16. The library of Ashurbanipal contained over 30,000 tablets from Ancient Mesopotamia
Ashurbanipal (reigned 668 – circa 627 BC) was the last great ruler of the Neo Assyrian Empire. The empire, founded in Mesopotamia in the 10th century BC, became the world’s biggest state until that date, and dominated much of the Middle East until its collapse in 609 BC. Ashurbanipal was a great military commander, but combined that with an intellectual bent that was rare for that era. In addition to being literate and mastering multiple languages, Ashurbanipal was a passionate collector of tablets and texts. He hired scribes to copy texts, sent others across the empire to find more, seized texts from defeated enemies as booty, and was not above using military threats to convince neighbors to send him texts from their countries.
In 1849, British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard hit the jackpot when he discovered Ashurbanipal’s library in Ninveh, in today’s Iraq. In it were over 30,000 tablets and writing boards – many of them severely fragmented, but many still recoverable and legible. They included laws, diplomatic correspondence, financial and religious documents, plus texts on medicine, astronomy, and literature. One of the most significant finds in the library was The Epic of Gilgamesh, a masterpiece of ancient Babylonian poetry dating to the third millennium BC, considered to be humanity’s oldest literary work.