3. The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal was so impressive that when Alexander the Great saw it, he demanded that he have a library built for him.
The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal was commissioned by King Ashurbanipal, the last of his dynasty. He wanted a library fit for royalty and one that would present him as an enlightened and educated man. It was built close to the modern-day city of Mosul, Iraq, and was, for the time, a huge project. The King donated his personal collection to the library, making key works available to priests and scholars, and over the years, the collection grew in size and breadth. Most works were collected from across Mesopotamia, above all from Babylonia, with text copied from parchment onto clay tablets.
Around 30,000 such tablets were discovered by archaeologists in the 19th century. The undoubted highlight is The Epic of Gilgamesh, a masterpiece of Babylonian poetry and the oldest-surviving work of great literature anywhere in the world. In 612BC, the city of Nineveh, where the Library of Ashurbanipal was located, was raided. The palace was burned down, engulfing the library too. Fortunately, while countless wax manuscripts would have been lost, the clay tablets survived the destruction. Today, the Ashurbanipal Library Project continues working to catalog all of the 30,943 tablets found where the library once stood.