Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria (reigned 669 to c. 631 BC), ruled the largest empire the world had yet seen and made an unusual boast for a Near Eastern monarch: that he could read — the whole scribal art, “the craft of the sage Adapa,” down to obscure tablets from before the Flood. He meant to own everything worth reading. His agents scoured Babylonia’s temples for texts to copy or confiscate; teams of scribes standardised editions; and the palaces at Nineveh filled with the result — the systematically collected knowledge of Mesopotamia: omens, rituals, medicine, mathematics, lexicons, letters, and literature. Modern counts run to some 30,000 tablets and fragments, the greatest library of the ancient Near East and arguably the first true research library anywhere.
The preserving fire
Assyria’s fall was swift and total: in 612 BC a coalition of Babylonians and Medes stormed Nineveh and burned it, ending the empire within a decade. And here clay differs from every later medium: the fire that would have annihilated a library of papyrus or parchment baked the unfired tablets hard, and the collapsing palace sealed them under rubble for two and a half millennia. The catastrophe was the preservation — the best-read ruin in antiquity, filed by disaster.
British-sponsored digs under Austen Henry Layard and his Assyrian-born successor Hormuzd Rassam uncovered the palace chambers and their tablet heaps from 1849, shipping them by the crate to the British Museum, where the infant science of Assyriology learned to read cuneiform largely from this one hoard.
The tablet that shook the pews
The library’s most famous moment came at a workbench. In 1872 the self-taught conservator George Smith — a banknote engraver hired for his uncanny eye for tablet joins — pieced together a fragment describing a ship grounded on a mountain, a dove sent out and returning: a Flood narrative, centuries older than any biblical manuscript, embedded in what became known as the Epic of Gilgamesh. By the famous (and cheerfully unverifiable) museum anecdote, Smith leapt up, shouted that he was the first man to read the text after two thousand years of oblivion — and began removing his clothes. His public lecture, with Gladstone in the audience, made front pages: Genesis had a Babylonian elder cousin, and Victorian certainties trembled accordingly. The Daily Telegraph funded Smith’s expedition to Nineveh, where — against odds that still embarrass probability — he found a missing portion of the Flood tablet within a week.
The library remains the backbone of what is known about Mesopotamian thought; tablets are still being joined and read, and the mound of Kuyunjik — battered in recent years by war and vandalism at Mosul — still holds unexcavated rooms. Ashurbanipal’s actual boast has aged into fact: his name lives, as he intended, by his tablets.