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reign 668-627 BCEReputable source · 2 sourcesWell documented

The Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh

A literate king built the ancient world's largest library, and its destruction by fire is exactly what preserved it

On the timeline · around reign 668-627 BCE · The Assyrian EmpireThe Assyrian EmpireNeo-Babylonian Babylon and the Persian ConquestThe Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh850 BCE800 BCE750 BCE700 BCE650 BCE600 BCE

Quick facts

Reign
668-627 BCE
Library location
Nineveh
Contents
Literature, religion, medicine, astronomy, divination texts
Preserved by
The 612 BCE fire that destroyed Nineveh

What happened

Ashurbanipal, the last powerful king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, ruled from 668 to 627 BCE and was unusual among Mesopotamian kings for being personally literate. He assembled a vast library at Nineveh, the largest collection of cuneiform tablets in the world at that time, gathering texts on literature, religion, medicine, astronomy, and divination, including the Standard Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The library was buried when Nineveh was sacked and burned in 612 BCE, but because its tablets were clay rather than paper, the heat of the fire that destroyed the city actually baked and hardened them, and the collapsing walls of the building sealed and preserved them until British and Iraqi excavations rediscovered the collection in the 19th century.

Why it matters

Ashurbanipal's library is the reason so much of Mesopotamian literature, law, and science survives at all; the same fire that ended the Neo-Assyrian Empire is what accidentally fired the clay tablets hard enough to survive twenty-six centuries underground. Without this library, the Epic of Gilgamesh's flood tablet, among thousands of other texts, would likely be lost entirely.

How we know

Tens of thousands of tablets and fragments from the library were recovered during 19th-century excavations at Nineveh and are now held primarily at the British Museum, where their content and the library's destruction context are documented directly from the physical tablets and the burned building layers they were found in.

Sources

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Part of a timelineAncient Mesopotamia30 events · The land between the rivers where farming villages became cities, cuneiform became writing, and kings first wrote their laws downView all →