Ashurbanipal

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Ashurbanipal

668 - CIRCA 627 b.c.e.

King of Assyria

The Royal Library. Digging in mounds of ancient Assyria during the 1840s, the British explorer Austen Henry Layard discovered a library of some thirty thousand fragments of cuneiform tablets, which had been preserved because they were baked in the conflagration that swept the city when it was sacked in 612 b.c.e. When pieced together these fragments constitute a royal library of more than two thousand tablets. The library also originally included three hundred wooden and ivory writing boards covered with a thin layer of wax and inscribed with cuneiform texts. The cuneiform texts are no longer preserved.

Tablet Acquisition. The tablets in the library were acquired during the reign of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria. The monarch, one of the few Mesopotamian rulers who claimed to be literate, ordered his courtiers to search for copies of texts throughout the realm. Tablets and writing boards were taken, sometimes by force, from temples, other royal libraries, and private collections. Ashurbanipal ordered that complete editions of omen series, rituals, lexical texts (lists of signs or words), and literary texts be assembled. No new compositions were commissioned. Commentaries to explain the meaning of older traditional texts were also found in the library.

The Scholar’s Collection. The collection was not assembled to be used as a lending library. It was a private library for the professional use of the king’s advisers. As the gods’ trustee, the king had to manage his realm in accord with their wishes, but without divine direction; the gods were unfathomable, “like a sealed beer-barrel.” Thus, the tablets in Ashurbanipal’s library were a royal reference guide to provide insight into the supernatural. If used properly, they would allow the scholars and priests resident in his court to communicate with the gods and maintain the tenuous rapport that existed between man and god.

Library Use. The king was not perfect. He was human. (Only a few Mesopotamian kings ever claimed to be divine, and none of these rulers lived in the first millennium b.c.e., when great libraries were founded.) The king’s mistakes, whether intentional or unintentional, could be interpreted by the gods with prejudice and could provoke divine displeasure or anger. Such misguided actions (which modern people call sins) would not be punishable without warning. The king would be given preliminary notice in the form of portents, dreams, oracles, and visions sent as premonitions of divine displeasure. If these divine signals were correctly interpreted through the texts found in the library, the ruler could identify his mistake, avoid punishment by atoning for his actions, make sacrifices to appease the gods, and instruct his exorcists to prepare rituals to avoid calamity.