
When Anu, Enlil and Enki, the great gods
had established in their firm plans
the great cosmic structures and the barge of Sîn,
when they had established that the crescent moon
should grow and give birth to the month…
Twenty-seven centuries ago, in the city of Nineveh, King Ashurbanipal built a library.
There were other libraries before this, and there were others after. Yet for a time the Library of Ashurbanipal was the largest in the world. Within its walls were stored thirty thousand clay tablets, recording the laws, the history, and the stories of the Assyrian Empire.
But, as is oft the fate of libraries, it eventually burned. In 612 BC, two decades after the king had died and his empire had fallen into chaos, Nineveh fell to the combined armies of Babylonia, Medes, and Scythia. They looted and burned the city, destroying its palaces, its temples, and its libraries.
Nineveh itself never reclaimed its former glory. For a while it had been the biggest city on the planet, capital of the most powerful empire in history. But after the battle of 612 BC, it fell into a long decline. The writer Xenophon, visiting two centuries later, described a city already in ruins, with even its name lost to the sands of time.
Nevertheless, the idea of Nineveh persisted. The city appeared in the Old Testament as a wicked and decadent place punished by God, and centuries later was the site of a climactic battle between the Byzantines and the Sasanians. So it was, then, that rumours of the lost city sometimes spread and drew interest.
Then, in the nineteenth century, European archaeologists started to dig at the site. They found the temples and palaces of the Assyrian Empire, and they unearthed the ancient Library of Ashurbanipal, revealing thousands of clay tablets, each baked hard by fire two and a half millennia earlier.
Among the tablets were records of battles, treaties, and the biographies of kings. The Epic of Gilgamesh was found, as were the astrological records of Babylon. Later excavations revealed much about the history of Assyria and Babylonia; a tale that until the rediscovery of Nineveh had mostly been lost.
Thanks to this discovery, we know King Ashurbanipal did not just style himself King of Assyria. He was proclaimed King of the Four Corners of the World, a title that perhaps reflected his military successes in every direction of the compass. More than that, Ashurbanipal also laid claim to the stars and the planets; for he was not just known as king of the world, but as the King of the Universe.
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