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Ashur-bani-pal, Book-Collector and Patron of Learning.
Ashur-bani-pal (the Asnapper of Ezra iv, 10) succeeded his father Esarhaddon B.C. 668, and at a comparatively early period of his reign he seems to have devoted himself
to the study of the history of his country, and to the making of a great Private Library. The tablets that have come down
to us prove not only that he was as great a benefactor of the Library of the Temple of Nebo as any of his predecessors, but
that he was himself an educated man, a lover of learning, and a patron of the literary folk of his day. In the introduction
to his Annals as found inscribed on his great ten-sided cylinder in the British Museum he tells us how he took up his abode
in the chambers of the palace from which Sennacherib and Esarhaddon had ruled the Assyrian Empire, and in describing his own
education he says:
"I, Ashur-bani-pal, within it (i.e., the palace) understood the wisdom of Nebo, all the art of writing of every craftsman, of every kind, I made myself master
of them all (i.e., of the various kinds of writing)."1
These words suggest that Ashur-bani-pal could not only read cuneiform texts, but could write like a skilled scribe, and that
he also understood all the details connected with the craft of making and baking tablets. Having determined to form a Library in his palace he set to work in a systematic manner
to collect literary works. He sent scribes to ancient seats of learning, e.g., Ashur, Babylon, Cuthah, Nippur, Akkad, Erech, to make copies of the ancient works that were preserved there, and when the
copies came to Nineveh he either made transcripts of them himself, or caused his scribes to do so for the Palace Library.
In any case he collated the texts himself and revised them before placing them in his Library. The appearance of the tablets
from his Library suggests that he established a factory in which the clay was cleaned and kneaded and made into homogeneous,
well-shaped tablets, and a kiln in which they were baked, after they had been inscribed. The uniformity of the script upon
them is very remarkable, and texts with mistakes in them are rarely found. How the tablets were arranged in the Library is
not known, but certainly groups were catalogued, and some tablets were labelled.2 Groups of tablets were arranged in numbered series, with "catch lines," the first tablet of the series giving the first line
of the second tablet, the second tablet giving the first line of the third tablet, and so on.
Ashur-bani-pal was greatly interested in the literature of the Sumerians, i.e., the non-Semitic people who occupied Lower Babylonia about B.C. 3500 and later. He and his scribes made bilingual lists
of signs and words and objects of all classes and kinds, all of which are of priceless value to the modern student of the
Sumerian and Assyrian languages. Annexed is an extract from a List of Signs with Sumerian and Assyrian values. The signs of which the meanings are given are in the middle column; the Sumerian
values are given in the column to the left, and their meanings in Assyrian in the column to the right. To many of his copies
of Sumerian hymns, incantations, magical formulas, etc., Ashur-bani-pal caused interlinear translations to be added in Assyrian,
and of such bilingual documents the following extract from a text relating to the Seven Evil Spirits will serve as a specimen.
The 1st, 3rd, 5th, etc., lines are written in Sumerian, and the 2nd, 4th, 6th, etc., lines in Assyrian.
The tablets that belonged to Ashur-bani-pal's private Library and those of the Temple of Nebo can be distinguished by the
colophons, when these exist. Two forms of colophon for each class of the two great collections of tablets are known, one short
and one long. The short colophon on the tablets of the King's Library reads:—"Palace of Ashur-bani-pal, king of hosts, king
of the country of Assyria" 
 , and that on the tablets of the Library of Nebo reads:—"[Country of ?] Ashur-bani-pal, king of hosts, king of the country
of Assyria" 
 . See on the Tablet of Astrological Omens. The longer colophons are of considerable interest and renderings of two typical examples are here appended:—
Colophon of a tablet from the Palace Library of Ashur-bani-pal containing incantations in the Sumerian language, with interlinear
translations in Assyrian. For an English rendering see following page. From Rawlinson, Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, Vol. IV, Plate VI, col. 6 (K. 4870).
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