Library of Ashurbanipal

A royal collection of cuneiform tablets assembled by Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BCE and excavated at Nineveh. Its texts preserve major works of Mesopotamian literature, scholarship, and administration.

Cuneiform: A writing system made by pressing wedge-shaped marks into clay, used across the ancient Near East. The tablets in Ashurbanipal’s collection were written in this script.
Epic of Gilgamesh: A Mesopotamian epic poem about the king Gilgamesh, friendship, mortality, and the search for life. A tablet from Nineveh preserves the best-known version’s account of the flood.
Ashurbanipal: The last great king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, who ruled from 669 to about 631 BCE. He commissioned and expanded the royal collection of tablets.
Mesopotamian divination: Ancient Mesopotamian practices for interpreting signs and predicting events through observation and ritual. Collections of omens helped scholars advise the Assyrian king.
Akkadian language: An East Semitic language written in cuneiform across ancient Mesopotamia. Many library texts use Akkadian, the language of Assyria and Babylonia.
Enuma Elish: A Babylonian creation epic in which the god Marduk defeats Tiamat and establishes cosmic order. Its tablets show that the collection preserved religious literature from Babylonia.
Hormuzd Rassam: An Assyrian-born archaeologist who excavated at Nineveh and other ancient Near Eastern sites. His excavations uncovered many tablets from Ashurbanipal’s palace library.
Enuma Anu Enlil: A large Babylonian series of celestial omens linking astronomical phenomena with earthly events. Its tablets show the library’s preservation of systematic omen scholarship.
Sumerian language: An ancient language of southern Mesopotamia, preserved in cuneiform after it ceased to be spoken. Scholarly tablets often preserved Sumerian texts alongside Akkadian translations.
Epic of Anzu: A Mesopotamian myth about the bird-demon Anzu stealing the Tablet of Destinies from Enlil. Fragments from Nineveh preserve a version of this mythic contest.

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