How did a brutal Assyrian king build a library of 30,000 tablets?
Ashurbanipal boasted of massacres, but he could read and write, and he ordered every city to send him copies of its books. A fire then partly baked the tablets and helped save them.
▶ Start the storyAshurbanipal built it by command. The last great king of the Assyrian Empire wrote to cities and centres of learning across Mesopotamia, instructing them to send him copies of all work written in the region, sent scribes into every region to collect ancient texts, and took more as war loot. The result, at Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, now within the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, was a collection of more than 30,000 clay tablets and fragments from the 7th century BCE, in various languages. Among its holdings was the Epic of Gilgamesh.
30,000+
The king himself is a contrast. Ashurbanipal is recognised as one of the most brutal Assyrian kings, and he boasted of gory massacres of rebellious civilians. Yet he was literate, trained as an apprentice scribe, mastered both Akkadian and Sumerian, and was a passionate collector of texts. He hired scholars and scribes to copy texts, and because he was known for cruelty, he could use threats to get materials from Babylonia.
Why would a warrior want books? Part of the answer may be power. His interest in texts was one of his driving motivations, and his original motive may have been to gain rituals and vital to maintain his royal power. The library was not mostly poetry: only ten of the texts were epics and myths. The rest included , incantations, hymns, medicine and astronomy.
Its survival is ironic. Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BCE by a coalition of Babylonians, and . A fire in the palace may have partially baked the clay tablets, and this potentially destructive event helped preserve them.
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Recap
Ashurbanipal gathered texts by writing to cities, hiring scribes and using loot and threats, partly to protect his own power.
💡 A trick to remember it · A king who could read ordered every city to send its books, then a fire baked the clay: a library saved by flames.
Surprising fact · The fire that destroyed Nineveh partially baked the tablets and helped preserve them.
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No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (15 claims) cites at least one of these.