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Ashurbanipal was literate, and a passionate collector of texts and tablets. He sent scribes into every region of the Neo-Assyrian Empire to collect ancient texts. He hired scholars and scribes to copy texts, mainly from Babylonian sources.
Ashurbanipal was not above using war booty as a means of stocking his library. Because he was known for being a scholar and being cruel to his enemies, Ashurbanipal was able to use threats to gain materials from Babylonia and surrounding areas.
The fragments from the royal library include royal inscriptions, chronicles, mythological and religious texts, contracts, royal grants and decrees, royal letters, and various administrative documents. Some of the texts contain divinations, omens, incantations and hymns to various gods, others relate to medicine, astronomy, and literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh, a masterpiece of ancient Babylonian poetry, was found in the library as was the Enûma Eliš creation story, and myth of Adapa the first man, and stories such as the Poor Man of Nippur.
The texts were principally written in Akkadian in the cuneiform script.
Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BC by a coalition of Babylonians, Scythians and Medes, an ancient Iranian people. It is believed that during the burning of the palace, a great fire must have ravaged the library, causing the clay cuneiform tablets to become partially baked. Paradoxically, this potentially destructive event helped preserve the tablets. As well as texts on clay tablets, some of the texts may have been inscribed onto wax boards which because of their organic nature have been lost.
The British Museum’s collections database counts 30,943 "tablets" in the entire Nineveh library collection, and the Trustees of the Museum propose to issue an updated catalog as part of the Ashurbanipal Library Project. If all smaller fragments that actually belong to the same text are deducted, it is likely that the "library" originally included some 10,000 texts in all. The original library documents however, which would have included leather scrolls, wax boards, and possibly papyri, contained perhaps a much broader spectrum of knowledge than that known from the surviving clay tablet cuneiform texts.
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