I’ve blogged about destroyed libraries before. I will forever mourn the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in particular, because we will never know for sure what knowledge the world lost in that massive fire, and how much more advanced the world might have been had Julius Caeser not set it ablaze. As Wikipedia’s List of Destroyed Libraries demonstrates, it was not the first library lost to us, nor was it the last. And not all of these losses were the fault of man, either. Floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, and simply the sands of time have also taken many from us.
So I was delighted when I stumbled upon the story of a library that was hundreds of years older than the Library of Alexandria, that has managed to survive precisely because of Man’s efforts to erase it from history. I do love a good plot twist, don’t you? Especially when good triumphs over evil.
The Library of Ashurbanipal was established sometime in the 7th century BCE, in Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, in the region of Mesopotamia, by King Sennacherib, and later expanded by King Ashurbanipal, often considered the last great king of the Assyrian Empire. It consisted of over 100,000 cuneiform tablets at its height. They were housed in their royal palaces in what is now the archeological site called Kouyunjik, which is located in present day Northern Iraq, within the city of Mosul.
Ashurbanipal was pretty proud of the fact that he was the only Assyrian king who could read and write cuneiform. We know this because he bragged about it. In writing. In cuneiform. According to Wikipedia, his inscription can be translated like so:
“I, Ashurbanipal, king of the universe, on whom the gods have bestowed intelligence, who has acquired penetrating acumen for the most recondite details of scholarly erudition (none of my predecessors having any comprehension of such matters), I have placed these tablets for the future in the library at Nineveh for my life and for the well-being of my soul, to sustain the foundations of my royal name.”
He sent scribes throughout Mesopotamia to collect tablets for his library. Writings from temples, medical texts, literary epics, astronomical records including a list of every observed lunar eclipse for centuries, omen lists, hymns, dictionaries of various languages, a catalog of the sounds that different animals make, magic spells, and mathematical tables. And his library had the first known very detailed catalog system, so when a tablet was taken to be studied, you knew exactly in what room and on what shelf it should be placed upon its return.
The library also includes King Ashurbanipal’s letters to his governors, and reports from his spies on the frontier, along with important legal documents of the era. It also includes construction information, such as the recipe for glass, and it is the only reason the Babylonian Creation Myth, the Enûma Eliš, has survived to the modern era. Within its collection of folk tales has been found a predecessor of one of the tales of One Thousand and One Nights.
The thing about these clay tablets is that they were meant to be reused. They weren’t fired in a kiln. So, if you needed a tablet, you could just scrape one smooth and stamp new symbols into its soft surface. And if these tablets got wet, the information would easily dissolve. Most clay tablets from 2700 years ago have not survived to the present day, and this library would not have done so, were it not, ironically enough, for concerted efforts to destroy it.
I’ll be the first to admit that there were plenty of good reasons to want to destroy King Ashurbanipal’s legacy. He was a brutal man. He believed that he was the mortal representative of the God Ashur, and as such he was obligated to expand Assyria, because lands outside its border were threats to the cosmic and divine order of things. He firmly believed in omens, and therefore thought all forms of cruelty were justified, including the flaying, dismemberment, impalement, torture, and humiliation of civilians. Some of the reliefs in Ashurbanipal’s palace include depictions of dead female bodies, and in one case, Assyrian soldiers ripping open a pregnant Arab woman. Despite all this, it is believed that he died a natural death at around the age of 53, around the year 631 BC. Scholars believe Ashurbanipal is most likely King Nebuchadnezzar from the Book of Judith in the Old Testament.
In 612 BC, about 19 years after Ashurbanipal’s Death, during the Battle of Nineveh, which ultimately put an end to the Assyrian Empire, the Medes, Scythians, and Babylonians broke into the palace and set it on fire. They were attempting to erase the empire entirely, but in so doing, they actually preserved the library’s clay tablets, because the fire acted as a kiln, and the tablets hardened like pottery. Granted, many cracked to pieces, but they became impervious to water and weather, and even though the building collapsed above them, they remained stacked for centuries underground, until their rediscovery.
In 1849 an English diplomat, Austen Henry Layard, was excavating the palace ruins and found one of the library rooms, and it was knee deep in broken clay tablets. Back then, we had yet to decipher Cuneiform, so he simply crated 30,000 of them up and sent them off to the British Museum in London. (Not for nothing, but you Brits sure know how to coopt people’s antiquities without blinking an eye.)
It turned out to be the largest surviving body of Mesopotamian literature still in existence. 1n 1872, once Cuneiform had been figured out, George Smith was looking through the fragments when he discovered Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which has sent shock waves through the realm of biblical studies.
This story, written on a tablet in 612 BC, tells the story of a man building a boat, animals brought aboard, a great flood, and doves sent out to find dry land. It’s a Mesopotamian poem that predates Genesis by about 1000 years, and the narrative is within a story about a king of Uruk, who fails to outrun death.
Now all those clay tablets are being digitized. Preserved for all to see. Even though Ashurbanipal was a despicable human, he felt that his library was the signature accomplishment of his reign, and I heartily agree. For that reason alone, it does give me great pleasure to think that those people who tried so hard to destroy his legacy have, in fact, kept it alive for 26 centuries.
Three cheers for the thwarting of censorship! Having said that, though, in 2016, many of the tablets that had remained at the archeological site were destroyed by ISIS. For that, I have no words.
Sources:
The greatest library in the world was built by this ruthless king
Wikipedia–Library of Ashurbanipal
Wikipedia–Book of Judith–Identification of Nebuchadnezzar with Ashurbanipal
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