What was Ashurbanipal's Library?

This project seeks to transform the scholarship of Ashurbanipal's Library by establishing a detailed and reliable evidence base, from what was a previously unmanageable collection of texts. It builds on many years of work at the British Museum that has led to the creation of a digital copy of the Library and an improved digital catalogue.

For the first time, this project will establish how many tablets from Nineveh bear a library label, known as a colophon. This work will show which tablets are from Ashurbanipal’s Library and which are from other collections. It will establish a new taxonomy of colophon types and examine the relationship between the text contained on the tablets and the colophons appended to them.

This project will exploit information in the texts on the origin of the original works from which they were copied, as well as cross referencing the tablets discovered at Nineveh with those mentioned in ancient lists recording acquisitions by Ashurbanipal.

This project will reveal key information about:

• The scope of Ashurbanipal’s collection
• How scholarly knowledge arrived in Nineveh
• The relative significance of Assyrian and Babylonian sources
• How the Library functioned
• How much of the Library survives today.

This project will yield a new understanding of the most important library of the cuneiform world, and stimulate a new era in research on ancient Middle Eastern scholarship. Through a range of written outputs, including articles and a book entitled The Library of Ashurbanipal, King of the World, it will shine a light on new areas of research, including:

• The origins of the Nineveh collection
• Ashurbanipal's collecting habits
• A new, comprehensive taxonomy of colophon types
• A correlation of the texts mentioned in ancient library records with the tablets actually found in the Library.

The project will support early career scholars, guiding both a PhD and an MA student in writing their theses on topics within the Nineveh Library scholarship. It will also facilitate research and dialogue on a wider scale, with a symposium, major public lecture and study day organised at the British Museum. 

The project's database on the Ashurbanipal Library Project's website is hosted on the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc) platform. 

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