Royal hermeneutics: Observations on the commentaries from Ashurbanipal's libraries at Nineveh

Abstract

The British excavations at Nineveh, initiated in 1845 by Austen Henry Layard, produced about 30,000 clay tablets or fragments of tablets, most of them coming from the citadel mound of Kuyunjik. This textual material can be divided into two main groups: on the one hand, library tablets, consisting of literary, lexical and historical texts, rituals, medical compendia, Sumerian prayers and above all omen texts, and on the other, archival documents, such as letters, contracts and administrative notes. The great, and rather unique, potential of the texts from Kuyunjik lies in the fact that they reveal to us, more than any other repository of cuneiform tablets ever found, how culture, represented by the first group of texts, and politics, represented by the second, were related to each other in ancient Mesopotamia.While the archival documents from Kuyunjik date to the reigns of several Assyrian rulers from the eighth and seventh centuries, the library texts seem to belong mostly, though not exclusively, to the reign of a single Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (669 to about 630), a man deeply interested in the scribal arts of ancient Mesopotamia. His enthusiasm for reading and writing, which he seems to have shared with his wife, Libbāli-šarrat, can be traced back to his youth. From an autobiographical sketch about his intellectual socialization, we know that Ashurbanipal had received the education of a future scholar. In a passage somewhat reminiscent of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, Ashurbanipal described the scribal training of his early years as follows:I learnt the craft of Adapa the sage, the hidden mystery of the scribal art. I used to watch the signs of heaven and earth and to study them in the assembly of the scholars. Together with the able experts in oil-divination, I deliberated upon (the tablet) “If the liver is a mirror of heaven”. … I looked at cuneiform signs on stones from before the flood.