THE LIBRARIAN KING

As a matter of great regret, I am now remembering the personal choice of mine, made in 1969, to forego a potentially invaluable trip to Iraq, in favor of the apparently more exciting journey to London and Scotland, where I indeed developed many precious memories, but at what expense! In Iraq, I could have breathed the air of antiquity itself, as I did in Egypt and in Rome, I could have visited the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh, seen the site of Sennacherib’s palace with Ashurbanipal’s library in it, as well as many other glories of Mesopotamia. Such would have been the kind of choice I might be making today, but, then, how many other choices would have been quite different now, from what they were then?... Ironically, however, it was during that same 1969 visit to London, that I was able to see those marvelous exhibits of Ashurbanipal’s library’s clay tablets in the British Museum, plundered by the British Empire in her heyday from her lowly subjects... So, I saw them anyway: an advantage of going to London… Eminently memorable, but not exactly the same thing as going there, to the source…

As a sad postscript, I wonder whether the American war in Iraq has destroyed all chances of ever seeing the ruins of ancient Mesopotamia again, in the same condition that they had survived the fuga temporum prior to the year 2003 of the New American Century, when the ongoing archaeological restoration sites of ancient Babylon were reportedly turned into US Army helipads, and pulverized, in the effort of liberating the world from Saddam Hussein. (Apparently, there were some very powerful people in Washington in those days with a personal interest to compensate for the erstwhile Babylonian Captivity by erasing the physical relics, even if lying in ruins, of the once great city of Babylon from the face of the earth…)

The name of Assyria has a special significance in the history of the world and in Biblical history. Taking its name from the city of Asshur, its first capital, then succeeded by Calah, and the magnificent Nineveh, these are all household names to any serious Bible reader, as well as subjects of immense fascination to religious and secular archaeologists, linguists, and historians of antiquity.

The Bible mentions several Assyrian kings, either obliquely or explicitly, by name, the first such king being Tiglath-pileser III, who conquered much of the Northern Kingdom of Israel (formed after King Solomon’s death, and the split of his kingdom into Israel and Judah), taking many Israelis into captivity. His successor Shalmaneser V, and eventually Sargon II, completed the job started by their predecessor, putting an end to the existence of the Northern Kingdom, burning down its capital Samaria (which was later rebuilt all anew, but this time as an Assyrian city), and repopulating the area with different peoples from other parts of the Empire. Two more Assyrian kings have achieved historical prominence, Sennacherib (the raider of Judah, and the very proud owner of a magnificent palace), and lastly Ashurbanipal, and of all these, it is the last of them, who has attracted my particular interest.

History of the great kings of the past casts a net into the boundless sea of the once-upon-a-time, so that we can draw out all kinds of fishes to nearly each individual taste. The great king Ashurbanipal, who ruled the Assyrian Empire with its capital in Nineveh from 668 to 627 BC, right before it collapsed permanently, in 616 BC, is famous for several reasons. The last great ruler of Assyria, he is remembered in the history of Babylon as the one who laid siege to his brother’s city, causing a great famine and reducing its citizens to cannibalism, until they finally surrendered to him in 648 BC. He was not a vengeful man, however. Being a connoisseur of art and history, his mind was too far above punishing the great city of Babylon for its folly of resisting him. Although most of his aesthetic endeavors were devoted to the city of Nineveh, Babylon, on his watch, saw a lot of restoration and amelioration, particularly, in the maintenance of its religious shrines and various sculptures.

Quoting from Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ashurbanipal was a man of religious zeal. He rebuilt or adorned most of the major shrines in Assyria and Babylonia. Many of his actions were guided by omen reports, in which he took  personal and informed interest. His younger brothers were priests. The king was also patron of the arts. He adorned his new and restored palaces at Nineveh with sculptures, depicting major historical and ceremonial events of his long reign. The style shows big improvement over that of his predecessors and many bas-reliefs have an epic quality unparalleled in the ancient world, which may well be due to his active and vigorous personal influence.”

But no matter how great his numerous cultural accomplishments were, his greatest historical achievement was the library, hence, my affectionate title The Librarian King, and my particular personal preference for this great king, as distinguished from all the rest.

A dedicated archaeologist and culture lover, Ashurbanipal stands out in history as the man whose love for literature led to an unprecedented accumulation in one place of some 100,000 clay tablets, with about one third of them to be later discovered by the archeologists, and to provide the main body of our knowledge of ancient Mesopotamia, as we know it.
The library of Ashurbanipal was the enlargement of the great palace built by his grandfather Sennacherib. The palace, uncovered in 1849-1854 by the Englishman Sir Austen Henry Layard, known as the father of Assyriology, was by far the largest of its kind, occupying an area of three large city blocks. Making up his mind to make Nineveh the capital of the world, Ashurbanipal put the greatest emphasis on culture, and, not surprisingly, on literature. He is known to have instructed his scribes to search for, and copy, the libraries of ancient Babylon and elsewhere, uncovering many old texts written well over two thousand years before his time. Here is another informative excerpt from Britannica, to wind up this entry:

“Ashurbanipal’s outstanding contribution resulted from his academic interests. He assembled in Nineveh the first systematically collected and catalogued library in the ancient Near East. At royal command, the scribes searched out and collected or copied texts of every genre from temple libraries added to the basic collection of tablets from Asshur, Calah, and Nineveh. The major group includes omen texts based on observations of events; on the behavior and features of men, animals, and plants, and on the motions of the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars. Lexicographical texts list in dictionary form Sumerian, Akkadian and other words. He collected many incantations, prayers, rituals, fables, proverbs and other texts. Traditional Mesopotamian epics, like the Creation Story, Gilgamesh, Irra, Etana, and Anzu have survived because of their preservation in his library. The presence of handbooks, scientific texts, and some folk tales, shows that this library was more than a reference library; it covered the whole range of Ashurbanipal’s personal literary interests, and many works bear the royal mark of ownership in their colophons.”

...Yes, some people become famous for building great palaces, others become great by turning their palaces into libraries. Don’t get me wrong, though. I am all for creators of architectural and decorative masterpieces, but my wife, a former research fellow at the great Lenin Library in Moscow, would never let me forget the librarian king.