A Fighting Librarian?

They don't really seem to go together.

Ashurbanipal killing a lion with a spear

Ashurbanipal was the King of Assyria from 668 to 627BC.  Just like any other good Assyrian king, he quelled rebellions in his empire, ransacked cities, and kept maintained the lands conquered.  Unlike other Assyrian kings, he learned to read and write.  He was trained as a scribe and was even a high priest of the god Assur.   Today he is remembered for the extensive library he established at Nineveh.

Conquest of Elam

Ashurbanipal's was the first library that was systematically collected and cataloged-meaning, the scribes developed a system for organizing all the texts (by subject matter, each room had a tablet near the door stating which subjects were kept in that room), so that they would know where to find them-in the Middle East.  When the British Museum excavated the library, they found around 30,000 clay tablets.  Tablets from Assyria, Sumer, and Babylon were all present.

Tablet found in Ashurbanipal's library

Even though Assyrians did not invent their own written language, they were the ones who preserved it.  Among the 30,000 tablets found in the library was the most complete version of the Epic of Gilgamesh (Sumerian), and the story of Adapa and how man became mortal (Babylonian).  Ashurbanipal enhanced his own library by pilfering tablets from the temples of Babylon and adding them to his own collection.  There is speculation that he, like librarians of Alexandria, maintained the original engravings and returned copies to the temples.  Ashurbanipal himself selected every tablet that was kept in his library.

Part of the Adapa myth

The library at Nineveh was also remarkable in its diversity of works.  It had many religious and business texts, but it also contained a large amount of scientific and literary texts.  In the 30,000 clay tablets, there are about 1,200 distinct texts.  The library also contained records of espionage and other government affairs, which give us better insight into what the culture of ancient Assyria was like.

A small fraction of the Epic of Gilgamesh

Ashurbanipal's library was not the first library.  Older libraries have been found in Egypt.  Predecessors and contemporaries of the library at Nineveh within Mesopotamia include private libraries, business records, other palace libraries, temple libraries.  And it was definitely not the last, personal libraries rose up in Greece and Rome, then came Alexandria, and, believe it or not, there are still libraries around today, but the library in Nineveh definitely holds its own place in history.