THE ANCIENT GREEK general and historian Xenophon, writing in his most famous work, the Anabasis or Persian Expedition, recounted the dramatic story of how he led a stranded army of 10,000 Greek mercenaries out of Mesopotamia and back to Greece. Xenophon described the army passing through the centre of what is now Iraq and pausing at a spot on the banks of the River Tigris, at a place he referred to as Larisa.1 Surveying the landscape, Xenophon noted an immense deserted city with towering walls. From here they marched further along to another city, Mespila, that Xenophon states ‘was once inhabited by the Medes’. It was here, according to Xenophon, that Medea, the king’s wife, had sought refuge while the Persians were besieging their empire. The Persian king was unable to take the city, Xenophon reports, until Zeus ‘rendered the inhabitants thunderstruck’.2
What Xenophon was looking at, in this ancient landscape, was the remains of the cities of Nimrud (Larisa) and Nineveh (Mespila). These cities were at the heart of the great Assyrian Empire and flourished under the rule of the famed and formidable King Ashurbanipal. After Ashurbanipal’s death, Nineveh was destroyed by an alliance of Babylonians, Medes and Scythians in 612 BCE. Xenophon confuses the Assyrians (who had inhabited the city) and the Medes (who took it) with the Medes and the Persians, the major eastern power at his time of writing.3
I find it astonishing to think that Xenophon viewed these great mounds more than two millennia ago; that the ruins were already many centuries old when he saw them, with the events that destroyed the cities already obscure even to that great historian. The Greeks saw themselves as the pioneers of libraries and by the time Xenophon was writing the Greek world had a vibrant book culture, in which libraries played an important part. Xenophon would surely have been excited to have learned of the magnificent library preserved deep in the soil below, that would one day reveal the story of its ancient founder, Ashurbanipal.
It would take a further twenty-two centuries before the great library of Ashurbanipal would be discovered and the full history of this empire (and of its predecessors and neighbours) could be unravelled, both from archaeology of many Assyrian sites excavated since but especially from the documents found in these digs.
Writing feels like such a recent technology in the long story of humanity that it is tempting to assume our most ancient civilisations relied primarily on oral communication to pass on knowledge. These civilisations, centred around the area we know today as Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, left large and impressive physical remains – buildings and objects above the ground and uncovered in archaeological digs – but they also left behind documents that give us clear evidence that the written record existed alongside oral communication in the centuries before the civilisations of Egypt, Mycenae, Persia, and eventually Greece and Rome. This written record is highly revealing of these cultures. The peoples of Assyria and their neighbouring civilisations had a well-developed culture of documentation and have passed down to us a rich intellectual inheritance.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the lands that Xenophon described at the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE became the subject of great interest to rival European imperial powers. This interest was to help recover the cultures of knowledge developed in these civilisations, revealing not only some of the earliest libraries and archives on the planet, but also evidence of ancient attacks on knowledge.
The British presence in this region was originally due to the activities of that engine of imperial expansion, the East India Company, which mixed trade with the enforcement of military and diplomatic power. One of its key employees in the region was Claudius James Rich, a talented connoisseur of oriental languages and antiquities, considered by his contemporaries to be the most powerful man in Baghdad, apart from the local Ottoman ruler, the Pasha; ‘and some even questioned whether the Pasha himself would not at any time shape his conduct according to Mr. Rich’s suggestions and advice, rather than as his own council might wish’.4 In pursuit of gratifying his ‘insatiable thirst for seeing new countries’,5 Rich had even managed to enter the Great Mosque at Damascus in disguise, which would have been a tall order for a Western visitor at the time.6 Rich travelled extensively throughout the region and made detailed studies of its history and antiquities, building a collection of manuscripts, which were purchased by the British Museum after his death. In 1820–1 Rich first visited the site of Nineveh, and the great mound of Kouyunjik (as it was called in Ottoman Turkish), which was at the heart of the Assyrian city. During this visit, Rich unearthed a cuneiform tablet that had been preserved from Ashurbanipal’s palace. This tablet was the first of tens of thousands that would be discovered on the site.
Rich sold his collection of amateurishly excavated artefacts to the British Museum, and the arrival of the first cuneiform tablets in London triggered a flurry of excited interest in the region, and speculation about what treasures might be in its soil. The collection was seen in London by Julius Mohl, the secretary of the French Asiatic Society, who also read Rich’s published accounts. Mohl immediately encouraged the French government to send its own expedition to Mesopotamia, so that they could compete with Britain for the glory of French scholarship. A French scholar, Paul-Émile Botta, was dispatched to Mosul as consul, with enough funds to make his own excavations, beginning in 1842. These were the first serious excavations to be made in the area and their publication in Paris in a sumptuously illustrated book, Monument de Ninive (1849), furnished with illustrations by the artist Eugène Flandin, made them famous among European elites. We do not know exactly where and when, but its pages were at some point turned with a growing sense of wonder by an adventurous young Briton named Austen Henry Layard.
Layard grew up in Europe, in a wealthy family, and spent his early years in Italy where he read avidly, being most strongly influenced by the Arabian Nights.7 He developed a love for antiquities, fine arts and travelling, and as soon as he was old enough he embarked on extensive journeys across the Mediterranean, through the Ottoman Empire, eventually visiting the country we now call Iraq, at first with an older Englishman named Edward Mitford, and then alone. Having reached the city of Mosul, Layard met Botta who told him about his own discoveries in the mound of Kouyunjik, and it may have been there that he saw a copy of the Monument de Ninive.8 So Layard was inspired to begin digging, using a workforce made up of local people that reached over a hundred and thirty at its height, and despite scientific archaeology being in its infancy at the time his efforts were astonishingly professional and productive. Layard’s digs were at first financed privately by Stratford Canning, the British ambassador in Constantinople, as the excavations became an aspect of rivalry between France and Britain. Over just six years a team of workers from local tribes were overseen and supported by Hormuzd Rassam, a Chaldean Christian from Mosul, and brother to the British vice consul. The two became close friends as well as colleagues. From 1846 Rassam served as secretary and paymaster for Layard’s digs, but he was also intellectually engaged with the enterprise. Rassam’s role in these sensational excavations has received less attention than it deserves, partly because he lacked the cunning to promote himself with prompt publications on his findings and partly because some of his successes were undermined by racist detractors, and his final years were marred by legal disputes and disillusionment. Rassam enabled Layard’s excavations to be a great success through his organisational abilities, but he also contributed to the interpretation of cuneiform, and after Layard returned to Britain to pursue a political career, Rassam continued to oversee major archaeological digs in Iraq, funded by the British Museum.9
As the digs progressed, they discovered enormous chambers filled with clay tablets. Layard and his team had discovered not just fragments of knowledge from the Assyrian Empire but the institution at its very heart: the great library of Ashurbanipal. Some 28,000 tablets would be brought back to the British Museum; thousands more are now in other institutions.10
Up to a foot high, clay tablets filled the chambers, some broken into fragments but others miraculously preserved intact over millennia. One chamber, ‘guarded by fish gods’, Layard wrote, ‘contained the decrees of the Assyrian kings as well as the archives of the empire’.11 Many were historical records of wars, he surmised, as ‘some seem to be Royal decrees, and are stamped with the name of a king, the son of Essarhaddon; others again, divided into parallel columns by horizontal lines, contain lists of the gods, and probably a register of offerings made in their temples.’12 Particularly remarkable were two fragmentary clay sealings, bearing the royal signets of an Egyptian king, Shabaka, and an Assyrian monarch (probably Sennacherib). Layard suggested they may have adorned a peace treaty. Discoveries such as this would begin a process of grounding legendary events in documentary evidence. Investigation into the language, literature, beliefs and organisation of these ancient civilisations continues to this day.
I have been lucky enough to handle some Mesopotamian clay tablets and see for myself the pioneering ways ancient communities documented knowledge. I have examined a variety of clay tablets preserved in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which show the sophistication developed by these cultures. The first to come out of the storage drawers in the museum were small oval tablets from a site at Jemdet-Nasr in southern Iraq. The tablets were highly practical, their shape designed to fit easily in the palm of the hand. Information was scratched into the clay while it was still moist. It is likely that these tablets, which held administrative information mostly about quantities of produce being traded (one tablet shows an image of donkeys, preceded by the number seven, for example, which referred to ‘seven donkeys’), would have been discarded after use as they were found as fragments piled in a corner of a room. Other tablets have been found as waste materials being used to patch a wall or some other part of a building in need of repair. Often throughout history records of this kind have only been preserved by accident. Ancient Mesopotamia was no exception.
Far more exciting were the clay tablets that had not been discarded but preserved and used again. I marvelled at slightly larger tablets, which contained more densely packed inscriptions. These square tablets are known as ‘library’ documents as they contain literary or cultural texts on topics ranging from religion to astrology, and were designed to be kept for reading over long periods. One of the literary tablets even has a colophon, which is where the scribe records the details of the document itself – what the text was, who the scribe was, and where and when he worked (it was almost always men who did the copying). These details, akin to the title pages of modern books, show that the tablets were intended to be kept with others, as the specific colophon helped to distinguish the contents of one tablet from another. This is the earliest form of metadata.
The surviving tablets show that there were other kinds of archival documents too, records of administrative and bureaucratic activity. A group of very small tablets, which looked a lot like the breakfast cereal ‘shredded wheat’, were ‘messenger’ documents. They provided proof of identity of a messenger who had come to either collect or deliver goods of some kind. They were small because they needed to be portable; they were kept by a messenger in a pocket or a bag and handed over on arrival. It is unclear why these were kept and not used for building repairs, but it may well have been for future reference.
Thanks to almost two centuries of archaeology we now know that these ancient peoples had a sophisticated culture, fostering libraries, archives and scribes. As the earliest civilisations formed, moving from nomadic to settled existence, so too did the sense that a permanent record of communication and of storing knowledge was required. When Ashurbanipal’s library was in operation, the tablets used then – heavy and cumbersome – required chambers such as those Layard discovered for storage so that copies could be made or information retrieved. Over time, scholars have uncovered evidence from the tablets of cataloguing and arrangement.
In 1846 Layard began to ship material back to Britain, and his finds became an instant sensation when they were revealed in London. Public pressure, fuelled by news reports, helped to change the view of the board of the British Museum, which agreed to fund further expeditions, partly spurred on by politicians who saw the success of the excavations as a victory over their French rivals. Layard became a national hero – nicknamed the ‘Lion of Nineveh’ – and was able to build a career as a writer and politician thanks to his new-found fame. The discovery of the library of Ashurbanipal was perhaps his most important find. The sculptures, pottery, jewels and the statuary (now on display in the great museums of London, Berlin, New York and Paris) were aesthetically stunning, but deciphering the knowledge contained in the collections was to truly transform our understanding of the ancient world.
From studying these excavated tablets, we now understand that the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal was perhaps the first attempt to assemble under one roof the entire corpus of collectable knowledge that could be assembled at the time. Ashurbanipal’s library consisted of three main groups: literary and scholarly texts, oracular queries and divination records, and letters, reports, census surveys, contracts and other forms of administrative documentation. The mass of material here (as in many of the other ancient libraries discovered in Mesopotamia) concerned the prediction of the future. Ashurbanipal wanted the knowledge in his library to help him decide when was the best time to go to war, to get married, to have a child, to plant a crop, or to do any of the essential things in life. Libraries were necessary for the future because of the knowledge they collected from the past, to put into the hands of the decision-makers, the most important decision-maker in Nineveh being Ashurbanipal.13
The literary texts embraced a wide range of subjects from the religious, medical and magical, to the historical and mythological, and were highly organised, arranged in a subject sequence with tags attached to them, which we might today regard as catalogue records or even as metadata. These were kept as a permanent reference resource, whereas the archival materials were retained on a more temporary basis as a means of settling legal disputes over land and property.14 Among the most important discoveries made by Layard and Rassam at Nineveh were a series of tablets that contain the text of one of the world’s earliest surviving works of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Several different series of tablets were found at Nineveh showing the ownership of this same key text over multiple generations, all preserved together, passed down from one generation of kings to the next, even with a colophon claiming it was written in Ashurbanipal’s own hand.
From the archaeological finds of the contents of Mesopotamian archives and libraries, and from the study of the texts on the tablets unearthed, we can identify a distinct tradition of organising knowledge and even the identities of professionals with responsibilities for these collections. Unlike today, where the professional roles of archivist and librarian are quite distinct, these lines are less easy to observe in ancient communities. Libraries such as Ashurbanipal’s reveal a desire to manage information and also give us a sense of how valuable knowledge was to rulers and how they were determined to acquire it by any means.
The scholarship of the last forty years on the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal has determined that it was built up not just by scribal copying but also by taking knowledge from neighbouring states. Our understanding of this comes from a variety of sources excavated in recent decades and was not apparent to Layard or the early pioneers of cuneiform. The tablets that reveal these acts of forced collection are perhaps the earliest forerunner of what we now call displaced or migrated archives (to which we will turn in chapter 11), a practice that has been taking place for millennia. A large number of the surviving tablets from Ashurbanipal’s library came through this route.15
Our understanding of this practice has been expanded through the discovery of tablets excavated at many other sites in the region, such as Borsippa in what is now southern Iraq. In the first millennium BCE, Borsippa was part of the Babylonian Empire, subjugated by Assyria. Tablets excavated there preserve later copies of a letter originally sent from Nineveh to an agent, Shadunu, who was charged to visit a group of scholars in their homes and to ‘collect whatever tablets are stored in the temple in Ezida’ (the temple of Nabu, especially dedicated to scholarship, at Borsippa).16 The desiderata are named quite specifically, which suggests that Ashurbanipal knew what might have been available in the collections of private scholars.17 Ashurbanipal’s instructions were clear and uncompromising:
… whatever is needed for the palace, whatever there is, and rare tablets that are known to you and do not exist in Assyria, search them out and bring them to me! … And should you find any tablet or ritual instruction that I have not written to you about that is good for the palace, take that as well and send it to me …18
This letter corroborates evidence from other tablets in the British Museum, that Ashurbanipal both seized and also paid scholars to give up their tablets, or to copy some of their own tablets and others in the famous collection at Borsippa well known for its sophisticated scribal tradition.
A small group of accession records survive, which help us get a broader sense of the way these seizures helped to build Ashurbanipal’s great library at Nineveh (and also confirm the sense that the library was very carefully organised and managed). The scale is something that is immediately surprising. Of the 30,000 tablets that are known to survive from Ashurbanipal’s library, the group of accession records suggests an intake at one time of around 2,000 tablets and 300 ivory or wooden writing boards. This was an immense single accession and the materials ranged over thirty genres from astrological omens to medical recipes. The provenance of the material is not recorded in every case but it is clear that the tablets came from private libraries in Babylonia. Some of them seem to have been ‘gifted’ by the scholars who owned them, perhaps to curry favour with the royal authorities in Nineveh, perhaps to give up some material so that the rest of their libraries could be left. The only dates that are identifiable point to 647 BCE, mere months after the fall of Babylonia during the civil war between Ashurbanipal and his brother Shamash-shumu-ukin. The conclusion is clear: he used the military victory as an opportunity to enlarge his own library through the enforced sequestration of knowledge.19
But Ashurbanipal’s library was soon to suffer a similar fate. His victory over Babylonia would provoke a burning desire for revenge, and this was wreaked on Ashurbanipal’s grandson Sin-shar-ishkun, who succeeded his father in 631 BCE. The Babylonians allied with the neighbouring Medes, whose forces besieged Nineveh in 612 BCE, eventually taking the city and unleashing a torrent of destructive force, which would encompass the collections of knowledge, including the library formed by Ashurbanipal. Although Layard’s work uncovered remarkable feats of preservation and acquisition, everywhere he dug there was also evidence of fire and violence. The excavations revealed layers of ash, objects were found to have been deliberately smashed inside rooms, and some of the discoveries of human remains were particularly horrific for later archaeologists at nearby Nimrud, who found bodies, their limbs still shackled, that had been thrown down a well.20
While the destruction of Ashurbanipal’s library at the fall of Nineveh was a catastrophic act, the precise details of what happened are unclear. The major library and archival collections may simply have been swept up in the general destruction of the palace complex. Fires and looting were widespread across the site, and we cannot tell whether the library was specifically targeted, although evidence does survive of the smashing of specific tablets (such as diplomatic treaties).21 At the Temple of Nabu in Nimrud, for example, sealed tablets of the vassal treaties of Esarhaddon, father of Ashurbanipal, were found smashed to pieces on the floor, left there as the battle raged around the great city, not to be found until two and a half millennia later.22
The Royal Library at Nineveh is the most celebrated collection of its kind from the Mesopotamian civilisations, but it was not the earliest. More than five thousand tablets have been found at Uruk in southern Iraq and date from the fourth millennium BCE, and are mainly concerned with economics, but also with naming things. A thousand years later we have evidence from Syria, in the ancient site of Ebla (south of the modern city of Aleppo), that there were scriptoria and library/archive rooms, including brick benches to help sort through tablets. Although there was no specific architectural expression of libraries as separate buildings, from this period there is growing evidence of the emergence of curatorial techniques for managing information, including different modes of storage. These include devices such as wooden shelves or stone pigeonholes found in the archive room of the Temple of Nabu at Khorsabad (the former capital of Assyria until it was moved to Nineveh), and shelves in the Temple of Shamash in the Babylonian city of Sippar, which were used to help sort collections of tablets, implying that their number had become so numerous that special techniques were required to help sort and manage their collection.23 The use of metadata (in the form of labels and other ways of describing the contents of the tablets) to aid retrieval of information and scribal copying alongside the storage of texts was also a feature of innovation throughout the civilisations of Mesopotamia. The necessity to keep knowledge safe and to enable the sharing of it through copying has very ancient roots, coterminous with civilisation itself.
Direct evidence of the libraries and archives of the ancient world is scarce and the nature of the societies that developed these collections is so different from ours that it is dangerous to draw too many close parallels. Despite these caveats I think it is possible to suggest some broad patterns.
The libraries and archives of Mesopotamia, especially the library of Ashurbanipal, show that the ancient world understood the importance of accumulating and preserving knowledge. These civilisations developed sophisticated methods: organising clay tablets, adding metadata to help with storage and retrieval as the size of collections grew. The copying of texts was also supported, for dissemination among the small elite groups in the royal households who were allowed access to them.
These collections were often formed by the rulers who thought the acquisition of knowledge increased their power. The forced collection of clay tablets from neighbouring and enemy states deprived those enemies of knowledge and made them weaker. As many of the texts were concerned with predicting the future, capturing tablets would not only help you make better predictions but it would also mean your enemy would be worse at understanding the future.
From Ashurbanipal’s library we have a sense of what it preserved for the benefit of successive generations, as tablets were passed on from father to son, including those of the Epic of Gilgamesh. There was an understanding even then that the preservation of knowledge had a value not just for the present but for the future. The survival of the collections themselves is accidental. The civilisations fell and did not endure. Their libraries and archives, even those designed to persist, have only been discovered in recent centuries, and then only through scholars at the dawn of archaeology.