Assyria's last great king built a library unrivalled until Alexandria
Ashurbanipal ruled Assyria for 38 years from 669 BC and trained as a scholar as well as a warrior. He poured the empire's wealth into collecting Mesopotamian writings, and his library at Nineveh may have held over 100,000 texts. More than 30,000 of its clay tablets survive today.
He was probably the fourth son of King Esarhaddon, born around 685 BC, and not expected to rule. When the crown prince died suddenly in 674, Esarhaddon, whose own father Sennacherib had been murdered by a passed-over heir, made a novel split: Ashurbanipal would inherit Assyria, while his older brother Shamash-shum-ukin would be king of Babylon. The name Ashurbanipal, meaning the god Ashur is the creator of the heir, was probably given to him at the celebration in May 672.
As crown prince he learned archery, chariotry and riding alongside scholarship, and with his father often ill he ran the empire's intelligence network. His grandmother Naqi'a drew up a treaty binding the court to swear loyalty to him. Crowned in late 669, he gave his brother the sacred statue of Marduk that Sennacherib had carried off from Babylon twenty years earlier.
His early reign went to holding Egypt, which his father had just conquered. After rebels wiped out the Assyrian garrison at Memphis, his army retook the city, and when the Kushite king's nephew Tantamani invaded in 664, the Assyrians plundered Thebes; its governor Mentuemhat's diplomacy may have spared it from being levelled. Assyria nevertheless lost Egypt. Relations with his brother soured over Babylon's independence, and in 652 Shamash-shum-ukin rebelled, dying during the siege of Babylon in 648.
He crushed Elam in repeated wars and boasted of mass killings, and historians count him among Assyria's cruellest rulers. Art made for him has an epic sweep earlier reliefs lack. Greek and Roman writers garbled his memory into Sardanapalus, a decadent king whose vices ruined his realm. He died in 631, and the empire collapsed roughly twenty years later; whether his policies caused that is still argued.
Source: Ashurbanipal
