An Archaeological Find that Unearthed an Ancient Library
Ashurbanipal (reigned 668 – circa 627 BC) was Assyria’s last great ruler. Founded in Mesopotamia in the tenth century BC, the Neo Assyrian Empire became the world’s biggest state until then, and dominated the Middle East before it collapsed in 609 BC. Ashurbanipal was not just a great military commander, but also an intellectual, which was rare for rulers back then. He was literate, mastered multiple languages, and passionately collected texts and tablets. Ashurbanipal hired scribes to copy writings, and sent others across the empire to find more. He seized texts from defeated enemies as booty, and used military threats to convince neighbors to send him writings from their countries.
British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard hit an archaeological jackpot in 1849 when he discovered Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh, in today’s Iraq. It contained more than 30,000 tablets and writing boards. Many were severely fragmented, but many were still recoverable and legible. They included diplomatic correspondence, laws, financial and religious documents, plus texts on literature, medicine, and astronomy. The greatest archaeological find in the library was The Epic of Gilgamesh. A masterpiece of ancient Babylonian poetry, it dates to the third millennium BC, and is considered to be humanity’s oldest known literary work.