Ashurbanipal

Ashurbanipal ruled Assyria at its greatest extent and assembled the first systematically collected library. Born around 685 BC, he was a younger son of Esarhaddon, and was chosen as heir over his elder brother Shamash-shum-ukin, who was given Babylon — an arrangement that lasted sixteen years before it produced a civil war. He was unusual among Assyrian kings in being literate. He wrote that he had learned the scribal craft, could read the obscure Sumerian and the difficult Akkadian, and understood inscriptions from before the flood, and there is no reason to disbelieve him. He sacked Thebes in Egypt in 663 BC, fought Elam repeatedly, and destroyed Susa in 647 BC, deporting its population, defiling the royal tombs and sowing salt. His brother's revolt from 652 BC took four years to suppress and ended with Babylon starved into surrender. The library at Nineveh is what he is now known for. He sent agents to temples and private houses across Mesopotamia with instructions to seize or copy tablets, and assembled some thirty thousand — divination texts, medicine, astronomy, lexicons, rituals, letters and literature — organised and catalogued. Among them was the fullest surviving version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, including the flood narrative, which George Smith read in the British Museum in 1872 and which caused a sensation for its resemblance to Genesis. Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BC, shortly after his death around 631 BC. The fire that burned it baked the clay tablets and preserved them. The reliefs of his lion hunt from Nineveh are among the finest surviving works of Assyrian art, and are now in the British Museum.

• Lived: 685 BCE – 627 BCE
• Nationality: Iraqi
• Roles: ruler, scholar, military_leader