September 9, 2026 • 37 mins
Ashurbanipal was the ruler of the Assyrian empire in the 7th century BCE. His 38-year reign was marked by both scholarship and a terrifying brutality.
Research:
- "Babylon." Britannica Library, Encyclopædia Britannica, 18 Mar. 2025. libraries.state.ma.us/login?eburl=https%3A%2F%2Flibrary.eb.com&ebtarget=%2Flevels%2Freferencecenter%2Farticle%2FBabylon%2F11618&ebboatid=9265928. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.
- Ashurbanipal Library Project. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/asbp/index.html
- " Encyclopedia of World Biography Online, Gale, 1998. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1631000306/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=f497ef8d. Accessed 14 Aug. 2026.
- Bonatz, Dominik. “Ashurbanipal's Headhunt: An Anthropological Perspective.” Iraq , 2004, Vol. 66, Nineveh. Papers of the 49th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Part One (2004). https://www.jstor.org/stable/4200564
- “Ashurbanipal.” https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/ashurbanipal
- Fincke, Jeanette C. “The British Museum's Ashurbanipal Library Project.” Iraq , 2004, Vol. 66, Nineveh. Papers of the 49th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Part One (2004). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4200559
- Hughes, Tristan. “Ashurbanipal: The Last Great King of Assyria.” The Ancients podcast. 8/20/2025. https://shows.acast.com/the-ancients/episodes/ashurbanipal-the-last-great-king-of-assyria
- Osborne, James. “He tried to conquer knowledge itself – instead this ancient Mesopotamian king resorted to rule with terror.” History Extra. 8/14/2025. https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-history/he-tried-to-conquer-knowledge-itself/
- Taylor, Jonathan. 'About the project', Ashurbanipal Library Project, The Ashurbanipal Library Project, Department of the Middle East, The British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG, 2022 http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/asbp/Abouttheproject/
- The British Museum. “Who was Ashurbanipal?” https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/who-was-ashurbanipal
- Urbanus, Jason. “Royal Bibliophile.” Archaeology. Jul/Aug2024, Vol. 77 Issue 4, p40-41.
- Wilkes, Jonny. “Ashurbanipal 'the Great', the Lion of Assyria.” History Extra. https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-history/who-was-ashurbanipal-lion-assyria-facts/
- Wiseman, Donald John. "Ashurbanipal". Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 May. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ashurbanipal. Accessed 17 August 2026
- Wisnom, Selena. “The Library of Ashurbanipal.” History Today. 4/4/2025. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/library-ashurbanipal
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
And I'm Holly Frey.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
We have another episode inspired by the trip I took
to England this past May, although the subject matter for
the most part is not about England itself. When I
was in school, what we learned about Mesopotamia was in
pretty broad strokes. We talked about things like cuneiform script
(00:37):
and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and their cycles of
flooding and the whole idea of the cradle of civilization.
There were some names that came up like in the
Bible in church, and I read the Epic of Gilgamesh
while studying literature. But beyond that, when it came to
actual history classes, I don't think I learned about any
specific Mesopotamian leaders, aside from maybe Hammurabi, who was ruler
(01:02):
of Babylon, and that was mostly in the context of
Hammurabi's code.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
That was one of the first codes of law.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
So when I was at the British Museum this past May,
I was really fascinated by the Library of Ashurbanipal, which
was a name that I mostly recognized from lyrics to
a They Might Be Giants song, Not anything I remember
ever learning in school. Something else that struck me in
that trip to the British Museum was that I was
(01:32):
reading all about Ashurbanipal's library, and Patrick was somewhere else
in the same room reading other stuff about Ashurbanipal as
king of Assyria. And when the two of us came
back together, we had radically different impressions of this man.
Because I was sort of thinking, wow, this guy's library
sounds so amazing. And Patrick, having read other signs, was like, wow,
(01:56):
that guy seems really ruthless.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
So to get some groundwork in, Mesopotamia actually means between rivers,
and that's an apt name because it is describing exactly that,
that area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. These rivers
start in what is now Turkey, and they pass through
a corner of Syria before traveling through Iraq in a
diagonal manner, and then they eventually cross come together to
(02:26):
form the Shat al-Arab River and discharge into the Persian Gulf.
But the kingdoms and empires that are usually framed as
ancient Mesopotamia go beyond this geographical area, stretching all the
way from the Zagros Mountains in the east to the
Arabian Peninsula in the west, and in some cases, conquering
territory that was even farther away.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
When I was in school, History classes in the United
States often described Mesopotamia as the birthplace of civilization, but
today the term cradle of civilization is used to describe
multiple regions on Earth. They're all near rivers or other
sources of water, and they are places where people established settlements,
(03:07):
which grew into cities, with those cities and societies that
they were home to becoming more and more complex. Other
cradles of civilization include the Indus Valley on the Indian subcontinent,
the western coast of South America, including Lake Titicaca and
the Indian Plateau, and the Yangtze and Yellow River systems
(03:28):
in China, as well as Mesoamerica. Starting with the establishment
of its first cities, ancient Mesopotamia spans more than 3,000
years of history. civilizations, kingdoms, and empires overlapped and influenced
each other. So trying to put together a linear timeline
or even a more relative one is actually quite challenging.
(03:51):
On top of that, we're still getting new information about
Mesopotamia in its ancient roots, both through archaeological work that
started in the mid-19th century and through reconstruction and translation
of texts that were and.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Still are being unearthed. That includes Ashurbanipal's library, only a
fraction of which has been reconstructed and translated.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah, what I wanted to put in this part of
the episode was a basic timeline to situate when we
are talking about, and I found that task to be impossible.
Assyria was, though, one of the later empires to be
established in Mesopotamia. Modern historians and archaeologists typically divide Assyrian
history into multiple parts, There's Early Assyrian, starting around 2600 BCE,
(04:39):
Old Assyrian, starting around 2025 BCE, Middle Assyrian, starting around
1363 BCE, and Neo-Assyrian, which spanned from 911 to 609 BCE.
That's then followed by a post-imperial period when Assyria no
(04:59):
longer existed as an organized state, but the region that
it had been home to had not been fully conquered
by other kingdoms or empires yet. The Assyrian ethnic group
still exists today, with an estimated 3 million to 5
million people in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey considering themselves Assyrian.
(05:19):
The Neo-Assyrian period is seen as the height of the
Assyrian Empire, and Ashurbanipal was one of that period's last kings.
At that point, Assyria was the largest empire in the world,
encompassing what's now Iraq, part of Iran, the Levant, including
the island of Cyprus, and northern Egypt. Its capital was
(05:41):
Nineveh in what's now Iraq, near the modern city of Mosul.
Ashurbanipal's father was Esarhaddon, and it doesn't appear that Ashurbanipal
was originally intended to be his successor. Esarhaddon had an
older son named Sin-idn-Apli, who is believed to have died
sometime before 672 BCE. But oracles and prophecies were a
(06:04):
huge part of the way Assyrian culture related to and
understood the world. And it's also possible that there was
some kind of divination or omen involved in Sin-Iden-Apli not
being named as his father's successor.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
It also seems like there may have been some kind
of omen or prophecy related to Ashurbanipal or to another
of Esarhaddon's sons, Shemashumukhin. Shemashumukhin was older than Ashurbanipal, and
ordinarily he would have been next in line to succeed
their father. But almost everyone, including Esarhaddon, seems to have
(06:41):
preferred Ashurbanipal. So in 672 BCE, Esarhaddon decided to divide
his son's responsibilities, giving Shamashum-Ukin control of Babylon, while Ashurbanipal
was named crown prince of the Assyrian Empire.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
This was sort of a throwback to some earlier family
and dynastic history and the greater history of Mesopotamia. Centuries
before this, Babylon had been established as the capital of
the kingdom of Babylonia, which covered much of southern Mesopotamia.
But Babylon faced a series of raids and invasions, starting
(07:18):
with the Hittites in the 16th century BCE. By the
11th century BCE, the Assyrians were continually fighting with their neighbors,
including the Chaldeans and the Arameans, over control of Babylon,
with Babylonia also trying to maintain itself and its own independence.
Babylon sometimes allied with Assyria's enemies to do this. Then
(07:43):
in 689 BCE, Esarhaddon's own father, Sennacherib, became convinced that
there was no way that Assyria would ever retain peaceful
control of Babylon, so he destroyed it and then diverted
a canal to drown the ruins. Sennacherib also passed over
an older son to name Esarhaddon as his heir. There's
(08:06):
a bit of murkiness after this, but afterward, one or
more of Esarhaddon's brothers, murdered their father, something that is
understandably interpreted as having been done because they were angry
about the line of succession. This sparked a civil war
in which Esarhaddon defeated his brother's forces and took the throne.
(08:27):
One of Esarhaddon's projects was to rebuild Babylon. Like a
lot of life in ancient Mesopotamia, this had a religious underpinning,
Babylon's chief god was Marduk, and Marduk was also a
deity in Assyria. Even Sennacherib's supporters feared that his actions
in Babylon had angered and offended Marduk. Sennacherib's assassination by
(08:51):
his son or sons was seen as a divine retribution
for his having done this to Babylon, and Esarhaddon's rebuilding
of Babylon happened alongside a reframing of its destruction as
another divine punishment. Esarhaddon framed himself as Babylon's governor rather
than its king, and he worked to gain the support
(09:13):
of other cities in Babylonia. Esarhaddon's decision to name Ashurbanipal
as heir to the throne of Assyria and Shemashumukhin as
crown prince of Babylon seems to have been done in
an attempt to prevent a repeat of the civil war
that had been part of his own ascension. We're going
to come back to that idea later. But Ashurbanipal's education
(09:35):
was already underway when he was named crown prince of Assyria,
so he had started studying subjects that weren't really typical
of Assyrian kings. He had learned horsemanship, charioteering, archery, military tactics,
and courtly decorum, which were all things that would be
expected of a royal. But he also studied literature and history,
(09:56):
and he knew multiple Sumerian and Akkadian languages, including how
to read and write them in cuneiform script. It was
not typical for kings of this era to get a
really scholarly education or really even to be literate. That
was the work of scholars and scribes. It's probably something
Ashurbanipal was only able to do because in the earliest
(10:18):
part of his life, He hadn't been totally focused on
preparing to become king. We will talk about Ashurbanipal as
king of Assyria after a sponsor break. When Ashurbanipal was
(10:39):
named crown prince of Assyria, its capital was in Nineveh
near modern-day Mosul, Iraq. Ashurbanipal's grandfather, Sennacherib, had moved the
capital to Nineveh and built a magnificent palace there, known
as the Palace Without Rival. This palace had extensive gardens
irrigated by a network of canals and aqueducts, which Ashurbanipal expanded.
(11:03):
There is some speculation that these were the fabled Hanging
Gardens of Babylon, rather than a site somewhere in Babylon.
One of the people to propose this is Assyriologist Stephanie
Daly of the University of Oxford.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
While his father was still living, Ashurbanipal took on a
lot of responsibility. Esarhaddon undertook a series of military campaigns
to put down uprisings in outlying parts of Assyrian territory
and to try to conquer new territory. This included a
campaign to take control of more of what is now Egypt.
(11:39):
While Esarhaddon was away, Ashurbanipal was effectively in charge. Ashurbanipal
also acted as his father's spymaster.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Esarhaddon died in 669 BCE while he was on the
way to Egypt to put down a revolt against Assyrian rule.
Ashurbanipal's ascension went smoothly. There were already treaties in place
that required Assyria's vassal states to be loyal to Esarhaddon's successor,
And Ashurbanipal's grandmother, Nakia Zakutu, required counselors and nobles to
(12:12):
sign oaths of loyalty to him. And for more than
a decade, his relationship with his brother and their divided
responsibilities over Assyria and Babylon, that all seems to have
gone okay. Ashurbanipal, whose name is translated as the god
Asher has made a son, was religiously devout or even zealous.
(12:34):
He learned methods of divination, including reading the entrails of
sacrificed animals and reading patterns in oil. During his reign,
he also built a lot of temples and added new
adornment to existing ones. He was also a patron of
the arts. He similarly built and adorned palaces, and he
commissioned extensive reliefs to decorate those palaces. A lot of
(12:58):
these reliefs featured depictions of him fighting his enemies, hunting lions,
and just living everyday life in the wealth and splendor
of his kingdom. Some of the reliefs depicting royal life
also referred back to those military conquests since there are
severed heads of some of his enemies on display. In
a lot of depictions of Ashurbanipal, he's shown with a
(13:20):
riding stylus in his belt, including in some when he's
doing things like killing a lion with a sword.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
He might want to journal after. He might. The reliefs
that were created during Ashurbanipal's reign are seen as the
pinnacle of Assyrian art. In the words of the 1925
edition of Cambridge Ancient History, quote, For modern students, the
age of Ashurbanipal marks a definite stage in the history
of culture, and the modern term as rightly links that
(13:49):
king's name with his time as it connects to the
glories of imperial Rome with the name of Augustus. The
depictions of his lion hunt provide an example of how
Assyrian art of this era was different from what came before.
To quote from that same volume, quote, the Masons no
longer cut figure after figure, whether human or animal, in
(14:12):
the same attitude, with the same expression, in monotonous succession.
The attempt to differentiate, to give each figure an individual interest,
renders the frieze of the lion hunt most interesting of
all the Assyrian sculptures, and a careful examination of the
battle scenes will show a more sustained effort of the
same kind in a crowded field. Above all, there is
(14:35):
a fertility of invention and an exquisite delicacy of carving,
both illustrated in the scene, which shows Ashurbanipal and his
queen feasting, a rare combination of qualities which had previously
been lacking in work of this type. Reliefs of Ashurbanipal's
lion hunt are now in the British Museum. This era
(14:57):
is also known for its extremely intricate cylinder seals. which
produce a complex pattern or image when rolled across clay.
And there was also, of course, Ashurbanipal's library, which we
are going to get into eventually.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
While Ashurbanipal is associated with all of these achievements in
Assyrian art and culture, none of this came out of
thin air, of course. He had inherited an empire that
had existed for thousands of years, and the flourishing that
is framed as the Neo-Assyrian period had started more than
200 years before he came to power, so he was
(15:32):
really building on all of those foundations. He was also
regarded as a popular king and a capable administrator, and
Assyria really prospered when he was in control.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
At the same time, though, he was ruthless and even
cruel when it came to his enemies. Some of this,
like displaying their severed heads, was typical of leaders in
ancient Mesopotamia. But in depictions he commissioned and in surviving
accounts produced by other people, Ashurbanipal is seen as taking
it to an extreme, like salting the earth after putting
(16:06):
down an uprising against him, forcing people to grind up
the bones of their ancestors to make bricks for his palaces,
forcing defeated Elamite kings to pull his chariot during a
triumphal parade, that he threw for himself, and forcing one
of his rivals to live in a dog kennel. Some
accounts describe that particular rival as being forced to wear
(16:29):
a dog collar, but others describe it as having a
chain punched through his jaw, neither of which sounds great.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
No, it's one of those things that I think is
depicted in some of the reliefs, and it's hard to
tell from the relief exactly which way it should be interpreted. Yeah.
Ashurbanipal and other Assyrian kings also dealt with conquered peoples
by deporting their citizens to other parts of the empire. Often,
they would install local princes as vassal rulers to try
(16:59):
to retain a region's loyalty. But a lot of the
people that had been living in those regions would be
sent elsewhere to exile. serve in the Assyrian army or
to work on farms or to work on the emperor's
building projects, just whatever work the empire thought was most
necessary in that moment. This also included sending scribes to
(17:20):
work for the royal court or taking the more educated
sons of local leaders hostage to serve as scribes and
scholars in the capital. Ashurbanipal's military campaigns began with finishing
what his father had tried to start in Egypt, putting
down the uprising that Esarhaddon had been on his way
to deal with when he died. There, Ashurbanipal's forces fought
(17:44):
against the Kushites and the Nubians, ultimately capturing Memphis and
taking control of what is now Egypt. Assyria's control of
Egypt was relatively brief, but that was when the empire
was at its largest. Other campaigns included besieging the Phoenician
city of Tyre, which had supported uprisings in Egypt and
(18:05):
in Lydia, and ongoing disputes with the kingdoms of Elam
in what's now southwestern Iran and Urartu in what's now
northwestern Iran, Armenia, and Turkey.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
And then there was Babylon and Ashurbanipal's relationship with his
brother Shamashum Ukin, a little family drama in play. This
has been characterized in a couple of different ways, in
part because documentation about it is still being reconstructed and translated.
So one is that Esarhaddon's intention was always for Ashurbanipal
(18:38):
to be ruler of the whole empire, with Shamashum-Ukin's governorship
of Babylon more like that of a vassal state. The
other is that Esarhaddon was dividing the empire, with his
two sons having different responsibilities and different territory. Either way,
when their father died, Ashurbanipal was fond of his brother,
(18:59):
but over time, that relationship deteriorated. Ashurbanipal started describing his
brother as being ungrateful and traitorous. He wouldn't even mention
Shamashumukhin's name without some kind of epithet. And Shamashumukhin increasingly
chafed at Ashurbanipal's attempts to control Babylon and to tell
(19:21):
him what to do.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Eventually, Ashurbanipal was encouraging the citizens of Babylon to rebel
against Shemashumukin, and Shemashumukin was working directly with Lydia, Elam,
and other territories to revolt against Ashurbanipal. Ashurbanipal started attacking
and besieging the cities that were involved, including taking on
(19:43):
a two-year siege of Babylon, during which conditions in that
city became truly horrific. Shamashum Ukin is believed to have
taken his own life during the siege in 648 BCE
by throwing himself into the flames while his palace was burning.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Ashurbanipal ruled the Assyrian Empire from 668 BCE to 627 BCE.
But there's not as much information about the last four
or five years of that, at least not yet. In
yet another attempt to deal with the line of succession,
Ashurbanipal gave two of his sons, Ashur-ed-el-elani and Sin-shar-esh-kun, co-regency
(20:24):
with different territories and different powers. But especially considering the
communication and transportation methods that existed in the 7th century BCE,
the Assyrian Empire was enormous. There were ongoing divisions within
and pressure from neighboring kingdoms and empires after Ashurbanipal's death.
(20:45):
His successors were not able to keep the empire together
in the face of all of that, and progressively they
lost territory.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
A coalition of kingdoms, including the Babylonians and the Medeans,
conquered the Assyrian capital of Nineveh in 612 BCE. Assyria
was absorbed into the Babylonian Empire, and then that fell
to the Persians in 539 BCE. The Persians drew a
lot of influence from Neo-Assyrian culture, and the roads and
(21:16):
other infrastructure that were built by the Assyrians were critical
to the building and the expansion of the Persian Empire.
We are finally going to get to that library after
we pause for a sponsor break. Now we have finally
(21:39):
gotten to Ashurbanipal's library. This was a massive library that
he assembled in the capital of Nineveh. Tablets from the
library have been found around the remains of multiple buildings
in that city, the Southwest Palace, the North Palace, and
then the areas around the temples of Ishtar and Nabu.
It is not fully clear whether this is where the
(22:02):
library collections were before the city was destroyed, or if
that's more where tablets wound up over the course of
the city's destruction in the centuries that have followed.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Obviously, plenty of monarchs and temples and wealthy people had
collections of documents and texts long before this, but this
is one of the oldest known systematically acquired and organized
libraries in the world. It was intentionally collected and curated
as a repository of knowledge. It's also the largest collection
(22:34):
of Assyrian texts in the world. Excavations there have unearthed
more than 20,000 clay tablets and fragments, and many have
standardized colophons that suggest a systematic method for labeling and
cataloging the texts. That number includes a lot of pieces,
and the total number of complete tablets is actually unknown. Yeah,
(22:56):
it's obviously less than 20,000, but it's hard to pinpoint
how many texts there were when the library existed as
a functioning entity. Ashurbanipal ordered the creation of this library.
He ordered temples and palaces all across his empire to
send their texts to Nineveh. Often these texts were copied
(23:18):
and Ashurbanipal would be sent either the copies or the originals.
There is some surviving documentation that suggests that what he
really wanted was those originals and that maybe people creatively
misunderstood his instructions so that they could keep the originals
in their temple or their collection. Surviving correspondence also suggests
that he was really knowledgeable about where to find the
(23:41):
text that he wanted for his library and also who
was likely to have works that would be good additions
to the library, but that he didn't specifically know about already.
I love that he has like a scholarly network of
acquisitions librarians to talk to. Some of the texts in
the library are ones that he wrote himself. and many
(24:04):
are inscribed with colophons that he wrote. There is also
a ten-sided cylinder covered in cuneiform containing the annals of Ashurbanipal,
including an account of his ascension to the throne and
his expeditions and conquests against Egypt, Tyre, Elam, Arabia, and
his brother in Babylon, among others. Assyriologist Hormuzd Rasam, who
(24:27):
was born in Mosul, unearthed this cylinder from the site
of the North Palace, and it is called the Rassam
Cylinder today.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Ashrapanipal described this library as containing all knowledge. There are
texts on medicine, mathematics, and history. There's also literature, including
epics and myths and dictionaries and other reference works. A
lot of the Assyrian literature that still exists today has
survived because Ashurbanipal included it in the library. That includes
(24:56):
the Epic of Gilgamesh and its famous tablet relating a
flood that has some distinct similarities to the biblical book
of Genesis.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
And there are.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Extensive legal texts and documents relating to the functioning of
the Assyrian Empire. There is also a lot of material
that relates to divination in some way. As we said earlier,
omens and divination were a key part of the Assyrian worldview.
Ashurbanipal wanted his library to contain every bit of information
(25:27):
that could possibly be used to interpret signs and omens,
believing this knowledge would benefit and strengthen the empire. That
includes books on astrology and omen texts. Based on what
has been translated so far, it is likely that roughly
half of the library's works relate to divination. And there
are also texts there that are related to magic. The
(25:51):
sacking of Nineveh in 612 BCE both preserved and destroyed
Ashurbanipal's library. As the city burned, the clay tablets hardened
in the heat, and then they were protected by the
fallen rubble of the city around them. But writing boards,
which would have been made of wood or ivory that
was covered with wax, those were largely destroyed. The tablets
(26:15):
were also broken and scattered during the destruction of the city,
and as they have been unearthed, it hasn't always been
clear where in the capital they were originally housed. That
scattering of fragments was compounded by the excavation of the
library after its rediscovery in the 19th century. English archaeologist
(26:35):
Austin Henry Layard was working with Hormuzd Razam, who had
been Layard's assistant before training at Oxford and becoming an
Assyriologist in his own right. The two started excavating Nineveh
in 1849 and found numerous clay tablets and fragments. Razam
continued excavations after Layard moved on and found another huge
(26:56):
collection of tablets that began in 1852. At the time,
this area was under Ottoman control, and the excavation site
was known as Koyunyik. I'm sorry for my bad pronunciation
of that. Much of the material that Laird and other
archaeologists excavated at Koyunyik was sent to the British Museum.
(27:18):
There were also French archaeology projects in the area, so
some of these materials are also now in the Louvre.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
Although the fire had hardened and preserved the tablets, many
of them were broken, and during excavations, archaeologists and workers
didn't fully document exactly where each piece was found. It's
obvious that tablets found in different places were all part
of the same overall collection, because many are marked Palace
(27:45):
of Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria. But
without knowing exactly where in Nineveh any individual piece was found,
it is extremely difficult to figure out which other pieces
that piece might go with. Yeah, the focus was much
more on sending these archaeological treasures to England than on
(28:06):
thoroughly documenting the context where each piece was found. Yeah,
get them out as quickly as you can and get
them on their way.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Yeah. So reconstructing these tablets is just an incredibly laborious process.
Only a fraction of the tablets have been reassembled, and
a lot of those still do have missing pieces. An
average of 35 texts have been reconstructed and transcribed every
year since the mid-19th century, and that means there is
(28:35):
still a whole lot left to go.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Even so, the library has been a massive source of
information about ancient Mesopotamia and the Assyrian Empire. Researchers first
deciphered cuneiform in 1857, just a few years after the
first tablets from the library were found. A key part
of this was the Bisitun inscription. That's an inscription on
(28:59):
a rock face in the Zagros Mountains in what is
now Iran, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site today.
Much like the Rosetta Stone, the Bessitun inscription contains an
inscription in three languages. It's an account of Achaemenid king
Darius I written in Babylonian, Old Persian, and Elamite. Henry
(29:19):
Rawlinson published his work on the Old Persian section of
it in 1849, and that enabled the translation of the
other languages. Ashurbanipal's library was part of the process of
deciphering cuneiform as it provided an array of additional samples
of cuneiform script to work from.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
Once people were able to read the cuneiform script that
they were written in, the tablets in Ashurbanipal's library became
the source of just a wealth of new historical information.
Prior to this, the vast majority of information about ancient
Mesopotamia and the Assyrian Empire had been in the Hebrew
(29:59):
Bible and the Christian Old Testament derived from it, and
from Greek and Roman writers. The biblical texts were really
primarily focused on things that related to the Levant and Egypt,
and then the Greek and Roman accounts were often ones
that were written centuries later. Neither of them was like
a complete... nuanced history of the Assyrian Empire.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Something that historians and other scholars were able to start
correcting after the discovery of Ashurbanipal's library was the existing
knowledge about Ashurbanipal himself. Greek sources had turned him into
a semi-mythical figure called Sardana Paulus, conflating elements of Ashurbanipal
with his brother Shemashumukhin. The Greek version of Sardanapalus was
(30:45):
the last king of Assyria and burned himself to death
in his palace alongside all of his riches and concubines.
Sardanapalus was depicted in European literature and art, particularly during
the Romantic era, including in George Gordon Lord Byron's verse
drama Sardanapalus and Eugène Delacroix's painting Death of Sardanapalus. reconstructing
(31:08):
and deciphering the works in the library is ongoing. The
British Museum established the Ashurbanipal Library Project in 2002 in
cooperation with the University of Mosul. This project has gone
through multiple phases of funding and has involved cataloging, the
creation of high-resolution 3D imagery of the tablets and fragments,
(31:31):
and multiple projects to reconstruct and translate the texts. So today,
these images and other information is available for scholars to
use to try to work on furthering the deciphering process
of all of these pieces. And great news, you can
see a lot of this online today. The Ashurbanipal Library
Project's online home is at ORAC, or the Open Richly
(31:54):
Annotated Cuneiform Corpus. at oracc.museum.upenn.edu. And the British Museum can
be visited virtually on Google Maps, including Room 55, which
is where the Ashurbanipal Library exhibit is located.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
And that is yet another installment of what I did
on my summer vacation.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Do you have a Cuneiform listener mail? I have listener form.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Listener form? That's not what it means, but sure, we'll
call it that. It's listener form from now on.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
There you go. It's not.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
I'll forget by the next time we do it. So
this is from Gwendolyn, and Gwendolyn wrote and said, Hello,
Holly and Tracy. I'm a longtime listener who has earned
a PhD in your history offerings, though like to purposely
get a little behind. in order to have multiple episodes
saved up for when I need them. My latest listening
spree included your week of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, which I
(32:52):
knew would be exciting for me as I am a
chemist and have also done x-ray crystallography. I think you
were a few minutes into the second part when you
mentioned Dorothy went to the doctor for pain in her hands.
I looked at my dog, Tungsten, more on him in
a moment, and said, uh-oh, I think Dorothy might have
rheumatoid arthritis. Sure enough, within a few minutes, you confirmed
(33:14):
this had been the case, though for her, it took
several years to get that answer. This was funny to
me because I also have rheumatoid arthritis, and I have
somehow correctly diagnosed several people, myself included, well before the
official diagnosis was reached. It's a little sad that most people,
and especially women, still go years between, hey, my hands hurt,
(33:34):
and receiving the final answer. And on another note, I
too have been given paradoxical information of just rest and
move your hands more because as Holly mentioned, this disease
is different for everyone it impacts. And despite many advances
in treatment, we're still kind of shrugging our shoulders about
how to really fix it for people with stubborn cases.
(33:54):
As an autoimmune girly, I'm always so grateful when you
discuss the facts about illnesses and disabilities. It's so important,
especially given today's climate, not believing scientists and healthcare professionals,
as well as the ever-increasing disregard for people with disabilities.
Thank you so much for not shying away from the
tough topics and handling them with care.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
You're a wonderful host. It's basically longtime.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Friends at this point. And I always look forward to
hearing your voices and insights when I have the time
to catch up on episodes. I will also add here
that Holly and I seem to have some kind of
spooky connection where we both think of an Eddie Izzard
reference for the same thing, and I always get a
big laugh whenever that happens. After that very long email,
(34:36):
you deserve some pet tax. I have included a couple
of pictures of the aforementioned Tungsten, a truly American melting
pot mix, my constant companion.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
And a long little doggie.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
In one of the photos, he is patiently waiting while
my 97.5-year-old grandmother looks absolutely shocked that dog treats can
be shaped like ice cream cones. The third picture is
of an embroidery project I completed recently for a friend's grandson.
I was terrified as it was the most complicated project
I had done in a while, but he turned out
all right. Here's to many more years of great episodes, Gwendolyn.
(35:10):
Gwendolyn has a postscript with an episode topic suggestion. I
will leave that secret in case it becomes a topic
in the future. So then, yes, we do have very
cute dog pictures. What a cute boy. And then a.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Really cool project. This looks like a moth. It does.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
A really intricate... I cannot imagine how challenging that must
have been to do.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
I'm wondering because it looks a lot like a kit
I bought to do a very similar bat. Oh, yeah?
Maybe we are experiencing spooky action at a distance because
we are apparently embroidering the same kinds of things as well.
Maybe so.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
I had not thoroughly read the whole rest of the
email when I just scrolled through it today and did not,
like I had not seen the context. For the photo
of the grandmother and the dog. I was like, what
is happening? What is she holding? And now I know
it is a dog treat shaped like a little ice
(36:14):
cream cone.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Precious.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
So thank you so, so much, Gwendolyn, for this email.
It was very kind and gracious. I always feel a
little awkward reading the very kind, gracious parts out loud
on the show. But thank you so much. I also
just realized, because it was hidden under the part of
the screen where Holly is, so I can see you
(36:37):
when I'm talking to you, that the title of the
email was rheumatoid arthritis worthy dot dot dot win question mark,
which is also great. If you would like to send
us a note, we are at historypodcast at iheartradio.com. You
can also find the show notes for all of our episodes,
(36:57):
including all of the sources that we've used for our research.
That's at our website, which is at missedinhistory.com. And you
can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app, but
anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff You
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
(37:19):
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
And I'm Holly Frey.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
We have another episode inspired by the trip I took
to England this past May, although the subject matter for
the most part is not about England itself. When I
was in school, what we learned about Mesopotamia was in
pretty broad strokes. We talked about things like cuneiform script
(00:37):
and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and their cycles of
flooding and the whole idea of the cradle of civilization.
There were some names that came up like in the
Bible in church, and I read the Epic of Gilgamesh
while studying literature. But beyond that, when it came to
actual history classes, I don't think I learned about any
specific Mesopotamian leaders, aside from maybe Hammurabi, who was ruler
(01:02):
of Babylon, and that was mostly in the context of
Hammurabi's code.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
That was one of the first codes of law.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
So when I was at the British Museum this past May,
I was really fascinated by the Library of Ashurbanipal, which
was a name that I mostly recognized from lyrics to
a They Might Be Giants song, Not anything I remember
ever learning in school. Something else that struck me in
that trip to the British Museum was that I was
(01:32):
reading all about Ashurbanipal's library, and Patrick was somewhere else
in the same room reading other stuff about Ashurbanipal as
king of Assyria. And when the two of us came
back together, we had radically different impressions of this man.
Because I was sort of thinking, wow, this guy's library
sounds so amazing. And Patrick, having read other signs, was like, wow,
(01:56):
that guy seems really ruthless.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
So to get some groundwork in, Mesopotamia actually means between rivers,
and that's an apt name because it is describing exactly that,
that area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. These rivers
start in what is now Turkey, and they pass through
a corner of Syria before traveling through Iraq in a
diagonal manner, and then they eventually cross come together to
(02:26):
form the Shat al-Arab River and discharge into the Persian Gulf.
But the kingdoms and empires that are usually framed as
ancient Mesopotamia go beyond this geographical area, stretching all the
way from the Zagros Mountains in the east to the
Arabian Peninsula in the west, and in some cases, conquering
territory that was even farther away.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
When I was in school, History classes in the United
States often described Mesopotamia as the birthplace of civilization, but
today the term cradle of civilization is used to describe
multiple regions on Earth. They're all near rivers or other
sources of water, and they are places where people established settlements,
(03:07):
which grew into cities, with those cities and societies that
they were home to becoming more and more complex. Other
cradles of civilization include the Indus Valley on the Indian subcontinent,
the western coast of South America, including Lake Titicaca and
the Indian Plateau, and the Yangtze and Yellow River systems
(03:28):
in China, as well as Mesoamerica. Starting with the establishment
of its first cities, ancient Mesopotamia spans more than 3,000
years of history. civilizations, kingdoms, and empires overlapped and influenced
each other. So trying to put together a linear timeline
or even a more relative one is actually quite challenging.
(03:51):
On top of that, we're still getting new information about
Mesopotamia in its ancient roots, both through archaeological work that
started in the mid-19th century and through reconstruction and translation
of texts that were and.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Still are being unearthed. That includes Ashurbanipal's library, only a
fraction of which has been reconstructed and translated.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah, what I wanted to put in this part of
the episode was a basic timeline to situate when we
are talking about, and I found that task to be impossible.
Assyria was, though, one of the later empires to be
established in Mesopotamia. Modern historians and archaeologists typically divide Assyrian
history into multiple parts, There's Early Assyrian, starting around 2600 BCE,
(04:39):
Old Assyrian, starting around 2025 BCE, Middle Assyrian, starting around
1363 BCE, and Neo-Assyrian, which spanned from 911 to 609 BCE.
That's then followed by a post-imperial period when Assyria no
(04:59):
longer existed as an organized state, but the region that
it had been home to had not been fully conquered
by other kingdoms or empires yet. The Assyrian ethnic group
still exists today, with an estimated 3 million to 5
million people in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey considering themselves Assyrian.
(05:19):
The Neo-Assyrian period is seen as the height of the
Assyrian Empire, and Ashurbanipal was one of that period's last kings.
At that point, Assyria was the largest empire in the world,
encompassing what's now Iraq, part of Iran, the Levant, including
the island of Cyprus, and northern Egypt. Its capital was
(05:41):
Nineveh in what's now Iraq, near the modern city of Mosul.
Ashurbanipal's father was Esarhaddon, and it doesn't appear that Ashurbanipal
was originally intended to be his successor. Esarhaddon had an
older son named Sin-idn-Apli, who is believed to have died
sometime before 672 BCE. But oracles and prophecies were a
(06:04):
huge part of the way Assyrian culture related to and
understood the world. And it's also possible that there was
some kind of divination or omen involved in Sin-Iden-Apli not
being named as his father's successor.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
It also seems like there may have been some kind
of omen or prophecy related to Ashurbanipal or to another
of Esarhaddon's sons, Shemashumukhin. Shemashumukhin was older than Ashurbanipal, and
ordinarily he would have been next in line to succeed
their father. But almost everyone, including Esarhaddon, seems to have
(06:41):
preferred Ashurbanipal. So in 672 BCE, Esarhaddon decided to divide
his son's responsibilities, giving Shamashum-Ukin control of Babylon, while Ashurbanipal
was named crown prince of the Assyrian Empire.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
This was sort of a throwback to some earlier family
and dynastic history and the greater history of Mesopotamia. Centuries
before this, Babylon had been established as the capital of
the kingdom of Babylonia, which covered much of southern Mesopotamia.
But Babylon faced a series of raids and invasions, starting
(07:18):
with the Hittites in the 16th century BCE. By the
11th century BCE, the Assyrians were continually fighting with their neighbors,
including the Chaldeans and the Arameans, over control of Babylon,
with Babylonia also trying to maintain itself and its own independence.
Babylon sometimes allied with Assyria's enemies to do this. Then
(07:43):
in 689 BCE, Esarhaddon's own father, Sennacherib, became convinced that
there was no way that Assyria would ever retain peaceful
control of Babylon, so he destroyed it and then diverted
a canal to drown the ruins. Sennacherib also passed over
an older son to name Esarhaddon as his heir. There's
(08:06):
a bit of murkiness after this, but afterward, one or
more of Esarhaddon's brothers, murdered their father, something that is
understandably interpreted as having been done because they were angry
about the line of succession. This sparked a civil war
in which Esarhaddon defeated his brother's forces and took the throne.
(08:27):
One of Esarhaddon's projects was to rebuild Babylon. Like a
lot of life in ancient Mesopotamia, this had a religious underpinning,
Babylon's chief god was Marduk, and Marduk was also a
deity in Assyria. Even Sennacherib's supporters feared that his actions
in Babylon had angered and offended Marduk. Sennacherib's assassination by
(08:51):
his son or sons was seen as a divine retribution
for his having done this to Babylon, and Esarhaddon's rebuilding
of Babylon happened alongside a reframing of its destruction as
another divine punishment. Esarhaddon framed himself as Babylon's governor rather
than its king, and he worked to gain the support
(09:13):
of other cities in Babylonia. Esarhaddon's decision to name Ashurbanipal
as heir to the throne of Assyria and Shemashumukhin as
crown prince of Babylon seems to have been done in
an attempt to prevent a repeat of the civil war
that had been part of his own ascension. We're going
to come back to that idea later. But Ashurbanipal's education
(09:35):
was already underway when he was named crown prince of Assyria,
so he had started studying subjects that weren't really typical
of Assyrian kings. He had learned horsemanship, charioteering, archery, military tactics,
and courtly decorum, which were all things that would be
expected of a royal. But he also studied literature and history,
(09:56):
and he knew multiple Sumerian and Akkadian languages, including how
to read and write them in cuneiform script. It was
not typical for kings of this era to get a
really scholarly education or really even to be literate. That
was the work of scholars and scribes. It's probably something
Ashurbanipal was only able to do because in the earliest
(10:18):
part of his life, He hadn't been totally focused on
preparing to become king. We will talk about Ashurbanipal as
king of Assyria after a sponsor break. When Ashurbanipal was
(10:39):
named crown prince of Assyria, its capital was in Nineveh
near modern-day Mosul, Iraq. Ashurbanipal's grandfather, Sennacherib, had moved the
capital to Nineveh and built a magnificent palace there, known
as the Palace Without Rival. This palace had extensive gardens
irrigated by a network of canals and aqueducts, which Ashurbanipal expanded.
(11:03):
There is some speculation that these were the fabled Hanging
Gardens of Babylon, rather than a site somewhere in Babylon.
One of the people to propose this is Assyriologist Stephanie
Daly of the University of Oxford.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
While his father was still living, Ashurbanipal took on a
lot of responsibility. Esarhaddon undertook a series of military campaigns
to put down uprisings in outlying parts of Assyrian territory
and to try to conquer new territory. This included a
campaign to take control of more of what is now Egypt.
(11:39):
While Esarhaddon was away, Ashurbanipal was effectively in charge. Ashurbanipal
also acted as his father's spymaster.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Esarhaddon died in 669 BCE while he was on the
way to Egypt to put down a revolt against Assyrian rule.
Ashurbanipal's ascension went smoothly. There were already treaties in place
that required Assyria's vassal states to be loyal to Esarhaddon's successor,
And Ashurbanipal's grandmother, Nakia Zakutu, required counselors and nobles to
(12:12):
sign oaths of loyalty to him. And for more than
a decade, his relationship with his brother and their divided
responsibilities over Assyria and Babylon, that all seems to have
gone okay. Ashurbanipal, whose name is translated as the god
Asher has made a son, was religiously devout or even zealous.
(12:34):
He learned methods of divination, including reading the entrails of
sacrificed animals and reading patterns in oil. During his reign,
he also built a lot of temples and added new
adornment to existing ones. He was also a patron of
the arts. He similarly built and adorned palaces, and he
commissioned extensive reliefs to decorate those palaces. A lot of
(12:58):
these reliefs featured depictions of him fighting his enemies, hunting lions,
and just living everyday life in the wealth and splendor
of his kingdom. Some of the reliefs depicting royal life
also referred back to those military conquests since there are
severed heads of some of his enemies on display. In
a lot of depictions of Ashurbanipal, he's shown with a
(13:20):
riding stylus in his belt, including in some when he's
doing things like killing a lion with a sword.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
He might want to journal after. He might. The reliefs
that were created during Ashurbanipal's reign are seen as the
pinnacle of Assyrian art. In the words of the 1925
edition of Cambridge Ancient History, quote, For modern students, the
age of Ashurbanipal marks a definite stage in the history
of culture, and the modern term as rightly links that
(13:49):
king's name with his time as it connects to the
glories of imperial Rome with the name of Augustus. The
depictions of his lion hunt provide an example of how
Assyrian art of this era was different from what came before.
To quote from that same volume, quote, the Masons no
longer cut figure after figure, whether human or animal, in
(14:12):
the same attitude, with the same expression, in monotonous succession.
The attempt to differentiate, to give each figure an individual interest,
renders the frieze of the lion hunt most interesting of
all the Assyrian sculptures, and a careful examination of the
battle scenes will show a more sustained effort of the
same kind in a crowded field. Above all, there is
(14:35):
a fertility of invention and an exquisite delicacy of carving,
both illustrated in the scene, which shows Ashurbanipal and his
queen feasting, a rare combination of qualities which had previously
been lacking in work of this type. Reliefs of Ashurbanipal's
lion hunt are now in the British Museum. This era
(14:57):
is also known for its extremely intricate cylinder seals. which
produce a complex pattern or image when rolled across clay.
And there was also, of course, Ashurbanipal's library, which we
are going to get into eventually.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
While Ashurbanipal is associated with all of these achievements in
Assyrian art and culture, none of this came out of
thin air, of course. He had inherited an empire that
had existed for thousands of years, and the flourishing that
is framed as the Neo-Assyrian period had started more than
200 years before he came to power, so he was
(15:32):
really building on all of those foundations. He was also
regarded as a popular king and a capable administrator, and
Assyria really prospered when he was in control.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
At the same time, though, he was ruthless and even
cruel when it came to his enemies. Some of this,
like displaying their severed heads, was typical of leaders in
ancient Mesopotamia. But in depictions he commissioned and in surviving
accounts produced by other people, Ashurbanipal is seen as taking
it to an extreme, like salting the earth after putting
(16:06):
down an uprising against him, forcing people to grind up
the bones of their ancestors to make bricks for his palaces,
forcing defeated Elamite kings to pull his chariot during a
triumphal parade, that he threw for himself, and forcing one
of his rivals to live in a dog kennel. Some
accounts describe that particular rival as being forced to wear
(16:29):
a dog collar, but others describe it as having a
chain punched through his jaw, neither of which sounds great.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
No, it's one of those things that I think is
depicted in some of the reliefs, and it's hard to
tell from the relief exactly which way it should be interpreted. Yeah.
Ashurbanipal and other Assyrian kings also dealt with conquered peoples
by deporting their citizens to other parts of the empire. Often,
they would install local princes as vassal rulers to try
(16:59):
to retain a region's loyalty. But a lot of the
people that had been living in those regions would be
sent elsewhere to exile. serve in the Assyrian army or
to work on farms or to work on the emperor's
building projects, just whatever work the empire thought was most
necessary in that moment. This also included sending scribes to
(17:20):
work for the royal court or taking the more educated
sons of local leaders hostage to serve as scribes and
scholars in the capital. Ashurbanipal's military campaigns began with finishing
what his father had tried to start in Egypt, putting
down the uprising that Esarhaddon had been on his way
to deal with when he died. There, Ashurbanipal's forces fought
(17:44):
against the Kushites and the Nubians, ultimately capturing Memphis and
taking control of what is now Egypt. Assyria's control of
Egypt was relatively brief, but that was when the empire
was at its largest. Other campaigns included besieging the Phoenician
city of Tyre, which had supported uprisings in Egypt and
(18:05):
in Lydia, and ongoing disputes with the kingdoms of Elam
in what's now southwestern Iran and Urartu in what's now
northwestern Iran, Armenia, and Turkey.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
And then there was Babylon and Ashurbanipal's relationship with his
brother Shamashum Ukin, a little family drama in play. This
has been characterized in a couple of different ways, in
part because documentation about it is still being reconstructed and translated.
So one is that Esarhaddon's intention was always for Ashurbanipal
(18:38):
to be ruler of the whole empire, with Shamashum-Ukin's governorship
of Babylon more like that of a vassal state. The
other is that Esarhaddon was dividing the empire, with his
two sons having different responsibilities and different territory. Either way,
when their father died, Ashurbanipal was fond of his brother,
(18:59):
but over time, that relationship deteriorated. Ashurbanipal started describing his
brother as being ungrateful and traitorous. He wouldn't even mention
Shamashumukhin's name without some kind of epithet. And Shamashumukhin increasingly
chafed at Ashurbanipal's attempts to control Babylon and to tell
(19:21):
him what to do.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Eventually, Ashurbanipal was encouraging the citizens of Babylon to rebel
against Shemashumukin, and Shemashumukin was working directly with Lydia, Elam,
and other territories to revolt against Ashurbanipal. Ashurbanipal started attacking
and besieging the cities that were involved, including taking on
(19:43):
a two-year siege of Babylon, during which conditions in that
city became truly horrific. Shamashum Ukin is believed to have
taken his own life during the siege in 648 BCE
by throwing himself into the flames while his palace was burning.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Ashurbanipal ruled the Assyrian Empire from 668 BCE to 627 BCE.
But there's not as much information about the last four
or five years of that, at least not yet. In
yet another attempt to deal with the line of succession,
Ashurbanipal gave two of his sons, Ashur-ed-el-elani and Sin-shar-esh-kun, co-regency
(20:24):
with different territories and different powers. But especially considering the
communication and transportation methods that existed in the 7th century BCE,
the Assyrian Empire was enormous. There were ongoing divisions within
and pressure from neighboring kingdoms and empires after Ashurbanipal's death.
(20:45):
His successors were not able to keep the empire together
in the face of all of that, and progressively they
lost territory.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
A coalition of kingdoms, including the Babylonians and the Medeans,
conquered the Assyrian capital of Nineveh in 612 BCE. Assyria
was absorbed into the Babylonian Empire, and then that fell
to the Persians in 539 BCE. The Persians drew a
lot of influence from Neo-Assyrian culture, and the roads and
(21:16):
other infrastructure that were built by the Assyrians were critical
to the building and the expansion of the Persian Empire.
We are finally going to get to that library after
we pause for a sponsor break. Now we have finally
(21:39):
gotten to Ashurbanipal's library. This was a massive library that
he assembled in the capital of Nineveh. Tablets from the
library have been found around the remains of multiple buildings
in that city, the Southwest Palace, the North Palace, and
then the areas around the temples of Ishtar and Nabu.
It is not fully clear whether this is where the
(22:02):
library collections were before the city was destroyed, or if
that's more where tablets wound up over the course of
the city's destruction in the centuries that have followed.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Obviously, plenty of monarchs and temples and wealthy people had
collections of documents and texts long before this, but this
is one of the oldest known systematically acquired and organized
libraries in the world. It was intentionally collected and curated
as a repository of knowledge. It's also the largest collection
(22:34):
of Assyrian texts in the world. Excavations there have unearthed
more than 20,000 clay tablets and fragments, and many have
standardized colophons that suggest a systematic method for labeling and
cataloging the texts. That number includes a lot of pieces,
and the total number of complete tablets is actually unknown. Yeah,
(22:56):
it's obviously less than 20,000, but it's hard to pinpoint
how many texts there were when the library existed as
a functioning entity. Ashurbanipal ordered the creation of this library.
He ordered temples and palaces all across his empire to
send their texts to Nineveh. Often these texts were copied
(23:18):
and Ashurbanipal would be sent either the copies or the originals.
There is some surviving documentation that suggests that what he
really wanted was those originals and that maybe people creatively
misunderstood his instructions so that they could keep the originals
in their temple or their collection. Surviving correspondence also suggests
that he was really knowledgeable about where to find the
(23:41):
text that he wanted for his library and also who
was likely to have works that would be good additions
to the library, but that he didn't specifically know about already.
I love that he has like a scholarly network of
acquisitions librarians to talk to. Some of the texts in
the library are ones that he wrote himself. and many
(24:04):
are inscribed with colophons that he wrote. There is also
a ten-sided cylinder covered in cuneiform containing the annals of Ashurbanipal,
including an account of his ascension to the throne and
his expeditions and conquests against Egypt, Tyre, Elam, Arabia, and
his brother in Babylon, among others. Assyriologist Hormuzd Rasam, who
(24:27):
was born in Mosul, unearthed this cylinder from the site
of the North Palace, and it is called the Rassam
Cylinder today.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Ashrapanipal described this library as containing all knowledge. There are
texts on medicine, mathematics, and history. There's also literature, including
epics and myths and dictionaries and other reference works. A
lot of the Assyrian literature that still exists today has
survived because Ashurbanipal included it in the library. That includes
(24:56):
the Epic of Gilgamesh and its famous tablet relating a
flood that has some distinct similarities to the biblical book
of Genesis.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
And there are.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Extensive legal texts and documents relating to the functioning of
the Assyrian Empire. There is also a lot of material
that relates to divination in some way. As we said earlier,
omens and divination were a key part of the Assyrian worldview.
Ashurbanipal wanted his library to contain every bit of information
(25:27):
that could possibly be used to interpret signs and omens,
believing this knowledge would benefit and strengthen the empire. That
includes books on astrology and omen texts. Based on what
has been translated so far, it is likely that roughly
half of the library's works relate to divination. And there
are also texts there that are related to magic. The
(25:51):
sacking of Nineveh in 612 BCE both preserved and destroyed
Ashurbanipal's library. As the city burned, the clay tablets hardened
in the heat, and then they were protected by the
fallen rubble of the city around them. But writing boards,
which would have been made of wood or ivory that
was covered with wax, those were largely destroyed. The tablets
(26:15):
were also broken and scattered during the destruction of the city,
and as they have been unearthed, it hasn't always been
clear where in the capital they were originally housed. That
scattering of fragments was compounded by the excavation of the
library after its rediscovery in the 19th century. English archaeologist
(26:35):
Austin Henry Layard was working with Hormuzd Razam, who had
been Layard's assistant before training at Oxford and becoming an
Assyriologist in his own right. The two started excavating Nineveh
in 1849 and found numerous clay tablets and fragments. Razam
continued excavations after Layard moved on and found another huge
(26:56):
collection of tablets that began in 1852. At the time,
this area was under Ottoman control, and the excavation site
was known as Koyunyik. I'm sorry for my bad pronunciation
of that. Much of the material that Laird and other
archaeologists excavated at Koyunyik was sent to the British Museum.
(27:18):
There were also French archaeology projects in the area, so
some of these materials are also now in the Louvre.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
Although the fire had hardened and preserved the tablets, many
of them were broken, and during excavations, archaeologists and workers
didn't fully document exactly where each piece was found. It's
obvious that tablets found in different places were all part
of the same overall collection, because many are marked Palace
(27:45):
of Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria. But
without knowing exactly where in Nineveh any individual piece was found,
it is extremely difficult to figure out which other pieces
that piece might go with. Yeah, the focus was much
more on sending these archaeological treasures to England than on
(28:06):
thoroughly documenting the context where each piece was found. Yeah,
get them out as quickly as you can and get
them on their way.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Yeah. So reconstructing these tablets is just an incredibly laborious process.
Only a fraction of the tablets have been reassembled, and
a lot of those still do have missing pieces. An
average of 35 texts have been reconstructed and transcribed every
year since the mid-19th century, and that means there is
(28:35):
still a whole lot left to go.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Even so, the library has been a massive source of
information about ancient Mesopotamia and the Assyrian Empire. Researchers first
deciphered cuneiform in 1857, just a few years after the
first tablets from the library were found. A key part
of this was the Bisitun inscription. That's an inscription on
(28:59):
a rock face in the Zagros Mountains in what is
now Iran, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site today.
Much like the Rosetta Stone, the Bessitun inscription contains an
inscription in three languages. It's an account of Achaemenid king
Darius I written in Babylonian, Old Persian, and Elamite. Henry
(29:19):
Rawlinson published his work on the Old Persian section of
it in 1849, and that enabled the translation of the
other languages. Ashurbanipal's library was part of the process of
deciphering cuneiform as it provided an array of additional samples
of cuneiform script to work from.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
Once people were able to read the cuneiform script that
they were written in, the tablets in Ashurbanipal's library became
the source of just a wealth of new historical information.
Prior to this, the vast majority of information about ancient
Mesopotamia and the Assyrian Empire had been in the Hebrew
(29:59):
Bible and the Christian Old Testament derived from it, and
from Greek and Roman writers. The biblical texts were really
primarily focused on things that related to the Levant and Egypt,
and then the Greek and Roman accounts were often ones
that were written centuries later. Neither of them was like
a complete... nuanced history of the Assyrian Empire.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Something that historians and other scholars were able to start
correcting after the discovery of Ashurbanipal's library was the existing
knowledge about Ashurbanipal himself. Greek sources had turned him into
a semi-mythical figure called Sardana Paulus, conflating elements of Ashurbanipal
with his brother Shemashumukhin. The Greek version of Sardanapalus was
(30:45):
the last king of Assyria and burned himself to death
in his palace alongside all of his riches and concubines.
Sardanapalus was depicted in European literature and art, particularly during
the Romantic era, including in George Gordon Lord Byron's verse
drama Sardanapalus and Eugène Delacroix's painting Death of Sardanapalus. reconstructing
(31:08):
and deciphering the works in the library is ongoing. The
British Museum established the Ashurbanipal Library Project in 2002 in
cooperation with the University of Mosul. This project has gone
through multiple phases of funding and has involved cataloging, the
creation of high-resolution 3D imagery of the tablets and fragments,
(31:31):
and multiple projects to reconstruct and translate the texts. So today,
these images and other information is available for scholars to
use to try to work on furthering the deciphering process
of all of these pieces. And great news, you can
see a lot of this online today. The Ashurbanipal Library
Project's online home is at ORAC, or the Open Richly
(31:54):
Annotated Cuneiform Corpus. at oracc.museum.upenn.edu. And the British Museum can
be visited virtually on Google Maps, including Room 55, which
is where the Ashurbanipal Library exhibit is located.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
And that is yet another installment of what I did
on my summer vacation.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Do you have a Cuneiform listener mail? I have listener form.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Listener form? That's not what it means, but sure, we'll
call it that. It's listener form from now on.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
There you go. It's not.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
I'll forget by the next time we do it. So
this is from Gwendolyn, and Gwendolyn wrote and said, Hello,
Holly and Tracy. I'm a longtime listener who has earned
a PhD in your history offerings, though like to purposely
get a little behind. in order to have multiple episodes
saved up for when I need them. My latest listening
spree included your week of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, which I
(32:52):
knew would be exciting for me as I am a
chemist and have also done x-ray crystallography. I think you
were a few minutes into the second part when you
mentioned Dorothy went to the doctor for pain in her hands.
I looked at my dog, Tungsten, more on him in
a moment, and said, uh-oh, I think Dorothy might have
rheumatoid arthritis. Sure enough, within a few minutes, you confirmed
(33:14):
this had been the case, though for her, it took
several years to get that answer. This was funny to
me because I also have rheumatoid arthritis, and I have
somehow correctly diagnosed several people, myself included, well before the
official diagnosis was reached. It's a little sad that most people,
and especially women, still go years between, hey, my hands hurt,
(33:34):
and receiving the final answer. And on another note, I
too have been given paradoxical information of just rest and
move your hands more because as Holly mentioned, this disease
is different for everyone it impacts. And despite many advances
in treatment, we're still kind of shrugging our shoulders about
how to really fix it for people with stubborn cases.
(33:54):
As an autoimmune girly, I'm always so grateful when you
discuss the facts about illnesses and disabilities. It's so important,
especially given today's climate, not believing scientists and healthcare professionals,
as well as the ever-increasing disregard for people with disabilities.
Thank you so much for not shying away from the
tough topics and handling them with care.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
You're a wonderful host. It's basically longtime.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Friends at this point. And I always look forward to
hearing your voices and insights when I have the time
to catch up on episodes. I will also add here
that Holly and I seem to have some kind of
spooky connection where we both think of an Eddie Izzard
reference for the same thing, and I always get a
big laugh whenever that happens. After that very long email,
(34:36):
you deserve some pet tax. I have included a couple
of pictures of the aforementioned Tungsten, a truly American melting
pot mix, my constant companion.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
And a long little doggie.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
In one of the photos, he is patiently waiting while
my 97.5-year-old grandmother looks absolutely shocked that dog treats can
be shaped like ice cream cones. The third picture is
of an embroidery project I completed recently for a friend's grandson.
I was terrified as it was the most complicated project
I had done in a while, but he turned out
all right. Here's to many more years of great episodes, Gwendolyn.
(35:10):
Gwendolyn has a postscript with an episode topic suggestion. I
will leave that secret in case it becomes a topic
in the future. So then, yes, we do have very
cute dog pictures. What a cute boy. And then a.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Really cool project. This looks like a moth. It does.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
A really intricate... I cannot imagine how challenging that must
have been to do.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
I'm wondering because it looks a lot like a kit
I bought to do a very similar bat. Oh, yeah?
Maybe we are experiencing spooky action at a distance because
we are apparently embroidering the same kinds of things as well.
Maybe so.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
I had not thoroughly read the whole rest of the
email when I just scrolled through it today and did not,
like I had not seen the context. For the photo
of the grandmother and the dog. I was like, what
is happening? What is she holding? And now I know
it is a dog treat shaped like a little ice
(36:14):
cream cone.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Precious.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
So thank you so, so much, Gwendolyn, for this email.
It was very kind and gracious. I always feel a
little awkward reading the very kind, gracious parts out loud
on the show. But thank you so much. I also
just realized, because it was hidden under the part of
the screen where Holly is, so I can see you
(36:37):
when I'm talking to you, that the title of the
email was rheumatoid arthritis worthy dot dot dot win question mark,
which is also great. If you would like to send
us a note, we are at historypodcast at iheartradio.com. You
can also find the show notes for all of our episodes,
(36:57):
including all of the sources that we've used for our research.
That's at our website, which is at missedinhistory.com. And you
can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app, but
anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff You
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
(37:19):
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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