The Library of Ashurbanipal
A king systematically collects the written knowledge of Mesopotamia into one archive.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 41 years
- Known to
- ± 10 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
Ashurbanipal, unusually literate for a king, sends agents across the empire to copy and confiscate tablets, assembling around 30,000 at Nineveh — omens, medicine, mathematics, dictionaries, rituals, and literature including the fullest surviving text of Gilgamesh. It is the first systematically collected and catalogued library known. The palace burned in 612 BCE, which baked the clay hard and preserved it: the library survives because the empire was destroyed.