History
Ashurbanipal
The Assyrian king who assembled a library at Nineveh meant to hold the written tradition, and so preserved most of what we can read of Mesopotamian literature.
Illustration of The Neo-Assyrian empire, not a likeness of any person on this page.
- Standing:
- A real person. Objects, inscriptions or archives made in their own lifetime carry their name.
- Reigned:
- 669 to c. 631 BCE
- City:
- Nineveh
- Period:
- The Neo-Assyrian empire · c. 911 to 609 BCE
What they did
collected older Babylonian and Sumerian material deliberately rather than incidentally; the library's tablets were baked hard by the fire when Nineveh fell in 612 BCE, which is the accident that saved them; the Epic of Gilgamesh reached the modern world through this collection.
Sources
The references this entry is drawn from. ETCSL is the scholarly edition for the Sumerian texts; the rest are general references for the archaeology and the dates.
In the same period
Others our chronology places in The Neo-Assyrian empire.
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