l'astronomie, la grammaire, les lois et les coutumes; ..."
↑ Taylor, Jon (2022), "History of the project", Ashurbanipal Library Project, The Ashurbanipal Library Project, Department of the Middle East, The British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG, 2022. http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/asbp/abouttheproject/historyoftheproject/. Retrieved 2023-03-21
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Tablet containing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh (Tablet 11 depicting the Deluge), now part of the holdings of the British Museum
"Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa" with astrological forecasts. British Museum reference K.160 .
Tablet of synonyms. British Museum reference K.4375 .
Prism of Sennacherib, containing records of his military campaigns, culminating with Babylon's destruction. British Museum BM 91032. [23]
