Ashurbanipal, also spelled Assurbanipal, Asshurbanipal and Asurbanipal (Akkadian: Aššur-bāni-apli[9], meaning “Ashur is the creator of an heir”, was the king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from the death of his father Esarhaddon in 669 BC to his own death in 631 BC. The fourth king of the Sargonid dynasty, Ashurbanipal is generally remembered as the last great king of Assyria.
At the time of Ashurbanipal’s reign, the Neo-Assyrian Empire was the largest empire that the world had ever seen and its capital, Nineveh, was probably the largest city on the planet. Selected as heir by his father in 672 BC despite not being the eldest son, Ashurbanipal ascended to the throne in 669 BC jointly with his elder brother Shamash-shum-ukin, who became king of Babylon. Much of the early years of Ashurbanipal’s reign was spent fighting rebellions in Egypt, which had been conquered by his father.
The greatest campaigns of Ashurbanipal were those directed towards Elam, an ancient enemy of Assyria, and against Shamash-shum-ukin, who had expected to be an equal to Ashurbanipal and began to resent the overbearing control his younger brother held over him. Elam was defeated in a series of campaigns in 665 BC and 647–646 BC, after which the cities of Elam were destroyed, its people slaughtered and the land was left barren and undefended. Shamash-shum-ukin rebelled in 652 BC and assembled a coalition of Assyria’s enemies to fight against Ashurbanipal alongside him but was defeated and committed suicide.
Ashurbanipal is most famous for the construction of the Library of Ashurbanipal, the first systematically organized library in the world. The king himself considered the library, a collection of over 30,000 clay tablets with text of a variety of genres including religious documents, handbooks and traditional Mesopotamian stories, as his greatest achievement. Ashurbanipal’s library is the primary reason why texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh managed to survive to the present day.
