Ashurbanipal’s Library
The Scholar-King, Scribe, and Forgotten Discoverer
Infophilia, a positive psychology of information | June 22, 2025 - Vol. 3, Issue 37
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Cite this as:
Coleman, A. S. (2025). Ashurbanipal’s library: The scholar-king, scribe, and forgotten discoverer. Infophilia, a positive psychology of information, 3 (37).
Ashurbanipal’s library
The scholar-king, scribe, and forgotten discoverer
Cuneiforms, colophons, and culture
𖤒 I refuse to think that the twin spirits of the East and the West…can never meet to make the perfect realization of truth. - Rabindranath Tagore
The evening news, starting June 12-13, has been reporting air strikes arcing back and forth between Israel and Iran, missiles tracing paths across the same ancient skies that saw campaigns on land. However, pictures of people, cuneiform writing, and colophons from one of the ancient world libraries keep superimposing themselves on my mind. The Library of Ashurbanipal once stood in Nineveh, modern-day Mosul, Iraq, just 95 miles from the Iranian border where today's conflict is unfolding.
At the center of how the British Museum in London (UK) came to curate the Nineveh collection of ca. 32,000 fragments belonging to an estimated number of 2,000 to 10,000 tablets and how the world learned about it was a young Chaldean-Christian, Hormuzd Rassam (1826-1910). Born in Mosul which was then a part of the Ottoman Empire, Rassam is the “forgotten discoverer” of one of archaeology’s greatest finds, quickly dubbed Ashurbanipal’s Library. Rassam’s life reveals how the growth of knowledge has always been entangled with empire, cultural identity, and extraction.
Mosul, which means "linking point" or “junction” in Arabic, has always been a nexus. Known to its people as "the Mother of Two Springs" and "Al-Hadba" (the hunchback, after its famous leaning minaret), the city embodies plural identity. Today it remains home to Sunni and Shia Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, Kurds, Turkmens, Armenians, and Assyrians, a population of approximately 1.5 million.
Writing was invented independently at least four times in human history: Mesopotamian (Sumerian cuneiform); Egypt (hieroglyphs); China (oracle bone script); and Mesoamerica (Maya). The Sumerian cuneiform script writing system also used by the Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians for 3,000 years indicates the presence of a sophisticated knowledge culture in the Near East millennia ago. However, instability and violence, i.e. targeted, weaponized cultural destruction have also been a recurring, although not uninterrupted companion, in this region.
And, last evening several world news agencies reported that the US has dropped bunker buster bombs in territories once ruled by Ashurbanipal as part of the Neo Assyrian Empire.
Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria
"If reading out loud was the norm from the beginning of the written word, what was it like to be read in the great ancient libraries?" In the seventh century BCE, Assyrian scholars in the royal library of Ashurbanipal "must have worked in the midst of a rumbling din."[i]
As the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire Nineveh was a bustling and noisy city during its heyday. Ashurbanipal, fourth son of Esarhaddon and grandson of Sennacherib, grew up in palaces with libraries in Nineveh and embodies the central paradox of knowledge and power. Knowledge empowers but its possession can also distort, and limit its pursuit and dissemination. The 2019 British Museum exhibition of Ashurbanipal’s Library captured this complexity by introducing him very simply: "Warrior. Scholar. Empire builder. King slayer. Lion hunter. Librarian." We’ll focus on the last.
Ashurbanipal was king from 669-c.631 BCE and his intention was revolutionary: to "bring together under his control the whole of inherited lore and knowledge recorded in cuneiform documents." Ashurbanipal "both seized and also paid scholars to give up their tablets" following up on his military victories through "enforced sequestration of knowledge." These represent perhaps the earliest instances of "displaced or migrated archives."[ii]
Ashurbanipal's cuneimania, i.e. compulsive collecting of cuneiform was nevertheless systematic both in collecting and labeling.
You shall search for and send to me ... rituals, prayers, stone inscriptions, and whatever is useful to royalty... all that is available, and also rare tablets of which no copies exist... And in case you should see some tablet or ritual text which I have not mentioned, and which is suitable for the palace, examine it, take possession of it, and send it to me.[iii]
The tablets collected ranged from administrative records to literary texts, medical, and religious works. Did the sheer volume of tablets create an illusion of omniscience for the scholar-king? Whether it did or not, the Nineveh fragments significantly contributed to the establishment and development of Assyriology, the study of the ancient civilizations of the Near East. Archaeology began to emerge as a formal discipline.
What about colophons?
The scholar-king didn’t invent colophons; they were already in use in the Near East. But his ‘vast collection of cuneiform learning’ is labeled with colophons bearing their royal status. Found after the main text, they are standardized, occurring word-to-word in multiple tablets. Ashurbanipal’s colophons provided the original basis for believing the Nineveh fragments belonged to the king’s royal library or the Nabu-temple library (Nabu is the god of writing and tablets with colophons were donated by the king).[iv]
The science of colophonology was born in 1968 when Hunger gathered colophons across cuneiform for his dissertation. More recently, the British Museum’s Reading the Library of Ashurbanipal: a multi-sectional analysis of Assyriology's foundational corpus project (2020-2024) has identified 2,296 colophons among the Nineveh fragments. 30 are “library” colophons. The most common library colophon (type a) is a property stamp mark: Palace of Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria. It’s been found applied to all types of text and other objects in the palace.[v]
Ashurbanipal was definitely literate; there are tablets with his script as evidence. But it is inconceivable that the royal hand wrote all the first-person colophons. Who did?