An Ancient “Encyclopedia of Human Knowledge”

Picture yourself in the Middle Eastern country known today as Iraq. The year is 650 B.C.E. You are within the towering walls of the city of Nineveh (near modern-day Mosul). Looming before you is the imperial palace of King Ashurbanipal​—ruler of Assyria, Egypt, and Babylonia.a While standing near the palace doors, you notice men carting heavy earthen jars into the building. These men have just returned from the extremities of the Assyrian kingdom and are attempting to gather every known work about the social, cultural, and religious traditions of the people living in Ashurbanipal’s realm. Opening one of the jars, you notice that they are full of pillow-shaped clay tablets about three inches [8 cm] wide by four inches [10 cm] long.

You follow one of the men inside the palace, where you see scribes with bone styli making wedge-shaped impressions on small tablets of moist clay. They are translating foreign-language documents into Assyrian. Later, the tablets will be baked in an oven, making the records almost indestructible. The records are stored in rooms filled with shelves that are stacked with hundreds of jars. On the doorposts of the rooms, plaques state the subject of the records held in each location. The more than 20,000 clay tablets in this library contain information about business transactions, religious customs, law, history, medicine, and human and animal physiology, forming what a later scholar described as “an encyclopedia of human knowledge.”

Before and After the Nineveh Library

Other great libraries existed before Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh. King Hammurabi built a library in the Babylonian city of Borsippa a thousand years before Ashurbanipal. Rameses II founded a famous library in the Egyptian city of Thebes more than 700 years before Ashurbanipal. But the diversity of information and the sheer number of records earn Ashurbanipal’s library the reputation of being “the greatest of the ancient world.” It was 350 years before another library surpassed it.

[Picture on page 18]

King Ashurbanipal of Assyria, whose library held cuneiform clay tablets, 650 B.C.E.