The Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh
- Date
- c. 647 BCE
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- Mesopotamia (Iraq)
- Era
- Classical Antiquity
- Significance
The Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (r. 668–627 BCE) assembled at Nineveh the oldest known systematically organised royal library, gathering more than 30,000 clay tablets and fragments through copying and the deliberate collection of texts from across Mesopotamia.
The library's holdings spanned literary, religious, scientific, divinatory, lexical, and administrative works, including the most complete surviving version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Tablets were catalogued and stored with a level of organisation unprecedented for its time. Scholars believe the collection was built up over Ashurbanipal's reign, with major acquisition likely concentrated after the second Elam campaign of 647 BCE, though texts were gathered earlier. Excavated in the mid-19th century and now largely held in the British Museum, the library is the single most important source for Mesopotamian literature, science, and religion, preserving works that would otherwise have been lost.
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Empires active in c. 647 BCE
- Roman Kingdom753 BCE – 509 BCE
- Neo-Assyrian Empire911 BCE – 609 BCE
- Zhou Dynasty1046 BCE – 256 BCE
- Scythians800 BCE – 300 BCE
- Kingdom of Kush1070 BCE – 350 CE
- Median Empire678 BCE – 550 BCE
Related culture, arts & philosophy events
- Homeric epics composed and the Greek alphabet adoptedc. 750 BCE
- Life and teaching of Confucius in China551–479 BCE
- Thales of Miletus and the predicted eclipse: the dawn of natural philosophy28 May 585 BCE (traditional)
- First Olympic Games held at Olympia776 BCE (traditional)
- Pythagoras founds his school at Crotonc. 530 BCE
- Darius I's Behistun Inscriptionc. 520 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
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