Pod Insights The Ancients Ashurbanipal: The Last Great King of Assyria About this episode Known as the 'King of the World' and the last great king of Assyria, Ashurbanipal bestrode the ancient Mesopotamian world as a warrior but also a scholar, ruling the great Assyrian empire at the height of its power.
In this episode, Tristan Hughes is joined by Assyriologist Dr Selena Wisnom to uncover the dual legacy of this fearsome conqueror and passionate intellectual. From brutal military triumphs to the vast Library of Nineveh - packed with texts on medicine, mathematics, law, and literature - they explore how Ashurbanipal turned his capital into the greatest empire and the greatest knowledge hub of the ancient Mesopotamian world.
MORE
Rise of the Assyrians:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Y3JdYSZ1nJ3cBXa91YzrI?si=56553edc20b0406f
The Scholars of Assyria:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5sM9ODjMw2f0JqfpsKNLoD?si=ec06ab7a656548f6
Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan and the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds
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Transcript 10,233 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:44 Tristan Hughes? Hey, guys. I hope you're doing well. Welcome to this latest Ancients episode. And we're going back to Mesopotamia and that great ruler of ancient Assyria, Ashurbanipal. Now, Ashurbanipal was much more than just a ruthless military leader. He was also fascinated by certain rather bizarre academic pursuits, including divination, this reading of sheep's livers for interpreting omens and signs from the gods. We're exploring all of that today, this great library of Ashurbanipal, with our guest, the wonderful Dr. Selena Wisnom from the University of Leicester, who's just written a book all about Ashurbanipal and his great library at Nineveh. Let's go.
2:35 Tristan Hughes? Ashurbanipal, the fearsome ruler of ancient Assyria, who described himself as king of the world. A titanic figure who saw his empire reach the zenith of its power. He saw himself as a warrior and a conqueror, but also as a scholar. At his capital at Nineveh, present day Mosul in Iraq, archaeologists discovered the remains of Ashurbanipal's greatest legacy: his library. Thousands of cuneiform texts from it have survived, revealing how Ashurbanipal was so much more than just a fearsome warlord. In this episode, we're exploring the complex story of this Assyrian king.
3:17 Tristan Hughes? Yes, we'll explore the military conquests that define his reign, but also his passion for academia. His desire to gather scholars at his court to read signs from the gods, to research texts that varied from medicine and mathematics to law and literature. Nineveh was the capital of this Assyrian superpower, but it was also a great centre of knowledge in the ancient Mesopotamian world. This is the story of Ashurbanipal, the last great king of Assyria, with our guest, Dr Selena Wisniewski.
3:59 Tristan Hughes? Selena, what a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
4:02 Speaker 03 Lovely to be here.
4:03 Tristan Hughes? And talking all about Ashurbanipal. So widely regarded as this ruler who oversaw the zenith of the Assyrian empire, but also this empire's last great king, it's quite the contrast.
4:15 Speaker 03 Yes, there is definitely a sense of he brings the empire right to its peak and Assyria will never be as powerful again as it is under him and his reign is the setting for all kinds of extraordinary events.
4:27 Tristan Hughes? And is he quite an extraordinary figure to explore? The fact that he has all of these different layers to him. He's not just a military man, he's also quite the intellectual too, or he likes to portray himself as such?
4:39 Speaker 03 Yes, this is a man who portrays himself as strangling lions with his bare hands, but he has a stylus in his belt while he is doing it. So he portrays himself as somebody who is out there fighting on behalf of Assyria. Probably he actually prefers to stay in his library and is reading and engaged in intellectual study. So he has both of these sides to him. He's somebody who is obsessed with the quest for knowledge as well as a quest for territory and power, and those two things go together very much.
5:13 Tristan Hughes? And where was this Assyria that he ruled over?
5:17 Speaker 03 Assyria has its heartland in northern Iraq, what's now a modern day Kurdistan mostly, and the empire is based at the city of Nineveh, which is modern day Mosul. But the empire itself expands out and really encompasses the whole Middle East in Ashurbanipal's time. It stretches right into bits of Iran in the east and then in the west, bits of Turkey and even Egypt itself the Assyrians rule over. So it is a huge place.
5:42 Tristan Hughes? And when are we talking about when Ashurbanipal is ruling this empire?
5:46 Speaker 03 It's the 7th century B.C., early 7th century.
5:49 Tristan Hughes? So 2,500 years ago, was it very much the case that Assyria, it was the Mesopotamian superpower of the time?
5:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, absolutely. People often credit the Persians with being like the world's first empire, but actually they were building on the groundwork that was laid by the Assyrians. The Assyrians set up the system of provinces, the Assyrians build the roads that make all of this possible, and the Persians sweep in and very neatly take it over and then expand on it even more. But the Assyrians got there first.
6:15 Tristan Hughes? And is the story of Ashurbanipal, when we consider the great length of Mesopotamian history with names like the Sumerians and the Akadians and so on, is he actually quite late in the story of Mesopotamia and its ancient history?
6:29 Speaker 03 Yes, this is the thing. I mean, Mesopotamian history is something that a lot of people consider to be quite niche, but it covers three and a half thousand years of history. So I mean, writing is invented in southern Iraq in the mid 4th millennium B.C. by Sumerian accountants who are keeping track of stuff going on in the temple, and cuneiform, the writing system that they invent, continues to be written in the first century A.D. by Babylonian priests who are keeping watch over, over the stars. So it is an incredible time span. And Ashurbanipal is towards the end, not the very end, but yeah, towards the zenith of this period of power and extraordinary influence.
7:05 Tristan Hughes? And I've also got in my notes the word Neo-Assyrian. So what do we mean by that when regarding Ashurbanipal and the Assyrian Empire as Neo-Assyrian?
7:14 Speaker 03 Oh, again, it's a reflection of the fact that there's just so much happening in this area over three millennia of history. You know, there's Old Assyrians, there's Middle Assyrians, and then the Neo-Assyrian Empire picks off around the 9th century B.C. So he's part of that dynasty. People coming to power, the things happening, breaking down, shrinking again. Then it picks up, they expand again, then it contracts. And then when the Neo-Assyrian Empire comes along, that's when it gets bigger than it ever has been before.
7:41 Tristan Hughes? And you also mentioned that big name, that great city of Babylon and the Babylonians. Are they also big players in the story of Ashurbanipal and the Neo-Assyrians at the time, at the 7th century B.C.?
7:51 Speaker 03 They absolutely are. So the fortunes of Assyria and Babylon are rising and falling, more or less alternately. Babylon is a big political power throughout the span of Mesopotamian history, but the Assyrians have been dominant over them for the last few generations before Ashurbanipal. Babylon is the cultural centre of the Near East. It's where many of the texts in the library were first written. They are the ones who are thought to have developed all of this knowledge originally, but then they are under Assyria's shadow. And the Babylonians do not like this at all. And they frequently try and break away and rebel, and the other Assyrian kings have endless problems with this. So when Ashurbanipal's father, who was called Esar Haddan, when he dies, he actually splits the kingdom.
8:37 Speaker 03 So he leaves Babylon and its surrounding area to Ashurbanipal's older brother, not to Ashurbanipal. So we now have Assyria, this mighty empire, and then Babylon as an independent kingdom as well. But Ashurbanipal does not like this. He will not let it go. He thinks he should still be king of Babylon as well as being king of Assyria. This leads to a lot of tensions between the brothers. He tries to micromanage things going on in Babylon, which are really not his job. The brother eventually gets fed up of this and declares war on Assyria. And then we have this bitter civil war between these two brothers, which goes on for about four years.
9:12 Tristan Hughes? Well, we'll definitely get to that civil war between the brothers. And it seems like... Babylon very much is is a trophy city that they want to get their hands on. But you mentioned there his father, Ashurbanipal's father, Esaradon. So can you let us know a bit about the family that Ashurbanipal is born into? The whole dynasty that he belongs to for the Neo Assyrian Empire?
9:32 Speaker 03 Well, I would say the story really starts with the death of Sargon, who died in battle unexpectedly in seven oh five B.C. And this casts a shadow over the whole dynasty because his his death is a disaster because they can't recover the body. They can't bury it. And because of that, they can't make offerings to his ghost. And they then believe that because they can't make offerings, the ghost is going to be driven mad with thirst in the netherworld and then may come back to haunt them. So they then move the capital away. They've just built a brand new city. And they abandon it, move the capital back to Nineveh, and that's where the Assyrian kings have their base from then on. But they can't really escape the shadow of Sargon.
10:14 Speaker 03 And they keep thinking, he must have done something wrong to have brought all of these troubles down on us. He's succeeded by Sinakrib, and Sinakrib is one who really has trouble with Babylon. He ends up destroying Babylon, which is a terrible thing to do because of the great debt that Assyria owes to Babylon as a sort of mother culture city. And there's all kinds of problems with the succession on from that. Esaradon tries to reverse his father's damage. He tries to restore Babylon, bring it back to its former glory. But then Ashurbanipal ends up sort of repeating his his grandfather's mistakes in an attempt to avoid repeating his father's mistakes.
10:56 Speaker 03 So this is sort of grand cycle of of tragedy, really, that starts there and then goes on and on and on.
11:03 Tristan Hughes? Basileena, so this is four generations of rulers. So Sargon, this Sargon is the great grandfather of Ashurbanipal.
11:11 Speaker 03 Yes, that's right.
11:12 Tristan Hughes? Sinakrib is his grandfather, Esaradon is his father, and then you have Ashurbanipal. And also, shall we also clarify this Sargon figure? If someone mentions Sargon in Mesopotamia, you might immediately think of Sargon of Akkad. But that's not the Sargon we're talking about here.
11:28 Speaker 03 Again, the timescale, yes. So there is an original Sargon of Akkad in the third millennium B.C. And then this Assyrian Sargon names himself, probably names himself after this figure because he wants to lay claim to the glory of this ancient splendor associated with that name.
11:44 Tristan Hughes? And so have we been seeing a general rise in the power of the Neo Assyrian Empire over these several generations of rulers in Ashurbanipal's family, ultimately culminating in Ashurbanipal himself?
11:57 Speaker 03 Yes, that's true. The empire is getting steadily bigger, they're getting steadily more powerful and making powerful enemies at the same time, I may add.
12:04 Tristan Hughes? And in regards to the sources, what types of sources do you have available to learn more about Ashurbanipal's reign?
12:11 Speaker 03 Well, a lot of it comes from this amazing library that he assembled. I mean, history fans are often lamenting the loss of the Library of Alexandria, but very few people know that there is this other library, which is not lost to history, but survives. It's sitting on the shelves of the British Museum, 33,000 documents that hardly anyone has bothered to read. And the reason it survives is actually ironically because it was destroyed. It was burned down by the Babylonians and the documents in it are all written on clay. And clay doesn't decay in the ground. And if you set a library of clay tablets on fire, it actually bakes the tablets and preserves it even better because it hardens the clay. So that's why we have so many sources from this period telling
12:55 Speaker 03 us all about the history of what was happening, the knowledge that was in use and the ways that people were thinking at the time. And we also have letters from the king's advisers to the king, talking about these political events, talking about how they're going to solve these problems with the magical wisdom in the library even. So it gives us an extraordinary breadth and an insight into how these people were thinking and how they were talking to each other.
13:20 Tristan Hughes? So it gets bigger picture. Documents of the empire at the time and what's going on, academic pursuits and so on. But also, I love that. So actual communications of named figures within the court of Ashurbanipal and Ashurbanipal himself. So those amazing two levels of archaeological evidence revealing more about his life and and his rule.
13:41 Speaker 03 Absolutely, yeah. And and in it, you see really, really human stories emerging. I particularly like, for instance, letters from the doctor of his father, Esar Haddan, when the king is really, really depressed and he won't come out and speak to anyone. And then he's telling him, you know, you've got to eat and drink something, you know, come on, look after yourself and stop being so paranoid. Yes, it's true. It's great that you defeated all the conspiracies. But like, actually, now that you're just seeing everybody as if they're all out to get you, and that's not fair. So really not being afraid to call the king to account and speak some harsh truths as well.
14:17 Tristan Hughes? Well, we're going to delve into all of these intellectual pursuits and this knowledge at the centre of Ashurbanipal's reign. But before that, Selena, you mentioned earlier this brotherly civil war that erupts during Ashurbanipal's rule against his brother. So shall we explore the more militaristic side of Ashurbanipal first? How long is it after he succeeds his father as king before you have this great degradation of relations between him and his brother that ultimately results in this four-year-long civil war?
14:47 Speaker 03 Well, it's quite gradual, actually. I was sort of surprised, discovered that 17 years before things finally break. So they seem to have been on good terms at the beginning, and probably very close, because some of his inscriptions talk about his brother in very, very affectionate terms. And then as time goes on, you see the language changing, and he suddenly starts railing against him instead, calling him ungrateful brother, you know, everything that kingship calls for, I gave to him. I did him all of these favours, and look at how he repaid my kindness, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it gets to the point where he can't even speak of his brother without calling him the unfaithful brother, or that traitor, and so on. Like, really, it's like an epithet that goes with
15:31 Speaker 03 him every single time his name is mentioned even. So it really hardens and escalates and becomes very bitter.
15:37 Tristan Hughes? And how is his brother mentioned in the sources? I mean, in what types of texts? Are these ones that survive from the library? That is just almost recording the day-to-day politics of the time? Or what do we know about that?
15:47 Speaker 03 Well, we have Ashurbanipal's accounts of his wars, where he describes the battles that he fights and his military campaigns. And then we also have got letters that Ashurbanipal writes to Babylon about the war as well. So there you can see what's going on behind the official narrative. Things like he writes to the citizens of Babylon directly and say, you know, my brother is leading you down a path of folly. Don't listen to him. Everything will be worse for you if you if you do, trying to incite them to rebel against him, for instance. Clearly, this doesn't actually work. And there's another source which gives us yet another side to all of this, which is actually an Aramaic papyrus written many centuries
16:32 Speaker 03 later, that has preserved the whole saga as a kind of like a fictional tale, where it's got a whole, it's all written in a whole story format, really. And here, we've got the king's sister going to Babylon to try to intercede between the brothers. And she tries to talk him out of it as well, you know, tells the brother that he was stupid to think that he could stand against him. And if he, you know, he'd better give in now, otherwise, you know, again, things will be so much the worst for him. And that he may as well go and throw himself on a pyre and burn himself in a fire with the fat of all of those useless administrators who made him think that he could stand up to Ashurbanipal. And then she storms off, which is just an incredible thing to have from the past, I think.
17:15 Tristan Hughes? Do you think that's an accurate account? Do you think Ashurbanipal would have used his sister, you know, a princess as as an envoy, as a diplomat in this brotherly civil war?
17:24 Speaker 03 That is the only evidence we have for it. So ultimately, who knows? But she was definitely a strong minded and sassy character. So we actually have one letter surviving that was written by her. And it is a letter written to the king's wife. And she's complaining and scolding her for not being good enough at writing cuneiform. You know, she actually says, Why don't you write your tablet and do your homework? You know, because if you don't, people will say, is this really the sister of Sheru Aturat? You know, is this really the the wife of the heir to the throne? As if she's bringing shame on the whole family by not having good handwriting and knowing her cuneiform, which is extraordinary.
18:02 Tristan Hughes? That's amazing. I love that. That's such a great story. I mean, so do we also, because we've talked about Ashurbanipal's brother and his sister, do we also get great insights into the larger family of Ashurbanipal from the sources, from the tablets that survive?
18:16 Speaker 03 We know a lot about his father in particular. His father, Esar Haddan, was very close to a lot of court scholars. And actually, most of the correspondence from the library pertains to them. Esar Haddan, he faced down three different conspiracies. So he was really on the lookout for anything that could help him stay on top. So we've got denunciations pouring in as, as people are obeying the loyalty oath that was sworn to him when he extended the throne, which says, you know, if you know of anybody plotting against the king, you have to make it known. And they actually do. It works. So there's all of that. And then, of course, there are the letters from his advisers, who are trying to help with their own supernatural ways.
18:58 Speaker 03 So we've got queries about astrology, you know, how the gods are weighing in on this and how they are communicating. We have lots of political queries that were put to the gods through sacrificing sheep, magical rituals that were performed to try to help the king when he was gravely ill, all of this kind of stuff.
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20:46 Tristan Hughes? So let's finish off this civil war between Ashurbanipal and his brother. I mean, how does that war play out? What ultimately happens?
20:53 Speaker 03 Well, in the end, Ashurbanipal besieges Babylon. And the siege lasts about two years and he starves them out really. And we know this is not just Ashurbanipal's rhetoric, because we know this from his own inscriptions. But there are also real administrative documents that survived from that time, showing that people were actually having to sell their children for food to eat because they were starving. They were desperate. So this really happened. And then Ashurbanipal takes the city, but he doesn't manage to take his brother. And that's where this insinuation that he may have thrown himself into the flames comes from.
21:33 Tristan Hughes? Goodness, I mean, but it does show also, is it? Do we see the beginnings of this ruthless side of Ashurbanipal coming out with the story of the civil war? Or is it very much already there with how he conducts his military campaigns during his rule? That, yes, as we'll get to, there's this extraordinary academic side of Ashurbanipal with the library and so on. But when it comes to the military side of ruling this empire back in the Neo Assyrian times, that Ashurbanipal, even towards his own brother, he could be absolutely ruthless with ensuring that he gained victory?
22:06 Speaker 03 Yes, so Ashurbanipal is like this with his other wars as well. Another enemy is the Elamites in Iran, and he fights a series of campaigns against them. They interfere in the Babylonian war, and he's quite annoyed about that in particular. In particular, there's one Assyrian general called Nabu Belshumati, who turns against him and goes to help his brother. And then he flees to Elam and Ashurbanipal tries to get him back. He tries to extradite him and he gets really obsessed with this, like he rages. We've got the letters between him and the king of Elam asking like, send this awful traitor back to me. And they won't do it. So he invades Elam and he again launches an attack on their capital city, where he blunders it, steals their gods, takes the statues of the gods back to Assyria,
22:50 Speaker 03 devastates it so that nothing more can grow there. Also, he tells us anyway, that sort of, he destroys it as much as he possibly can so that they won't be a problem again.
23:00 Tristan Hughes? And is there also that extraordinary wall relief which shows him in his garden, which looks very nice and quaint and a lovely scene? And then you look above and you can see the decapitated heads of the people he's defeated in battle.
23:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, there is an amazing scene carved on the walls of his palace from one of these battles, where the Elamite king, Teoman, is beheaded on the battlefield. And then the head is carried back to Assyria. And you can actually follow the head around the wall as it has its journey. You know, it's really like a narrative that shows scene by scene what's happening. The chaos of the battlefield, soldier cuts off his head and then parades it all the way back to Nineveh. And in Nineveh, it ends up in the king's garden, hanging upside down from a tree, while Ashurbanipal and his queen are eating and drinking, relaxing, reclining in the garden. And then, oh, you know, on the wall, there is this trophy of the severed head of his enemy.
23:54 Tristan Hughes? It's absolutely extraordinary. I mean, are there any other big military campaigns that Ashurbanipal undertook during his rule that strengthened the Assyrian Empire alongside fighting the Elamites and defeating his brother at Babylon?
24:07 Speaker 03 Well, the Egyptian campaign is another big one.
24:09 Tristan Hughes? Right.
24:09 Speaker 03 So his father, Eselhaddan, was the one who conquered Egypt originally for the empire. But then the Egyptians rebel and then Ashurbanipal goes back to sort it out and bring it back under Assyrian control. It's a part of history that most people don't know anything about. Everybody knows about Egypt, but nobody knows that the Assyrians had Egypt for 20 years. It's not long, but it's longer than the Egyptians ever held Assyria.
24:33 Tristan Hughes? But is it also the heavy-handedness of Ashurbanipal when he's dealing with his enemies? When he's, well, he might think he's delivering justice, but you know, it's quite, he's quite ruthless in how he wins his wars. Does that also breed anti-Assyrian sentiment in the empire? That means that when he dies, it leaves the empire a little bit unstable and maybe that's putting it mildly.
24:57 Speaker 03 Yes, it does backfire on him. People are not very happy at being. Well, moved around by the Assyrians because one of their big strategies is when they conquer a place, they will break up the population, deport them and move them to places where it's useful for the empire. You know, where can they go to build these roads that we need, work on infrastructure and so on. Obviously, people don't like that. I think the maybe the biggest instance of backfiring is his treatment of Elam because eventually the people who swarm on Nineveh and burn down the library are not only the Babylonians, but also the Medes, who are a bit further away in Iran. And because the Elamites have been weakened, there's nobody in the way to stop the Medes from taking
25:39 Speaker 03 over and from them to to come and give Assyria its comeuppance. So, you know, weakening a state to that extent is not actually in Assyria's interests, although it may have seemed so at the time.
25:51 Tristan Hughes? Thank you for covering that first of all, Selena, because I know that's not the main focus of your book, but it feels important to highlight with Ashurbanipal because many people think straight away of his brutality or his his military campaigns. So it's great to cover that. But would you argue that we should not be looking at Ashurbanipal solely for this? There's this other remarkable side of him, which is this this academic pursuit, this pursuit of knowledge and intellectualism, or at least that this was flourishing at his court during his reign?
26:21 Speaker 03 Yes. And one other thing I want to argue is that it is true that the Assyrian kings were pretty brutal in their military campaigns. But I don't think that means they were necessarily worse than us, actually. They just celebrate it more. And if you think about some of the horrible things that modern nation states have done in the service of their own interests, they just don't put it on the walls. You know, we don't have Hiroshima on the on the walls of the US Capitol, for instance, but they still do these horrible things. So that that has disproportionately affected Assyria's reputation, I think. But it was also a place of culture and a place that has influenced the subsequent cultures in in very positive ways. And this quest for knowledge is one of their greatest legacies,
27:06 Speaker 03 I think, you know, the creation of the library, which was also a place for what we might Akav's academic research, you know, there was medical research going on at Ashurbanipal's court, which is something not many people know. He commissioned a new medical encyclopedia, which aimed to bring together all of the treatments in from different traditions in the area and and bring them together and work out which ones are going to be standard and so on. They tried to sort out complicated texts, overlapping things and produce authoritative additions so that they know what knowledge they can really trust and things like, things like that were, were really good things.
27:44 Tristan Hughes? And so what were the main academic scholarly pursuits at the time of Assyria? What were the, the subjects that they greatly valued?
27:52 Speaker 03 So they split it into five official domains of knowledge. Astrology is one. Divination from looking at sheep and trails is another. Then you have what we tend to translate as exorcism, but it's so much more than that. It's really magic of all kinds. You know, it's not only driving out demons, but it's really a kind of reconciling people with the gods and with other supernatural entities in, in all kinds of ways. Then you have medicine, as just mentioned, and finally lamentation, which is an art of appeasing the gods by singing sad songs to them in advance. It's a kind of preemptive strike where they will lament all the terrible things that the gods have
28:34 Speaker 03 done even before they do them, because if the gods hear this, then they will not feel the need to do these things in the first place because their power is being acknowledged. Like, okay, you know that we can destroy you anytime, therefore we don't have to do it to prove ourselves to you. It's a sort of strange reverse psychology.
28:50 Tristan Hughes? And was this big throughout Mesopotamia at the time, or was this solely focused on Assyria?
28:55 Speaker 03 Well, this is actually a Babylonian practice, this lamentation thing. And it comes to Assyria just a, a, a generation or two before Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian kings, bring Babylonian lamenters into the court and install them in the temples. And there is a bit of a tension there because, yes, their knowledge is Babylonian. It has this pedigree of, you know, ancientness and authoritiveness, but at the same time, we don't do this kind of stuff in Assyria. So who are these southerners barging in and like suddenly having influence and power in, in the temples? And you can see that tension in the sources very much.
29:29 Tristan Hughes? And you mentioned there also one of these. Fields was divination, and I know this is something that you've done lots of work around. So Selena, can you explain to us in a bit more detail what exactly divination was and how it worked?
29:42 Speaker 03 Well, it's a way of understanding messages from the gods, and this can go two ways. So fundamentally, they believe the gods are always sending messages to people. And it's the job of the scholars at the Assyrian court to keep a lookout for strange things happening in the world in case one of these is a message from the gods. So that can be in the form of eclipses, lunar and solar eclipses, pretty dramatic things. You can see why they might think the gods are trying to get their attention with stuff like that. But also odd things happening on earth, and that could be anything from an ant infestation in your house to a lizard falling from the ceiling onto your right shoulder. All of these kinds of things could also be messages from the gods. And they developed these really sophisticated systems for reading these signs,
30:27 Speaker 03 which they believe the gods are writing on the world, as if they are literally writing messages to them. But then there's the other side, which is where they can also ask questions of the gods directly. And that's where you get things like sacrificing sheep. That is their chance to have a direct communication with the gods. And they can ask any question they want about past, present or the future, as long as it's got a yes or no answer. And then they believe that the gods will write the answer to their question on the entrails of the sheep at the moment that they sacrifice it. So then they butcher the sheep, open it up and look at strange markings on the entrails. And again, they have a whole system of tablets which explains exactly how to read these and what they mean.
31:09 Speaker 03 And they have survived today. We actually have the instructions for reading the answers from the gods.
31:14 Tristan Hughes? So you have an Assyrian guide to sheep. Well, looking at sheep entrails surviving from more than 2,500 years ago from the library that we're going to explore in a bit.
31:24 Speaker 03 Absolutely, yeah.
31:25 Tristan Hughes? It's amazing. And was it always sheep? Or did they have, or did they use different livestock animals depending on what question they were going to ask?
31:34 Speaker 03 It's mostly sheep. If you can't afford a sheep, you can use a pigeon. But Asher Banapal liked to use sheep. King of Assyria can afford a decent sheep.
31:43 Tristan Hughes? Yeah, if he's king of the superpower of the time, I think he probably can afford a sheep, can't he?
31:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
31:48 Tristan Hughes? And also, this idea of academic wisdom and its importance to Mesopotamian rulers. Of course, we see it with Asher Banapal, but did we also see it with his predecessors, with the likes of Esahadon, Senakrib, Sargon? Were they also interested in academic pursuits? Did they also have their own library equivalents?
32:06 Speaker 03 Yes, they did, actually. So Asher Banapal, he made the library what it was. He probably didn't start it. So we have all of these texts from advisers of previous kings, which show that there was all of this scholarly activity going on. We actually have a writing board, which has got celestial omens on it from the time of King Sargon, who we spoke about before. That survives from a different city, was found down a well, strangely. But anyway, the other kings were interested in this knowledge, for sure. It was Asher Banapal who tried to make it a systematic collection and drafted people in to copy tablets so that he made sure he had a copy of absolutely everything.
32:48 Tristan Hughes? So was it very much this quest for knowledge and finding texts from other cities nearby that he wanted to make sure was also in his library itself? So do we know much about that? About when, in Asher Banapal's reign, he decides to extend this library to extend the amount of knowledge at his capital at Nineveh, and how this whole library was ultimately structured?
33:09 Speaker 03 We don't know when exactly it starts. We do know that Asher Banapal had an interest in scholarship all of his life, because there is a text that talks about his life before he came to power, and he says how he was trained in all of the ancient lore of the scholars. He says that, you know, he learned how to do difficult mathematics, calculations that don't come out evenly, how he's adept in the very dead language of Sumerian, how he can discuss the obscure commentaries on divination with his advisers, that he can debate them on their own terms. So he really stresses that this is something he is trained to do very, very well. Now, in terms of when the library was Banded that we don't know, but we do know a lot about how he acquired tablets during the war against Babylon.
33:54 Speaker 03 Because after he defeated the city, he then confiscated the collections of various important scholars and brought them back to Assyria and had his scholars copy them. And he also kidnapped some of the scholars themselves and got them to write it out. And again, we have an amazing letter that talks about this, that talks about the different jobs that are being assigned to different scholars in the library and mentions, you know, one of them better be put back in chains when he's finished copying this series. So he's definitely making use of his, of his prisoners of war in that sense. But there are more peaceful ways as well. So he does also send out letters to different cities, asking them to copy all of the tablets in their possession and send them to him. So he's taking a comprehensive approach.
34:39 Tristan Hughes? Do we have any idea from the archaeology, from the discovery of these tablets? How the library was structured? I mean, were they the ancient Assyrian equivalent of clerks? And maybe one section was to do with the epic poems and another section was to do with handbooks and manuals on divination and another on political matters of the day. Do we know much about that side of the library?
35:00 Speaker 03 I really wish we did, but unfortunately we don't because the library doesn't survive as a physical place. In fact, when the invading armies ransacked it, they ended up throwing tablets all over the place in different rooms. So one of the first big caches of tablets to be discovered, which the Victorian excavators called the Chamber of Records, turned out to be a bathroom next to the throne room. It's just somehow all ended up there. So we can't see how it was organised, but two labels have survived somehow. We've got a little label that says, you know, celestial omens here and omens from things happening on earth here. So they must have been organised in, in some way like that. We have got other libraries from different parts of Mesopotamia
35:44 Speaker 03 from similar times, which are organised in like a grid-like fashion. It's a little bit like those, those Ikea bookcases you can get, which have lots of squares next to each other. And they're really, really deep niches. So they seem to have been places that could store a lot of tablets in a very small, compact space, maybe a little bit like a storage stack.
36:04 Tristan Hughes? So you have the storage, you have the storage compartment surviving, but that's an amazing piece of evidence in its own right to kind of get this. Get rid completely of this idea of kind of binded books or scrolls being rolled up. This idea that it would have just been stacks and stacks of these clay tablets placed together in one of these little storage squares that went back quite a long way.
36:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, and you can fit in quite an amazing number of tablets in a small space like that. So it's very, very densely packed together.
36:31 Tristan Hughes? And do we think from the amount of tablets that have survived, do we find any that could potentially have been written by Ashur Banapal himself?
36:40 Speaker 03 Yes, we do. So we actually have some tablets from probably from the time of his training, when he was learning to write. There is an adorable tiny little tablet, which is written in really clumsy handwriting. Like the signs are really, really big. They're not joined up properly. Can't do joined up handwriting yet, where he writes to the king and it's got his name on it, which is also spelled in a really simplistic way. That survives and we've got texts copied out at later points in his training, which are much more advanced. So there's prayers to the gods and even some quite technical texts, like a glass making recipe and lists of important medicinal plants and things like that, which claim to have been written by Ashur Banapal himself.
37:24 Speaker 03 So I think it shows that he did have an active interest. This is not all, you know, exaggeration and big talk, but he is sincerely interested in some quite obscure things.
37:36 Tristan Hughes? But do we think then that, let's take with divination, because you said he was big into divination as well, that if he wanted to understand something from the gods, would he have been the active participant? Would he have been the one who was reading the sheep's liver and stuff like that, rather than getting one of his scholars to do it for him?
37:54 Speaker 03 Well, that's a good question. I mean, I think he wouldn't have got his hands dirty himself, but he can certainly challenge them and interpret, you know, what the meaning of these things would be. So the reports are usually sent to the king, rather than him being there himself. Also, I just think about the sheer amount of work that would be required for him to do it all himself. When you do a sheep liver divination, you have to stay up all All night and the number of queries that survive, you know, I think he's not going to be getting very much sleep if he's really doing all of this himself. So better to leave the hard work to his scholars and then he can just read the results.
38:31 Tristan Hughes? But at the same time, because we have that correspondence surviving, he can read the account of the scholar who's made that, who's done the work and has made the assumption. And then do we get cases where Asher Banapal says, I think you've got this completely wrong. I interpret this a different way because of this or that.
38:46 Speaker 03 Unfortunately, we don't because we don't have very many letters the other way around from Asher Banapal to the scholars. So there isn't much direct evidence of that, but I can't help but think it must have happened for somebody who has that background and is that steeped in all of this knowledge.
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40:30 Tristan Hughes? And so how much does Ashurbanipal boast of his academic expertise in the source evidence we have surviving?
40:38 Speaker 03 Well, there is this sort of often called Ashurbanipal's biography, where he talks about all of the ranges of texts that he has studied. And we also see it in his depictions of war as well. I mean, some of the battles that we've already talked about being portrayed on the walls are full of literary allusions. So things like when the head of this Elamite king is cut off and paraded around the battlefield, taken back to Assyria, that visually echoes stories about, well, from the Epic of Gilgamesh, where this great hero king of Mesopotamia goes and cuts off the head of an evil monster in the forest and brings it back to his city. There are also allusions to omens in these reliefs.
41:21 Speaker 03 So when this Elamite king is falling out of his chariot and his hat falls off, anybody who knows the omen series about bad things that can happen when you're in a chariot will know that this means something very bad is going to happen. So you can, you can even read the signs from the gods in the visual narratives that he provides for us. So everything he does is suffused with the scholarship.
41:48 Tristan Hughes? So if we now go to Ashurbanipal's court and given his interest in, in scholarship, can we paint a picture of the people who surrounded him? Can we imagine that Ashurbanipal is sitting on his throne? And you would have all of these different scholars, experts in these different fields that you've already mentioned, almost jostling to get his ear and to tell him about what they've learnt from their recent academic doings?
42:13 Speaker 03 Absolutely, yeah. And you can really see how some of them are closer to him than others. I mean, some of them have been close to him for years, I mean, such as, you know, his chief astrologer taught him to write as a boy and is still there giving him advice all these years later. But then you have other people who've fallen out of favour and who are desperate to be reinstated. There's a trail of letters from one exorcist in particular called Burad Gula, who used to be very close to the king, and then something went wrong. We're not sure what. It might be that he was involved in a royal childbirth that went wrong, and maybe he was blamed for it. But then suddenly, he's not in the circle anymore, and he complains about how he's fallen into poverty. He doesn't have any means of transport anymore. He doesn't have enough money to buy a new pair of sandals, and he was getting
42:58 Speaker 03 more and more desperate, and he wants the king to take him back. But there is a very conspicuous silence.
43:04 Tristan Hughes? And do we get a sense that maybe there were there were rival academics at court, that they're great, this factional strife, academic factional strife between certain scholars who want the ear of Ashurbanipal, and that maybe they, do they slag each other off? I think is the question I want to ask.
43:21 Speaker 03 Yes, they do. And that is also something amazing that we can see in the letters. There's one case in particular where this king's chief astrologer gets really, really angry that somebody has told the king the wrong interpretation of an omen, or he says that Venus has become visible. But the planet Venus has not become visible, he confused it with Mercury. And this is a really idiotic mistake. I mean, for those of us who were not very well versed in astrology, we might not see what the big fuss is about. But if you know what you're doing, this is quite obvious. And in fact, the Assyrians had the knowledge to predict this for a very long time already. It's like an elementary mistake. And now the king is really worried, because, you know, Venus rising at the wrong time
44:02 Speaker 03 is a bad omen. So he's, you know, he's anxious about it. And then Bolassi, the scholar, comes in and just rages about what an idiot his colleague is for making such a ridiculous mistake. You know, call himself a scholar. How on earth could he get this wrong?
44:16 Tristan Hughes? Is this a tablet where he labels his, well, the companion he's angry at, well, the fellow academic, an ignoramus?
44:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's the one.
44:23 Tristan Hughes? That's the one. Yes. I mean, we talked to Dr Moody Al Rashid all about that. And that was absolutely fascinating to learn about that. And are there any other particular tablets or figures that would have surrounded Ashurbanipal? For instance, are there any famous diviners that you'd really like to mention before we move on? Because I appreciate there are so many tablets, there must be so many stories, so many accounts of these different academic fields from the library, that surely there must be some great stories we've missed.
44:49 Speaker 03 There's one story I would like to mention, which is it's more of a controversy about omens than a particular diviner. But we know that there was a guy called Sin Erish, who was wrapped up in a controversy over the birth of a calf. Now, he found out that a calf was born that looked a bit like a lion. And in response to this, first of all, he kills the calf, then he eats it to destroy the evidence. And then he makes sure the evidence doesn't get out by killing the farmer who owned the calf. So, but he still doesn't manage to contain the story because the farmer's servants see what he's done and are willing to testify against him.
45:29 Speaker 03 And we know about this because one of the king's astrologers mentions it to the king. So, I mean, this to us seems absolutely crazy. I mean, how could a calf that looks a bit like a lion lead to intrigue and murder? But again, it's one of these signs from the gods who are putting unusual things in the world as a message to the king that something is wrong or something bad is going to happen. So it probably means that something very bad was about to happen to the king and they were trying to cover it up. And I think that's a really good example of, A, how seriously they took these omens and these weird things happening in the world, and also of the kinds of intrigue that can be going on at the court surrounding that.
46:14 Tristan Hughes? It's amazing, the combination of the worlds. And does it also show how with the academic pursuits of the time and with Ashurbanipal, if he's focusing a lot on scholarly pursuits, a big part of his job was hearing these reports of how the people around him were interpreting signs from the gods. I mean, it's not just sitting down and learning all about certain mathematical equations. He's receiving tablet after tablet about how certain academics are reading signs, whether it's in the celestial realm above, looking at the stars and the planets, or interpreting a sheep's liver and the like. That was such a big part of Ashurbanipal's reign.
46:51 Speaker 03 Yes, and it shows that the knowledge in this library is not just esoteric and abstract, but it's really practical. It is stuff that would have helped him to rule his empire, stuff that would have helped him solve problems, not only his own personal problems, but political issues as well. And it was all really applicable to his everyday life.
47:11 Tristan Hughes? And as Ashurbanipal's reign goes on, I mean, Selena, how long does Ashurbanipal reign for?
47:16 Speaker 03 So Ashurbanipal rules for about 38 years. It's complicated by the fact we don't know when exactly he dies. He sort of fades out from the record, but there's no mention of him after that point. So we have to assume he's probably gone.
47:31 Tristan Hughes? Do we know much about what happened to him during his later reign? Do we have many texts surviving from the library that we can say probably were written down or were created later? Or is it a bit more mysterious, those last years?
47:42 Speaker 03 It's all very mysterious, pretty much after the destruction of Babylon, after he defeats his brother, and then he goes after the Elamites again. And then it all goes suspiciously quiet. And I guess that's why he's often referred to as one of the last great kings of Assyria, because those are the peak dramatic events.
48:04 Tristan Hughes? And I have in my notes that there is this Greco-Roman legend of a last king of Assyria called Sard-- I'm going to get this so wrong.
48:11 Speaker 03 Sardinapolis.
48:13 Tristan Hughes? Sardinapolis, thank you, Selena. Can you explain what this legend is and how this might align with the fall of the Assyrians and the decline after Ashurbanipal?
48:21 Speaker 03 Well, the Greeks have a story about the last king of Assyria, Sardinapolis, as somebody who was not interested in ruling his empire, but instead living a life of luxury and decadence and lounging around with his concubines until the city is surrounded and it's all over. Now, that, I think, is a confusion with the story about what happened to his brother, who did die in this fire, most likely. Sardinapolis is also purported to have died in this great blaze. The Greeks do sometimes confuse stories about Babylon and Assyria, and maybe that's what happened. But it's also very ironic, because this is not at all how Ashurbanipal would want himself to be remembered, you know, he's very, very different from this
49:06 Speaker 03 great scholar and incredibly powerful military man. It might also show that there were other stories circulating about him that he didn't like so much. And one thing it reminds me of a little bit is, in one of the wars against Elam, he actually says in his account of it that he did not go to the battlefield. He says, "The goddess Ishtar specifically told me not to go to the war, but to stay in this other city and celebrate a festival. So that's what I did." And you think, hmm, why is he apologising for this? I mean, there are many, many complex reasons why, why he might have wanted to say that. But, you know, you know, maybe there are hints of stories that he was actually not quite the warrior that he said he was.
49:49 Tristan Hughes? Do we see him aligning with any particular gods? You mentioned there Ishtar, which seems a pretty well-known deity from Mesopotamia. But do we know if he aligned with any particular deities when he ruled?
50:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, Ashur is the state god of Assyria, who is always, you know, there on the battlefield with the Assyrian kings. Ishtar also goes with him into battle, or goes into battle for him, as we've just mentioned. But the god of scribes is also a favourite of Ashurbanipal's. And he, he dedicates tablets from the library to the god of scribes, which is something that scholars would do during their training, to align themselves with the god of scribal wisdom.
50:28 Tristan Hughes? Interesting. So he also aligns it there with, with, with his, with the divine. I mean, do you think there is any potential that, I appreciate it's murky, so it must all be theory, but that as Ashurbanipal's reign went on and he got older, could he have devoted himself more to academic pursuits and this idea that he, he stayed in his royal palace, or maybe in his gardens, and he, he just listened to the scholars surrounding him and all about the omens and the, the other fields that he was interested in, and just got more and more dedicated to that, and less and less to, to going around his empire? I appreciate that must just all be theory.
51:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, we don't know, but I can certainly imagine it, you know, it would it would be consistent with what we do know about him. There is one text which is called, we we refer to as Ashurbanipal's lament, where he complains about how miserable he is, actually.
51:18 Tristan Hughes? Oh, wow.
51:19 Speaker 03 And says, you know, I did everything right. I did all I could to listen to the gods and yet, you know, all of this strife is still coming after me. And what's interesting about that is this is a very, very literary creation as well. It's got allusions to some of the great traditional Babylonian poems about righteous sufferers who've done everything they can to appease the gods and yet still don't seem to see any benefit from it. And it switches from prose to verse halfway through, I think. So even when he's complaining about how rubbish life is, he's doing it in a literary way.
51:54 Tristan Hughes? So you can still see the scholarly undertone there, even at that time. I mean, so do we know what state Ashurbanipal left the Assyrian Empire when he does ultimately die?
52:07 Speaker 03 Well, the people who take over from him don't do an awful lot. It takes a while for the empire to fall. It's 612 B.C. when the Babylonians and the Medes round on Nineveh and burn it down. He's followed by a succession of of kings who who don't really make their mark in the same way, that's for sure.
52:26 Tristan Hughes? So that covers the story of Ashurbanipal Selena. How would you argue we should envisage Ashurbanipal today? How should we remember him?
52:35 Speaker 03 Well, I think Ashurbanipal would have wanted to be remembered as a scholar and a military man, and that these things go together, actually. It's easy for us to think that they are two completely different worlds, that the the intellectual would have nothing to do with fighting a war. But in Assyria, they are both used in service of the other. There actually would have been exorcists on the battlefield, performing magic spells to help the king get the advantage. You would have had diviners looking at the insides of sheep to try to determine is now the right time to go to war? What do we do? So even though they may seem very separate, they are really entwined. And I think the side
53:15 Speaker 03 of scholarship is the one that we know less about, and it deserves to be celebrated for that reason. This was an incredible library. It made a huge contribution to knowledge, and it reverberated throughout the centuries afterwards. You know, this, when the library burned down, it wasn't all forgotten. Much of the knowledge in it was translated into other languages. It turns up in, say, echoes in Hebrew texts. It has influenced Greek and Roman culture. It's of course influenced the Middle East itself in the other direction. These omens were carried to India, Central Asia, maybe even China, that's a controversial one, but it had a huge reach. And I think that is the main thing that we have to remember,
54:00 Speaker 03 that this was a powerhouse of knowledge, and it had a legacy for thousands of years to come.
54:07 Tristan Hughes? So do we think some of the wisdom, some of the knowledge in the library at Nineveh, in Ashurbanipal's library, will ultimately end up centuries later in the famous Library of Alexandria in Egypt?
54:18 Speaker 03 Quite probably, yes, because there are texts that survive from Egypt, which are very, very similar to the Mesopotamian ones that we know. When Alexander the Great conquered Babylon, for instance, you know, this is a moment where now the Greek world and the Mesopotamian world, they are in the same empire. And the scholars must have talked to each other and shared knowledge, because all of the data that has been collected by the Babylonian astrologers gets taken back to the Greek world and forms the basis of Greek astronomy and Greek mathematics. And they used the Babylonian calculations. The astronomer Ptolemy tells us he had access to eclipse records stretching back to the
54:58 Speaker 03 eighth century B.C., thanks to the Mesopotamian scholars. So yes, it had a very direct impact, and I'm sure would have been known in some form to the scholars of that later library.
55:09 Tristan Hughes? Well, Selena, this has been brilliant. Last but certainly not least, you have written a book all about Ashurbanipal and his library, which is called?
55:17 Speaker 03 The Library of Ancient Wisdom, Mesopotamia and the Making of History.
55:21 Tristan Hughes? Selena, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.
55:24 Speaker 03 Thanks very much. It's been great.
55:29 Tristan Hughes? Well, there you go. There was Dr Selena Wisnem on the show to talk through the story of Ashurbanipal, his military conquests, but also his fascinating life as a scholar, with Nineveh and his library being the centre of knowledge in the ancient Mesopotamian world. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Please follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's enough from me. I'll see you in the next episode.
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