Ashurbanipal: The Last Great King of Assyria

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Welcome to this latest Ancients episode and we're going back to Mesopotamia and that great ruler of ancient Assyria, Ashurbanipal.

Now Ashurbanipal was much more than just a ruthless military leader.

He was also fascinated by certain rather bizarre academic pursuits including divination, this reading of sheep's livers for interpreting omens and signs from the gods.

We're exploring all of that today, this great library of Ashurbanipaul, with our guest, the wonderful Dr.

Selena Wisnom from the University of Leicester, who's just written a book all about Ashurbanipao and his great library at Nineveh.

Let's go.

Ashurbanipal,

the fearsome ruler of ancient Assyria, who described himself as king of the world.

A titanic figure who saw his empire reach the zenith of its power.

He saw himself as a warrior and a conqueror, but also as a scholar.

At his capital at Nineveh, present-day Mosul in Iraq, archaeologists discovered the remains of Ashurbanipal's greatest legacy, his library.

Thousands of cuneiform texts from it have survived, revealing how Ashabanapal was so much more than just a fearsome warlord.

In this episode, we're exploring the complex story of this Assyrian king.

Yes, we'll explore the military conquests that define his reign, but also his passion for academia.

His desire to gather scholars at his court to read signs from the gods, to research texts that varied from medicine and mathematics to law and literature.

Nineveh was the capital of this Assyrian superpower, but it was also a great center of knowledge in the ancient Mesopotamian world.

This is the story of Ashabanapal,

the last great king of Assyria, with our guest, Dr.

Selena Wisnum.

Selena, what a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Lovely to be here.

And talking all about Ashurbanipal.

So widely regarded as this ruler who oversaw the zenith of the Assyrian Empire, but also this empire's last great king.

It's quite the contrast.

Yes, there is definitely a sense of he brings the empire right to its peak, and Assyria will never be as powerful again as it is under him.

And his reign is the setting for all kinds of extraordinary events.

And is he quite an extraordinary figure to explore?

The fact that he has all of these different layers to him.

He's not just a military man, he's also quite the intellectual too, or he likes to portray himself as such.

Yes, this is a man who portrays himself as strangling lions with his bare hands, but he has a stylus in his belt while he is doing it.

So he portrays himself as somebody who is out there fighting on behalf of Assyria.

Probably he actually prefers to stay in his library and is reading and engaged in intellectual study.

So he has both of these sides to him.

He's somebody who is obsessed with the quest for knowledge as well as a quest for territory and power and those two things go together very much.

And where was this Assyria that he ruled over?

Assyria has its heartland in northern Iraq, what's now a modern-day Kurdistan mostly, and the empire is based at the city of Nineveh, which is modern day Mosul.

But the empire itself expands out and really encompasses the whole Middle East in Ashabalafal's time.

It stretches right into bits of Iran, in the east, and then in the west, bits of Turkey and even Egypt itself, the Assyrians rule over.

So it is a huge place.

And when are we talking about when Ashurbanipal is ruling this empire?

It's the 7th century BC, early 7th century.

So 2,500 years ago, was it very much the case that Assyria, it was the Mesopotamian superpower of the time?

Yeah, absolutely.

People often credit the Persians with being like the world's first empire, but actually they were building on the groundwork that was laid by the Assyrians.

The Assyrians set up the system of provinces, the Assyrians built the roads that make all of this possible, and the Persians sweep in and very neatly take it over and then expand on it even more.

But the Assyrians got there first.

And is the story of Ashurbanipald, when we consider the great length of Mesopotamian history with names like the Sumerians and the Akkadians and so on, is he actually quite late?

in the story of Mesopotamia and its ancient history?

Yes, this is the thing.

I mean, Mesopotamian history is something that a lot of people consider to be quite quite niche, but it covers 3,500 years of history.

So, I mean, writing is invented in southern Iraq in the mid-fourth millennium BC by Sumerian accountants who are keeping track of stuff going on in the temple.

And cuneiform, the writing system that they invent, continues to be written in the first century AD by Babylonian priests who are keeping watch over the stars.

So it is an incredible time span.

And Ashabanaforth, towards the end, not the very end, but yeah, towards the zenith of this period of power and extraordinary influence.

And I've also got in my notes the word Neo-Assyrian.

So what do we mean by that when regarding Ashurbanipal and the Assyrian Empire as Neo-Assyrian?

Oh, again, it's a reflection of the fact that there's just so much happening in this area over three millennia of history.

You know, there's old Assyrians, there's middle Assyrians, and then the Neo-Assyrian Empire kicks off around the 9th century.

BC.

So he's part of like of that dynasty.

People coming to power, then things happening, breaking down, shrinking again.

then it picks up, they expand again, then it contracts.

And then when the Neo-Assyrian Empire comes along, that's when it gets bigger than it ever has been before.

And you also mentioned that big name, that great city of Babylon and the Babylonians.

Are they also big players in the story of Ashurbanipal and the Neo-Assyrians at the time at the 7th century BC?

They absolutely are.

So the fortunes of Assyria and Babylon are rising and falling,

more or less alternately.

Babylon is a big political power throughout the span of Mesopotamian history, but the Assyrians have been dominant over them for the last few generations before Ashabannipal.

Babylon is the cultural center of the Near East.

It's where many of the texts in the library were first written.

They are the ones who are thought to have developed all of this knowledge originally, but then they are under Assyria's shadow.

And the Babylonians do not like this at all.

and they frequently try and break away and rebel.

And the other Assyrian kings have endless problems with this.

So when Ashabanipal's father, who was called Esarhaddon, when he dies, he actually splits the kingdom.

So he leaves Babylon and its surrounding area to Ashabanipal's older brother, not to Ashabanipal.

So we now have Assyria, this mighty empire, and then Babylon as an independent kingdom as well.

But Ashabannipal does not like this.

He will not let it go.

He thinks he should still be king of Babylon as well as being king of Assyria.

This leads to a lot of tensions between the brothers.

He tries to micromanage things going on in Babylon, which are really not his job.

The brother eventually gets fed up of this and declares war on Assyria.

And then we have this bitter civil war between these two brothers, which goes on for about four years.

Well, we'll definitely get to that civil war between the brothers.

And it seems like Babylon very much is a trophy city that they want to get their hands on.

But you mentioned there his father, Ashabanipal's father, Esharadan.

So can you let us know a bit about the family that Ashurbanipal is born into, the whole dynasty that he belongs to for the Neo-Assyrian Empire?

Well, I would say the story really starts with the death of Sargon, who died in battle unexpectedly in 705 BC.

And this casts a shadow over the whole dynasty because his death is a disaster because they can't recover the body.

They can't bury it.

And because of that, they can't make offerings to his ghost.

And they then believe that because they can't make offerings, the ghost is going to be driven mad with thirst.

in the netherworld and then may come back to haunt them.

So they then move the capital away.

They've just built a brand new city and they abandon it, move the capital back to Nineveh, and that's where the Assyrian kings have their base from then on.

But they can't really escape the shadow of Sargon and they keep thinking he must have done something wrong to have brought all of these troubles down on us.

He's succeeded by Sennacherib.

And Sennacherib is one who really has trouble with Babylon.

He ends up destroying Babylon, which is a terrible thing to do because of the great debt that Assyria owes to Babylon as a sort of mother culture city.

And there's all kinds of problems with the succession on from that.

Esarhaddon tries to reverse his father's damage, he tries to restore Babylon, bring it back to its former glory.

But then Ashabanipal ends up sort of repeating his grandfather's mistakes in an attempt to avoid repeating his father's mistakes.

So this is a sort of grand cycle of tragedy, really, that starts there and then goes on and on and on.

But Selena, so this is four generations of rulers.

So Sargon, this Sargon is the great-grandfather of Ashurbanipal.

Yes, that's right.

Sennacherib is his grandfather, Esaraddon is his father, and then you have Ashurbanipal.

And also, shall we also clarify this Sargon figure?

If someone mentions Sargon in Mesopotamia, you might immediately think of Sargon of Akkad, but that's not the Sargon we're talking about here.

Again, the time scale, yes.

So there is an original Sargon of Akkad in the third millennium BC, and then this assyrian sargon names himself probably names himself after this figure because he wants to lay claim to the glory of this ancient splendor associated with that name and so have we been seeing a general rise in the power of the neo-assyrian empire over these several generations of rulers in ashurbanipal's family ultimately culminating in ashurbanipal himself Yes, that's true.

The empire is getting steadily bigger.

They're getting steadily more powerful and making powerful enemies at the same time, I may may add.

And in regards to the sources, what types of sources do you have available to learn more about Ashurbanipal's reign?

Well, a lot of it comes from this amazing library that he assembled.

I mean, history fans are often lamenting the loss of the Library of Alexandria, but very few people know that there is this other library, which is not lost to history, but survives.

It's sitting on the shelves of the British Museum, 33,000 documents that hardly anyone has bothered to read.

And the reason it survives is actually, ironically, because it was destroyed.

It was burned down by the Babylonians, and the documents in it are all written on clay.

And clay doesn't decay in the ground.

And if you set a library of clay tablets on fire, it actually bakes the tablets and preserves it even better because it hardens the clay.

So that's why we have so many sources from this period telling us all about the history of what was happening, the knowledge that was in use, and the ways that people were thinking at the time.

And we also have letters letters from the king's advisors to the king talking about these political events, talking about how they're going to solve these problems with the magical wisdom in the library, even.

So it gives us an extraordinary breadth and an insight into how these people were thinking and how they were talking to each other.

So he gets bigger picture documents of the empire at the time and what's going on, academic pursuits and so on.

But also, I love that.

actual communications of named figures within the court of Ashubanapal and Ashurbanipal himself.

So those those amazing two levels of archaeological evidence revealing more about his life and his rule.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And in it, you see really, really human stories emerging.

I particularly like, for instance, letters from the doctor of his father, Esarhaddon, when the king is really, really depressed and he won't come out and speak to anyone.

And then he's telling him, you know, you've got to eat and drink something.

You know, come on, look after yourself and stop being so paranoid.

Yes, it's true it's great that you defeated all the conspiracies but like actually now that you're just seeing everybody as if they're all out to get you and that's not fair so really not being afraid to call the king to account and speak some harsh truths as well well we're going to delve into all of these intellectual pursuits and this knowledge at the center of ashabanapal's reign but before that selena you mentioned earlier this brotherly civil war that erupts during ashabanapal's rule against his brother so shall we explore the more militaristic side of ashabanipal first?

How long is it after he succeeds his father as king before you have this great degradation of relations between him and his brother that ultimately results in this four-year-long civil war?

Well, it's quite gradual actually.

I was sort of surprised to discover that it's 17 years before things finally break.

So they seem to have been on good terms at the beginning.

and probably very close because some of his inscriptions talk about his brother in in very affectionate terms.

And then as time goes on, you see the language changing and he suddenly starts railing against him instead, calling him ungrateful brother.

You know, everything that kingship calls for, I gave to him, I did him all of these favours, and look at how he repaid my kindness, etc., etc, etc.

And it gets to the point where he can't even speak of his brother without calling him the unfaithful brother or that traitor and so on.

Like, really, it's like an epithet that goes with him every single time his name is mentioned, even.

So, it really hardens and escalates and becomes very bitter.

And how is his brother mentioned in the sources?

I mean, in what types of texts are these ones that survive from the library?

That is just almost recording the day-to-day politics of the time, or what do we know about that?

Well, we have Ashurbanipal's accounts of his wars, where he describes the battles that he fights and his military campaigns.

And then we also have got letters that Ashurbanipal writes to Babylon about the war as well.

So, there you can see what's going on behind the official narrative.

Things like he writes to the citizens of Babylon directly and says, you know, my brother is leading you down a path of folly.

Don't listen to him.

Everything will be worse for you if you do, trying to incite them to rebel against him.

For instance, clearly this doesn't actually work.

And there's another source which gives us yet another side to all of this, which is actually an Aramaic papyrus written many centuries later that has preserved the whole saga as a kind of like a fictional tale where it's got a whole it's it's all written in a whole story format really and here we've got the king's sister going to babylon to try to intercede between the brothers and she tries to talk him out of it as well you know tells the brother that he was stupid to think that he could stand against him and if he you know he'd better give in now otherwise you know again things will be so much the worse for him and that he may as well go and throw himself on a pyre and burn himself in a fire with the fat of all of those useless administrators who made him think that he could stand up to Ashurbanipal, and then she storms off, which is just an incredible thing to have from the past, I think.

Do you think that's an accurate account?

Do you think Ashurbanipal would have used his sister, you know, a princess, as an envoy, as a diplomat in this brotherly civil war?

That is the only evidence we have for it.

So ultimately, who knows?

But she was definitely a strong-minded and sassy character.

So we actually have one letter surviving that was written by her.

And it is a letter written to the king's wife.

And she's complaining and scolding her for not being good enough at writing cuneiform.

You know, she actually says, why don't you write your tablet and do your homework?

You know, because if you don't, people will say, is this really the sister of Sheru Atirat?

You know, is this really the wife of the heir to the throne?

As if she's bringing shame on the whole family by not having good handwriting and knowing her cuneiform.

Which is amazing.

I love that.

That's such a great story.

Amit, so do we also, because we've talked about Ashabanipal's brother and his sister, do we also get great insights into the larger family of Ashurbanipal from the sources, from the tablets that survive?

We know a lot about his father in particular.

His father, Esarhaddon, was very close to a lot of court scholars.

And actually, most of the correspondence from the library pertains to them.

Es-sarhaddin, he faced down three different conspiracies, so he was really on the lookout for anything that that could help him stay on top.

So, we've got denunciations pouring in as

people are obeying the loyalty oath that was sworn to him when he ascended the throne, which says, You know, if you know of anybody plotting against the king, you have to make it known.

And they actually do, it works.

So, there's all of that.

And then, of course, there are the letters from his advisors who are trying to help with their own supernatural ways.

So, we've got queries about astrology, you know, how the gods are weighing in on this and how they are communicating.

We have lots of political queries that were put to the gods through sacrificing sheep, magical rituals that were performed to try to help the king when he was gravely ill, all of this kind of stuff.

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Right, time to slide out of here and avoid the bedpan.

So let's finish off this civil war between Ashurbanipal and his brother.

I mean, how does that war play out?

What ultimately happens?

Well, in the end, Ashurbanipal besieges Babylon, and the siege lasts about two years, and he starves them out, really.

And we know this is not just Ashurbanipal's rhetoric, because we know this from his own inscriptions, but there are also real administrative documents that survive from that time showing that people were actually having to sell their children for food to eat because they were starving, they were desperate.

So this really happened.

And then Ashabanipal takes the city, but he doesn't manage to take his brother.

And that's where this insinuation that he may have thrown himself into the flames comes from.

Goodness, I mean, but it does show also, is it Do we see the beginnings of this ruthless side of Ashabanipal coming out with the story of the civil war?

Or is it very much already there with how he conducts his military campaigns during his rule?

That, yes, as we'll get to, there's this extraordinary academic side of Ashabanipal with the library and so on.

But when it comes to the military side of ruling this empire back in the neo-Assyrian times, that Ashurbanipal, even towards his own brother, he could be absolutely ruthless with ensuring that he gained victory.

Yes, so Ashabanipal is like this with his other wars as well.

Another enemy is the Elamites Elamites in Iran, and he fights a series of campaigns against them.

They interfere in the Babylonian war, and he's quite annoyed about that, in particular.

In particular, there's one Assyrian general called Nabu-bel-Shumati who turns against him and goes to help his brother, and then he flees to Elam.

And Ashbanipal tries to get him back.

He tries to extradite him, and he gets really obsessed with this.

Like, he rages.

We've got the letters between him and the king of Elam asking, like, send this awful traitor back to me, and they won't do it.

So he invades Elam, and he again launches an attack on their capital city where he plunders it, steals their gods, takes the statues of the gods back to Assyria, devastates it so that nothing more can grow there.

Or so he tells us anyway.

Yeah, sort of he destroys it as much as he possibly can so that they won't be a problem again.

And is there also that extraordinary wall relief which shows him in his garden, which looks very nice and quaint and a lovely scene.

And then you look above and you can see the decapitated heads of the people he's defeated in battle.

Yeah, there is an amazing scene carved on the walls of his palace from one of these battles where the Elamite king, Tauman, is beheaded on the battlefield.

And then the head is carried back to Assyria.

And you can actually follow the head around the wall as it has its journey.

You know, it's really like a narrative that shows scene by scene what's happening.

The chaos of the battlefield, soldier cuts off his head and then parades it all the way back to Nineveh.

And in Nineveh, it ends up in the king's garden, hanging upside down from a tree, while Ashurbanipal and his queen are eating and drinking, relaxing, reclining in the garden.

And then, oh, you know, on the wall, there is this trophy of the severed head of his enemy.

It's absolutely extraordinary.

I mean, are there any other big military campaigns that Ashurbanipal undertook during his rule that strengthened the Assyrian Empire alongside...

fighting the Elamites and defeating his brother at Babylon.

Well, the Egyptian campaign is another big one.

Right.

So his father, Esarhaddon, was the one who conquered Egypt originally for the empire, but then the Egyptians rebel, and then Ashurbanipal goes back to sort it out and bring it back under Assyrian control.

It's a part of history that most people don't know anything about.

Everybody knows about Egypt, but nobody knows that.

The Assyrians had Egypt for 20 years.

It's not long, but it's longer than the Egyptians ever held Assyria.

But is it also the heavy-handedness of Ashurbanipal when he's dealing with his enemies, when he's, well, he might think he's delivering justice, but, you know, it's quite he's quite ruthless in how he wins his his wars does that also breed anti-assyrian sentiment in the empire that means that when he dies it leaves the empire a little bit unstable if and maybe that's putting it mildly yes it does backfire on him people are not very happy at being

well moved around by the assyrians because one of their big strategies is when they conquer a place they will break up the population deport them and move them to places where where it's useful for the empire.

You know, where can they go to build these roads that we need, work on infrastructure, and so on?

Obviously, people don't like that.

I think maybe the biggest instance of backfiring is his treatment of Elam, because eventually, the people who swarm on Nineveh and burn down the library are not only the Babylonians, but also the Medes, who are a bit further away in Iran.

And because the Elamites have been weakened, there's nobody in the way to stop the Medes from taking over and from them to come and give Assyria its come-upance.

So, you know, weakening a state to that extent is not actually in Assyria's interests, although it may have seemed so at the time.

Thank you for covering that first of all, Selena, because I know that's not the main focus of your book, but it feels important to highlight with Ashurbanipal, because many people think straight away of his brutality or his military campaign.

So it's great to cover that.

But would you argue that we should not be looking at Ashurbanipal solely for this?

There's this other remarkable side of him, which is this academic pursuit, this pursuit of knowledge and intellectualism, or at least that this was flourishing at his court during his reign.

Yes, and one other thing I want to argue is that it is true that the Assyrian kings were pretty brutal in their military campaigns, but I don't think that means they were necessarily worse than us, actually.

They just celebrate it more.

And if you think about some of the horrible things that modern nation states have done in the service of their own interests, they just don't put it on the walls.

You know, know, we don't have Hiroshima on the walls of the US Capitol, for instance, but they still do these horrible things.

So that has disproportionately affected a Syria's reputation, I think.

But it was also a place of culture and a place that has influenced the subsequent cultures in very positive ways.

And this quest for knowledge is one of their greatest legacies.

I think, you know, the creation of the library, which was also a place for what we might think of as academic research.

You know, there was medical research going on at Ashurbanipal's court, which is something not many people know.

He commissioned a new medical encyclopedia, which aimed to bring together all of the treatments from different traditions in the area and bring them together and work out which ones are going to be standard and so on.

They try to sort out complicated texts, overlapping things, and produce authoritative editions so that they know what knowledge they can really trust and things like things like that were

really good things.

And so what were the main academic scholarly pursuits at the time of Assyria?

What were the subjects that they greatly valued?

So they split it into five official domains of knowledge.

Astrology is one.

Divination from looking at sheep entrails is another.

Then you have what we tend to translate as exorcism, but it's so much more than that.

It's really magic of all kinds.

You know, it's not only driving out demons, but it's really a kind of reconciling people with the gods and with other supernatural entities in all kinds of ways.

Then you have medicine, as just mentioned, and finally lamentation, which is an art of appeasing the gods by singing sad songs to them in advance.

It's a kind of preemptive strike where they will lament all the terrible things that the gods have done even before they do them.

Because if the gods hear this, then they will not feel the need to do these things in the first place because their power is being acknowledged.

Like, okay, you know that we can destroy you at any time, therefore we don't have to do it to prove ourselves to you.

It's a sort of strange reverse psychology.

And was this big throughout Mesopotamia at the time, or was this solely focused on Assyria?

Well, this is actually a Babylonian practice, this lamentation thing.

And it comes to Assyria just a generation or two before Ashabannipal, the Assyrian kings.

bring Babylonian lamenters into their court and install them in the temples.

And there is a bit of a tension there because, yes, their knowledge is Babylonian.

It has this pedigree of, you know, ancientness and authoritativeness.

But at the same time, we don't do this kind of stuff in Assyria.

So who are these southerners barging in and like suddenly having influence and power in the temples?

And you can see that tension in the sources very much.

And you mentioned there also one of these fields was divination.

And I know this is something that you've done lots of work around.

So Selena, can you explain to us in a bit more detail what exactly divination was and how it worked?

Well, it's a way of understanding messages from the gods.

And this can go two ways.

So fundamentally, they believe the gods are always sending messages to people.

And it's the job of the scholars at the Assyrian court to keep a lookout for strange things happening in the world in case one of these is a message from the gods.

So that can be in the form of eclipses, lunar and solar eclipses, pretty dramatic things.

You can see why they might think the gods are trying to get their attention with stuff like that.

But also odd things happening on earth, and that could be anything from an ant infestation in your house to a lizard falling from the ceiling onto your right shoulder.

All of these kinds of things could also be messages from the gods.

And they develop these really sophisticated systems for reading these signs, which they believe the gods are writing on the world as if they are literally writing messages to them.

But then there's the other side, which is where they can also ask questions of the gods directly.

And that's where you get things like sacrificing sheep.

That is their chance to have a direct communication with the gods.

And they can ask any question they want about past, present, or the future, as long as it's got a yes or no answer.

And then they believe that the gods will write the answer to their question on the entrails of the sheep at the moment that they sacrifice it.

So then they butcher the sheep, open it up, and look at strange markings on the entrails.

And again, they have a whole system of tablets which explains exactly how to read these and what they mean.

And they have survived today.

We actually have the instructions for reading the answers from the gods.

So you have an Assyrian guide to sheep, well, looking at sheep entrails surviving from more than 2,500 years ago from the library that we're going to explore in a bit.

Absolutely, yeah.

It's amazing.

And was it always sheep or did they have, or did they use different livestock animals depending on what question they were going to ask?

It's mostly sheep.

If you can't afford a sheep, you can use a pigeon.

But Ashurbanipal liked to use sheep.

King of Assyria can afford a decent sheep.

If he's king of the superpower of the time, I think he probably can afford a sheep, can't he?

Yeah, yeah.

And also this idea of academic wisdom and its importance to Mesopotamian rulers, of course we see it with Ashurbanipal, but did we also see it with his predecessors, with the likes of Esohaddon, Senakrib, Sargon?

Were they also interested in academic pursuits?

Did they also have their own library equivalents?

Yes, they did actually.

So Ashurbanipal, he made the library what it was, but he probably didn't start it.

So we have all of these texts from advisors of previous kings, which show that there was all of this scholarly activity going on.

We actually have a writing board, which has got celestial omens on it from the time of King Sargon, who we spoke about before.

That survives from a different city.

It was found down a well.

strangely.

But anyway, the other kings were interested in this knowledge for sure.

It was Ashurbanipal who tried to make it a systematic collection and drafted people in to copy tablets so that he made sure he had a copy of absolutely everything.

So was it very much this quest for knowledge and finding texts from other cities nearby that he wanted to make sure was also in his library itself?

So do we know much about that, about when in Ashurbanipal's reign he decides to extend this library to extend the amount of knowledge?

at his capital at Nineveh and how this whole library was ultimately structured?

We don't know when exactly it starts.

We do know that Ashurbanipal had an interest in scholarship all of his life because there is a text that talks about his life before he came to power.

And he says how he was trained in all of the ancient law of the scholars.

He says that he learned how to do difficult mathematics, calculations that don't come out evenly, how he's adept in the very dead language of Sumerian, how he can discuss the obscure commentaries on divination with his advisors, that he can debate them on their own terms.

So he really stresses that this is something he is trained to do very, very well.

Now, in terms of when the library was expanded, that we don't know, but we do know a lot about how he acquired tablets during the war against Babylon, because after he defeated the city, he then confiscated the collections of various important scholars and brought them back.

to Assyria and had his scholars copy them.

And he also kidnapped some of the scholars themselves and got them to write it out.

And again, we have an amazing letter that talks about this, that talks about the different jobs that are being assigned to different scholars in the library and mentions, you know, one of them better be put back in chains when he's finished copying this series.

So he's definitely making use of

his prisoners of war in that sense.

But there are more peaceful ways as well.

So he does also send out letters to different cities asking them to copy all of the tablets in their possession and send them to him.

So he's taking a comprehensive approach.

Do we have any idea from the archaeology, from the discovery of these tablets, how the library was structured?

I mean, were there the ancient Assyrian equivalent of clerks?

And maybe one section was to do with the epic poems and another section was to do with handbooks and manuals on divination and another on political matters of the day.

Do we know much about that side of the library?

I really wish we did, but unfortunately we don't because the library doesn't survive as a physical place.

In fact, when the invading armies ransacked it, they ended up throwing tablets all over the place in different rooms.

So one of the first big caches of tablets to be discovered, which the Victorian excavators called the Chamber of Records, turned out to be a bathroom next to the throne room.

It's just somehow all ended up there.

So we can't see how it was organized, but two labels have survived somehow.

We've got a little label that says, you know, celestial omens here and omens from things happening on earth here.

So they must have been organized in some way like that.

We have got other libraries from different parts of Mesopotamia, from similar times, which are organized in like a grid-like fashion.

It's a little bit like those IKEA bookcases you can get, which are lots of squares next to each other.

And they're really, really deep niches.

So they seem to have been places that could store a lot of tablets in a very small, compact space.

Maybe a little bit like a storage stack.

So you have the storage, you have the storage compartment surviving, but that's an amazing piece of evidence in its own right to kind of get this, get rid completely of this idea of kind of binded books or scrolls being rolled up this idea that it would have just been stacks and stacks of these clay tablets placed together in one of these little storage squares that went back quite a long way yeah and you can fit in quite an amazing number of tablets in a small space like that so it's very very densely packed together And do we think from the amount of tablets that have survived, do we find any that could potentially have been written by Ashurbanipal himself?

Yes, we do.

So we actually have some tablets from probably from the time of his training when he was learning to write.

There is an adorable tiny little tablet, which is written in really clumsy handwriting.

Like the signs are really, really big.

They're not joined up properly.

Can't do joined up handwriting yet, where he writes to the king and it's got his name on it, which is also spelled in a really simplistic way.

That survives.

And we've got texts copied out at later points in his training, which are much more advanced.

So there's prayers to the gods and even some quite technical texts like glass-making recipe and lists of important medicinal plants and things like that, which claim to have been written by Ashabhanapal himself.

So I think it shows that he did have an active interest.

This is not all exaggeration and big talk, but he is sincerely interested in some quite obscure things.

Do we think then that, let's take with divination, because you said he was big into divination as well, that if he wanted to understand something from the gods would he have been the active participant would he been the one who was reading the sheep's liver and and stuff like that rather than getting one of his scholars to do it for him well that's a good question I mean I think he wouldn't have got his hands dirty himself but he can certainly challenge them and interpret you know what what the meaning of these things would be so the reports are usually sent to the king rather than him being there himself also i just think about the sheer amount of work that will be required for him to do it all himself.

When you do a sheep liver divination, you have to stay up all night.

And the number of queries that survive, you know, I think he's not going to be getting very much sleep if he's really doing all of this himself.

So better to leave the hard work to his scholars and then he can just read the results.

But at the same time, because we have that correspondent surviving, he can read the account of the scholar who's made that, who's done the work and has made the assumption.

And then do we get cases where Ashabanipal says, I think you've got this completely wrong.

I interpret this a different way because of this or that.

Unfortunately, we don't because we don't have very many letters the other way around from Ashabanipal to the scholars.

So there isn't much direct evidence of that, but I can't help but think it must have happened for somebody who has that background and is that steeped in all of this knowledge.

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Right, time to slide out of here and avoid the bedpan.

And so, how much does Ashabanipal boast of his academic expertise in the source evidence we have surviving?

Well, there is this sort of often called Ashabanipal's biography, where he talks about all of the ranges of texts that he has studied.

And we also see it in his depictions of war as well.

I mean, some of the battles that we've already talked about being portrayed on the walls are full of literary allusions.

So things like when the head of this Elamite king is cut off and paraded around the battlefield, taken back to Assyria, that visually echoes stories about, well, from the epic of Gilgamesh, where this great hero king of Mesopotamia goes and cuts off the head of an evil monster in the forest and brings it back to his city.

There are also allusions to omens in these reliefs.

So, when this Elamite king is falling out of his chariot and his hat falls off, anybody who knows the omen series about bad things that can happen when you're in a chariot will know that this means something very bad is going to happen.

So, you can even read the signs from the gods in the visual narratives that he provides for us.

So, everything he does is suffused with the scholarship.

So, if we now go to Ashabanapow's court and given his interest in scholarship, can we paint a picture of the people who surrounded him?

Can we imagine that Ashurpanapow is sitting on his throne and you would have all of these different scholars, experts in these different fields that you've already mentioned, almost jostling to get his ear and to tell him about what they've learned from their recent academic doings?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And you can really see how some of them are closer to him than others.

I mean, some of them have been close to him for years.

I mean, such as, you know, his chief astrologer taught him to write as a boy and is still there giving him advice all these years later.

But then you have other people who've fallen out of favor and who are desperate to be reinstated.

There's a trail of letters from one exorcist in particular called Urad Gula, who used to be very close to the king.

And then something went wrong.

We're not sure what.

It might be that he was involved in a royal childbirth that went wrong and maybe he was blamed for it.

But then suddenly he's not in the circle anymore anymore and he complains about how he's fallen into poverty and he doesn't have any means of transport anymore he doesn't have enough money to buy a new pair of sandals and he was getting more and more desperate and he wants the king to take him back but there is a very conspicuous silence and do we get a sense that maybe there were there were rival academics at court that they're great this factional strife academic factional strife between certain scholars who want the ear of Ashubanapal and that maybe they do they slag each other off I think, is the question I want to ask.

Yes, they do.

And that is also something amazing that we can see in the letters.

There's one case in particular where this king's chief astrologer gets really, really angry that somebody has told the king the wrong interpretation of an omen.

Or he says that Venus has become visible, but the planet Venus has not become visible.

He confused it with Mercury.

And this is a really idiotic mistake.

I mean, for those of us who are not very well versed in astrology, we might not see what the big fuss is about.

But if you know what you're doing, this is quite obvious.

And in fact, the Assyrians had the knowledge to predict this for a very long time already.

This is like an elementary mistake.

And now the king is really worried because, you know, Venus rising at the wrong time is a bad omen.

So he's, you know, he's anxious about it.

And then Bulassi, the scholar, comes in and just rages about what an idiot his colleague is for making such a ridiculous mistake.

You know, call himself a scholar.

How on earth could he get this wrong?

Is this the tablet where he labels his, well, the companion he's angry at, well, the fellow academic, an ignoramus?

Yeah, that's the one.

That's the one.

Yes.

We talked to Dr.

Mudi al-Rashid all about that, and that was absolutely fascinating to learn about that.

And are there any other particular tablets or figures that would have surrounded Ashabanipowl?

For instance, are there any famous diviners that you'd really like to mention before we move on?

Because I appreciate there are so many tablets.

There must be so many stories, so many accounts of these different academic fields from the library that surely there must be some great stories we've missed.

There's one story I would like to mention which is it's more of a controversy about omens than a particular diviner.

But we know that there was a guy called Sin Eresh

who was wrapped up in a controversy over the birth of a calf.

Now he found out that a calf was born that looked a bit like a lion and in response to this first of all he kills the calf then he eats it to destroy the evidence.

And then he makes sure the evidence doesn't get out by killing the farmer who owned the calf.

But he still doesn't manage to contain the story because the farmer's servants see what he's done and are willing to testify against him.

And we know about this because one of the king's astrologers mentions it to the king.

So, I mean, this to us seems absolutely crazy.

I mean, how could a calf that looks a bit like a lion lead to intrigue and murder?

But again, it's one of these signs from the gods who are putting unusual things in the world as as a message to the king that something is wrong or something bad is going to happen.

So it probably means that something very bad was about to happen to the king and they were trying to cover it up.

And I think that's a really good example of how seriously they took these omens and these weird things happening in the world.

and also of the kinds of intrigue that can be going on at the court surrounding that.

It's amazing the combination of the worlds.

I mean, does it also show how with the the academic pursuits of the time and with Ashurbanipal, if he's focusing a lot on scholarly pursuit, a big part of his job was hearing these reports of how the people around him were interpreting signs from the gods?

I mean, it's not just sitting down and learning all about certain mathematical equations.

He's receiving tablet after tablet about how certain academics are reading signs, whether it's in the celestial realm above, looking at the stars and the planets or interpreting a sheep's liver and the like.

That was such a big part of Ashurbanipal's reign.

Yes, and it shows that the knowledge in this library is not just esoteric and abstract, but it's really practical.

It is stuff that would have helped him to rule his empire, stuff that would have helped him solve problems, not only his own personal problems, but political issues as well.

And it was all really applicable to his everyday life.

And as Ashabanipal's reign goes on, I mean, Telina, how long does Ashurbanipal reign for?

So Ashabanipal rules for about 38 years.

It's complicated by the fact we don't know when exactly he dies.

He sort of fades out from the record, but there's no mention of him after that point.

So we have to assume he's probably gone.

I mean, do we know much about what happened to him during his later reign?

Do we have many texts surviving from the library that we can say probably were written down or were created later?

Or is it a bit more mysterious those last years?

It's all very mysterious, pretty much after the destruction of Babylon, well, after he defeats his brother, and then he goes after the Elamites again.

And then

it all goes suspiciously quiet.

And I guess that's why he's often referred to as one of the last great kings of Assyria, because those are the peak dramatic events.

And I have in my notes that there is this Greco-Roman legend of a last king of Assyria called Sardin.

I'm going to get this so wrong.

Sardinapolis.

Sardinapolis.

Thank you, Selena.

Can you explain what this legend is and how this might align with the fall of the Assyrians and the decline after Ashurbanipal?

Well, the Greeks have a story about the last king of Assyria, Sardinapoul, as somebody who was not interested in ruling his empire, but instead living a life of luxury and decadence and lounging around with his concubines until the city is surrounded and it's all over.

Now, that, I think, is a confusion with...

the story about what happened to his brother, who did die in this fire, most likely.

Sardinapoulis is also purported purported to have died in this great blaze.

The Greeks do sometimes confuse stories about Babylon and Assyria, and maybe that's what happened.

But it's also very ironic because this is not at all how Ashurbanipal would want himself to be remembered.

He's very, very different from this great scholar and incredibly powerful military man.

It might also show that there were other stories circulating about him that he didn't like so much.

And one thing it reminds me of a little bit is in one of the wars against Elam, he actually says in his account of it that he did not go to the battlefield.

He says, the goddess Ishtar specifically told me not to go to the war, but to stay in this other city and celebrate a festival.

So that's what I did.

And you think, hmm, why is he apologizing for this?

I mean, there are many, many complex reasons why he might have wanted to say that.

But, you know, you know, maybe there are hints of stories that he was actually not quite the warrior that he said he was.

Do we see him aligning with any particular gods?

You mentioned there, Ishtar, which seems a pretty well-known deity from Mesopotamia.

But do we know if he aligned with any particular deities when he ruled?

Yeah, well, Ashur is the state god of Assyria, who is always, you know, there on the battlefield with the Assyrian kings.

Ishtar also goes with him into battle or goes into battle for him, as we've just mentioned.

But the God of Scribes is also a favourite of Ashurbanipal's.

And he dedicates tablets from the library to the God of scribes which is something that scholars would do during their training to align themselves with the God of scribal wisdom.

Interesting so he also aligns it there with his with the divine I mean do you think there is any potential that I appreciate it's murky so it must all be theory but that as Ashurbanipal's reign went on and he got older Could he have devoted himself more to academic pursuits and this idea that he he stayed in his royal palace or maybe in his gardens and he he just listened to the scholars surrounding him and all about the omens and the other fields that he was interested in and just got more and more dedicated to that and less and less to going around his empire.

I appreciate that must just all be theory.

Yeah, we don't know, but I can certainly imagine it.

It would be consistent with what we do know about him.

There is one text which is called

we refer to as Ashabanipal's Lament, where he complains about how miserable he is actually and says, you know, I did everything right.

I did all I could to listen to the gods, and yet, you know, all of this strife is still coming after me.

And what's interesting about that is this is a very, very literary creation as well.

It's got allusions to some of the great traditional Babylonian poems about righteous sufferers who've done everything they can to appease the gods and yet still don't seem to see any benefit from it.

And it switches from prose to verse halfway through, I think.

So, even when he's complaining about how rubbish life is, he's doing it in a literary way.

So you can still see the scholarly undertone there, even at that time.

I mean, so do we know what state Ashurbanipal left the Assyrian Empire when he does ultimately die?

Well, the people who take over from him don't do an awful lot.

It takes a while for the empire to fall.

It's 612 BC.

when the Babylonians and the Medes round on Nineveh and burn it down.

But he's followed by a succession of kings who don't really make their mark in the same way, that's for sure.

So that covers the story of Ashabanapaul-Selina.

How would you argue we should envisage Ashurbanabao today?

How should we remember him?

Well, I think Ashabanipau would have wanted to be remembered as a scholar and a military man, and that these things go together, actually.

It's easy for us to think that they are two completely different worlds, that the intellectual would have nothing to do with fighting a war.

But in Assyria, they are both used in service of the other.

There actually would have been exorcists on the battlefield performing magic spells to help the king get the advantage.

You would have had diviners looking at the insides of sheep to try to determine is now the right time to go to war.

What do we do?

So even though they may seem very separate, they are really entwined.

And I think the side of scholarship is the one that we know less about and it deserves to be celebrated for that reason.

This was an incredible library, it made a huge contribution to knowledge, and it reverberated throughout the centuries afterwards.

You know, this when the library burned down, it wasn't all forgotten.

Much of the knowledge in it was translated into other languages, it turns up in, say, echoes in Hebrew texts, it has influenced Greek and Roman culture, it's of course influenced the Middle East itself in the other direction.

These omens were carried to India, Central Asia, maybe even China.

That's a controversial one, but it had a huge reach.

And I think that is the main thing that we have to remember, that this was a powerhouse of knowledge and it had a legacy for thousands of years to come.

So do we think some of the wisdom, some of the knowledge in the library at Nineveh, in Ashurbanipal's library, will ultimately end up centuries later in the famous library of Alexandria in Egypt?

Quite probably, yes, because there are texts that survive from Egypt, which are very, very similar to the Mesopotamian ones that we know.

When Alexander the Great conquered Babylon, for instance, you know, this is a moment where now the Greek world and the Mesopotamian world, they are in the same empire.

And the scholars must have talked to each other and shared knowledge because all of the data that has been collected by the Babylonian astrologers gets taken back to the Greek world and forms the basis of Greek Greek astronomy and Greek mathematics.

And they use the Babylonian calculations.

The astronomer Ptolemy tells us he had access to eclipse records stretching back to the 8th century BC, thanks to the Mesopotamian scholars.

So yes, it had a very direct impact and I'm sure would have been known in some form to the scholars of that later library.

Well, Selena, this has been brilliant.

Last but certainly not least, you have written a book all about Ashabanipowl and his library, which is called The Library of Ancient Wisdom, Mesopotamia and the Making of History.

Selena, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Thanks very much, it's been great.

Well, there you go.

There was Dr.

Selena Wisdom on the show to talk through the story of Ashobanapaul, his military conquests, but also his fascinating life as a scholar with Nineveh and his library being the center of knowledge in the ancient Mesopotamian world.

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