25. The Discovery of an Ancient Library With More Than 30,000 Tablets
The Neo Assyrian Empire’s last great ruler was Ashurbanipal (reigned 668 – circa 627 BC). Founded in Mesopotamia in the tenth century BC, the empire became the world’s biggest state until then and dominated much of the Middle East before it collapsed in 609 BC. Ashurbanipal was not just a great military commander, but also an intellectual, which was rare for that era. He was literate, mastered multiple languages, and was a passionate collector of tablets and texts. He hired scribes to copy writings, sent others across the empire to find more, seized texts from defeated enemies as booty, and was not above using military threats to convince neighbors to send him writings from their countries.
In 1849, British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard hit an archaeological jackpot when he discovered Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh, in today’s Iraq. It contained more than 30,000 tablets and writing boards – many of them severely fragmented, but many still recoverable and legible. They included laws, diplomatic correspondence, financial and religious documents, plus texts on medicine, astronomy, and literature. One of the most significant finds in the library was The Epic of Gilgamesh, a masterpiece of ancient Babylonian poetry that dates to the third millennium BC, and is considered to be humanity’s oldest known literary work.
