During the mid-7th century BC, the Neo-Assyrian Empire ruled over the largest territory that the
world had ever seen at the time. Leading this vast empire was a cunning military commander
named Ashurbanipal, who was popular among his people but merciless when dealing with enemies.
His obsession with collecting knowledge led him to construct The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, which
has been referred to as "the most precious source of historical material in the world!”
Ashurbanipal, whose name means “Ashur has made another son,” was born in the Neo-Assyrian capital
of Nineveh in 685 BC. He descended from the Sargonid dynasty founded by his great-grandfather Sargon the Second,
after he usurped the Assyrian throne in 722 BC. Ashurbanipal’s grandfather, Sennacherib and father,
Esarhaddon were both very successful rulers who had helped form the largest empire in history up
to that point. Upon conquering Egypt in 671 BC, Ashurbanipal’s father became the first ruler in history
to control both Mesopotamia and Egypt. King Esarhaddon suffered from a severe skin disease and
died only two years later as he was heading back to Egypt to put down a rebellion. Despite being
his father’s fourth son, Ashurbanipal was appointed heir to the majority of the Assyrian Empire early and
rightfully claimed the title, “King of the Universe.” His first goal as ruler was to mobilize an army to
crush the rebellion that his father had planned to end in Egypt. Ashurbanipal defeated the rebels
with ease and campaigned as far south as Thebes. The city of Thebes was so thoroughly sacked that
its destruction is used in the Hebrew Bible as an example of the devastation that can befall a city.
By 665 BC, Egypt was once again under the complete control of the Assyrian Empire.
Ashurbanipal appointed an Egyptian prince named Psamtik as pharaoh. The prince had been captured
several years earlier and forcibly reeducated as an Assyrian puppet ruler. Shortly after installing
Psamtik as pharaoh of Egypt, Ashurbanipal turned his attention to a new threat on the other side of his
empire. The kingdom of Elam, led by King Urtak, had taken advantage of Ashurbanipal’s prolonged absence
in western Assyria by invading Babylonia in 665 BC. The surprise attack was easily repelled by
the Assyrians and King Urtak died shortly thereafter. Ashurbanipal’s brother, Shamash-shum-ukin,
grew tired of his inferior position as King of Babylon and began conspiring against his brother.
Unbeknownst to Ashurbanipal, his brother had been sending secret aid to Elam in an effort
to destabilize his rule. Ashurbanipal eventually launched a devastating attack on Elam in 653 BC,
which culminated in the Battle of Ulai near the Elamite capital of Susa. There, Ashurbanipal won a
decisive victory over the Elamite Kingdom. The king described his victory by saying:
“With the encouragement of Ashur and Ishtar I killed them. I cut off their heads before one another.
I damned up the Ulai River with the bodies of the warriors and people of Elam. For three days
I made that stream flow full of bodies instead of water. Like the onset of a terrible hurricane
I overwhelmed Elam in its entirety. I cut off the head of Teumman, their king, – the haughty one,
who plotted evil. Countless of his warriors I slew. With my hands, I seized his fighters. With
their corpses I filled the plain. Their blood I let run down the land; its water I dyed red like wool.”
In this relief sculpture, Ashurbanipal and his queen can be seen dining in Nineveh as the severed head
of King Teumman hangs from a tree on the left. Thus, by the end of the 650’s BC, Ashurbanipal had
succeeded in expanding the Assyrian Empire to the greatest extent it would ever reach. These
palace reliefs found in Nineveh, called the “Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal,” show the king taking part in
the Assyrian royal tradition of hunting lions. Lions were viewed as menaces for centuries and
these hunts were symbolic of the king’s ability to protect the Assyrian people from its enemies.
The tensions between Ashurbanipal and his brother Shamash-shum-ukin eventually led to a civil war
in 652 BC. Shamash-shum-ukin was greatly outmatched and outnumbered from the beginning of the war,
but managed to sustain his cause for several years by seeking alliances amongst his brother’s enemies.
In reference to the situation with his brother, Ashurbanipal said: “In these days Shamash-shum-ukin, the
faithless brother of mine, whom I had treated well and had set up as king of Babylon, – every imaginable
thing that kingship calls for, I made and gave him; soldiers, horses, chariots, I equipped and put into
his hands; cities, fields, plantations, together with the people who live therein, I gave him in larger
numbers than my father had ordered. But he forgot this kindness I had shown him and planned evil.
Outwardly, with his lips, he was speaking fair words while inwardly his heart was designing murder.”
Despite building a notable coalition, Shamash-shum-ukin’s cause was futile as his brother’s armies
laid siege to most Babylonian cities, including Babylon itself which eventually fell in 648 BC. It
is believed that Shamash-shum-ukin and his family either set themselves on fire in order to escape captivity or
were burned alive by the attacking Assyrian soldiers. Ashurbanipal described his victory
over his brother and his allies by saying: “The gods who march before me, slaying my foes, cast Shamash-shum-ukin,
my hostile brother, who became my enemy, into the burning flames of a conflagration and destroyed him. As for the
people who hatched these plans for my hostile brother, and did evil, but who were afraid of
death and valued their lives highly, they did not cast themselves into the fire with Shamash-shum-ukin,
heir lord. Not one escaped; not one sinner slipped through my hands.
The chariots, coaches, palanquins, his concubines, the goods of his palace, they brought it all before me.
As for those men and their vulgar mouths, who uttered vulgarity against Ashur, my god, and
plotted evil against me – I slit their tongues and brought them low. Their dismembered bodies
I fed to the dogs, swine, wolves and eagles, to the birds of heaven and the fish of the
deep.” With his brother gone and the civil war over, Ashurbanipal decided to punish the Elamite Kingdom
for all their sins against the Assyrian people by besieging the Elamite capital of Susa, massacring
all of its inhabitants and leaving it in ruins. Ashurbanipal described his victory as follows:
Susa, the great holy city, abode of their gods, seat of their mysteries, I conquered. I entered
its palaces, I opened their treasures where silver and gold, goods and wealth were amassed... I destroyed
the ziggurat of Susa. I smashed its shining copper horns. I reduced the temples of Elam to naught.
their gods and goddesses I scattered to the winds. The tombs of their ancient and recent
kings I devastated and exposed to the sun, I carried away their bones toward the land of Ashur.
I devastated the provinces of Elam and on their lands I sowed salt.” This relief sculpture shows
the humiliated King of Elam, Humban-haltash, being forced to serve food at the royal court in Nineveh.
Ashurbanipal enjoyed torturing defeated kings and is said to have once put a chain through the jaw
of a king and forced him to live the rest of his life in a dog kennel. Ashurbanipal decided against
appointing any puppet kings in Elam and made no attempt to incorporate the region into his empire,
instead leaving it empty and undefended. Choosing to ignore Elam proved to be a fatal mistake
because the Medians would go on to migrate into the abandoned region, rebuild the
destroyed cities and play an instrumental role in the eventual downfall of the Assyrian Empire.
The second conquest of Elam in the mid-640’s BC was the final major military campaign
of Ashurbanipal’s life. He had been at war for nearly twenty-five years by that point, quelling
rebellions in Egypt, Anatolia and Babylonia, as well as conquering the Kingdom of Elam.
With his massive empire finally at peace, Ashurbanipal was free to turn his attention to
more scholarly pursuits. He constructed the world’s first systematically organized library, called “The
Royal Library of Ashurbanipal,” or sometimes referred to as “The Library at Nineveh.” Ashurbanipal was
obsessed with ancient tablets and wanted to own a copy of every text that was ever written.
He commanded hundreds of scribes to search for texts across the known world and make
copies for his library. The king described his motivation for constructing his library by saying:
“I, Ashurbanipal, King of the Universe, on whom the gods have bestowed intelligence, I have placed
these tablets for the future in the library at Nineveh for my life and for the well-being of
my soul, to sustain the foundations of my royal name.” Ashurbanipal himself was a voracious reader=
of the texts within his library and many of the surviving tablets bear his royal mark, indicating
that he had read or consulted them personally asha banipal had been trained in the scribal
arts before becoming heir to the throne and this made him feel far superior to previous kings.
He boasted of his unique abilities and great intelligence, saying: “I studied the secret lore
of the entire scribal craft, I know the celestial and terrestrial portance. I can solve the most
complicated divisions and multiplications which do not have a solution. I have read intricate tablets
inscribed with obscure Sumerian or Akkadian that are difficult to unravel. I took my pleasure in
reading stones inscribed before the flood. The best of the scribal art, such works as none of the kings
who went before me had ever learned.” The prolific English writer H.G. Wells referred to the Library
of Ashurbanipal as "the most precious source of historical material in the world." The royal library
was buried during the Battle of Nineveh in 612 BC and lay buried beneath Ashurbanipal’s destroyed
palace until English archeologist Austen Henry Layard discovered it in 1849. Layard took over
30,000 tablets from the library to England, where they have been preserved at the British Museum
in London ever since. The most important text found within the library was “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” which
contained a version of the great flood story that predated the Bible. Today, “The Epic of Gilgamesh” is
considered a literary masterpiece and is widely regarded as the world's earliest surviving work of
literature. In 631 BC, after thirty-eight years on the throne, Ashurbanipal died of unknown causes at the age of
fifty-four. A civil war between Ashurbanipal’s two sons erupted over the throne, weakening the empire from
within and resulting in Assyria’s enemies becoming restive. A revolt broke out in Babylon led by a
rebel leader named Nabopolassar, who conquered the city from the Assyrian Empire and crowned himself
king of Babylon in 626 BC. Nabopolassar’s conquest of Babylon gave birth to the Neo-Babylonian Empire,
which went on to survive for less than a century. King Nabopolassar formed an alliance with the Medes,
Persians, Chaldeans, Cimmerians, and Scythians against the Assyrian Empire. Their combined armies marched
on the empire’s capital of Nineveh and in response, the final Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal’s son
Ashur-uballit the Second, fled to the city of Harran which he established as the empire’s new capital.
The king formed an alliance with his Egyptian vassal, but their combined forces were no match
and they suffered a devastating defeat at the Siege of Harran in 609 BC. It’s unknown whether
King Ashur-uballit the Second died during the siege, but he simply vanished from historical records
after the battle. With no leader, the defeat marked the end of the Neo-Assyrian Empire,
as its lands were divided between the Medians and the Neo-Babylonians. Thus, the empire that
Ashurbanipal had carried to its strongest position and through which he made profound contributions
to learning and world literature was conquered after only about twenty years after his death.
Through great brutality and intellect, Ashurbanipal controlled the largest empire the world had ever
seen and built the greatest surviving collection of ancient knowledge ever discovered! Consider
liking, commenting, subscribing and clicking the bell icon below for more videos like this!
Also, please consider becoming a member on Patreon to help in the creation of new videos!
Thank you!