Ashurbanipal

Definition

by Joshua J. Mark published on 02 September 2009

Ashurbanipal (685-627 BCE, also known as Assurbanipal) was the last of the great kings of Assyria. His name means "the god Ashur is creator of an heir" and he was the son of King Esarhaddon of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. In the Hebrew Tanakh (the Christian Old Testament) he is called As(e)nappar or Osnapper (Ezra 4:10), while the Greeks knew him as Sardanapolos and the Romans as Sardanapulus.



Ashurbanipal succeeded his father Esarhaddon in 669 BCE. He achieved the greatest territorial expansion of the Assyrian Empire which included Babylonia, Persia, Syria, and Egypt (although Egypt was lost as a result of a revolt under the reign of the Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichus I). Ashurbanipal was a popular king who ruled his citizens fairly but was marked for his cruelty toward those whom he defeated (the best known example being a relief depicting the defeated king with a dog chain through his jaw, being forced to live in a kennel after capture). When he sacked and destroyed the city of Susa in 647 BCE, he left behind a tablet which recorded his triumph over the Elamites:

 

Susa, the great holy city, abode of their gods, seat of their mysteries, I conquered. I entered its palaces, I opened their treasuries where silver and gold, goods and wealth were amassed... I destroyed the ziggurat of Susa. I smashed its shining copper horns. I reduced the temples of Elam to naught; their gods and goddesses I scattered to the winds. The tombs of their ancient and recent kings I devastated, I exposed to the sun, and I carried away their bones toward the land of Ashur. I devastated the provinces of Elam and on their lands I sowed salt.

Ashurbanipal was not only a feared warrior in battle and a just administrator but also a great patron of the arts. He established a famous library of over 30,000 clay tablets at his capital Nineveh. Among the works found in the Library of Ashurbanipal were the Enuma Elish (the Babylonian Epic of Creation) and the great epic tale of Gilgamesh, the oldest adventure story extant. Ashurbanipal claimed to be able to read cuneiform script in both Akkadian and Sumerian, and the discovery of his library was one of the greatest archaeological finds in history.



After his death, a power struggle ensued between his brother, his leading general, and the king of Babylonia which resulted in the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire to the Babylonians and Medes, and subsequently the Assyrian Empire and Ashurbanipal’s magnificent library were lost to history for almost 2,000 years.

Written by Joshua J. Mark, published on 02 September 2009 under the following license: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms.

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Illustrations

Ashurbanipal Books

• DK Eyewitness Books: Mesopotamia Philip Steele DK CHILDREN (25 June 2007) Currently unavailable

• The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures Anonymous Princeton University Press (08 November 2010) Price: $37.98

• Everyday Life In Babylon and Assyria Georges Contenau W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. (17 March 1966) Price: $19.76

• Lost Treasures of the Bible: Understanding the Bible through Archaeological Artifacts... Clyde E. Fant Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (15 October 2008) Price: $17.90

• Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia Stephen Bertman Oxford University Press, USA (07 July 2005) Price: $16.85