Ashurbanipal

Ashurbanipal ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 669 BCE until his death, probably in 631 BCE, and is often called the last great king of Assyria. His armies fought from Egypt to Iran, and his great library at Nineveh preserved much of what survives of Mesopotamian literature. Yet within two decades of his death the empire had collapsed, and historians still argue over how much of the blame is his.

Born around 685 BCE, Ashurbanipal was probably the fourth son of King Esarhaddon. When the crown prince died unexpectedly in 674, Esarhaddon made the younger Ashurbanipal heir to Assyria and an older son, Shamash-shum-ukin, heir to Babylon, with the two meant to rule as equals. Ashurbanipal trained in the crown prince's palace, learning both warfare and scholarship, and took on much of the government while his father was ill. He succeeded in late 669; his brother was crowned in Babylon the next spring, but in practice remained a closely watched vassal.

Esarhaddon had conquered Egypt in 671 from its Kushite pharaoh Taharqa, but the country revolted as he died. Ashurbanipal's armies retook Memphis and drove Taharqa south. When Taharqa's nephew Tantamani invaded in 664, the Assyrians returned and sacked Thebes. Control did not last: the vassal Psamtik I, raised at the Assyrian court, gradually united Egypt and slipped free of Assyrian rule around the middle of the reign, though he remained an ally.

Assyria's old enemy Elam, in what is now south-western Iran, attacked Babylonia in 665 and again in 653. In the second war Ashurbanipal's army defeated and killed the Elamite king Teumman near Susa. In 652 Shamash-shum-ukin, resentful of his brother's interference, rebelled and drew in Babylonians, Chaldeans, Arameans, Elamites and others. After years of fighting, Babylon fell in 648 following a two-year siege marked by famine. Shamash-shum-ukin died as the city burned; later tradition said he killed himself, but contemporary texts are vague. Ashurbanipal's inscriptions boast of the slaughter that followed.

Elam had backed the rebels, and in 647 and 646 Assyrian armies devastated it. Susa was plundered, its temples and royal tombs desecrated, and many thousands of people were deported. Some scholars describe the campaign as genocide; Elam never recovered. Two wars against Arab tribes followed, which brought rich plunder but no lasting control.

Assyrian kings saw rebellion as a crime against the gods, but modern scholars note that most limited their cruelty to soldiers and elites. Ashurbanipal stands out: his inscriptions claim the killing of civilians by flaying, dismemberment and impalement, and scenes of violence from his reign make up about 35 per cent of all such Neo-Assyrian reliefs known.

Ashurbanipal boasted of a scholar's education, claiming to read Akkadian and Sumerian. As king he sent scribes across the empire to copy texts for a palace library at Nineveh, perhaps holding over 100,000 texts, the first systematically organised library known. About 30,000 tablets survived the destruction of Nineveh in 612 BCE; they include the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Babylonian creation epic. Excavated from 1853, they are now in the British Museum, together with the celebrated lion-hunt reliefs from his palace.

Records grow scarce after 639 BCE. One late inscription has the king lamenting strife in his land and family and his own illness. He most likely died, abdicated or was deposed in 631 or 630; an older date of 627 rests on a much later inscription and is now generally rejected. Under his sons the empire fell to the Babylonians and Medes. Greek writers later blended him with other kings into Sardanapalus, the legendary effeminate last ruler of Assyria.

Our 700 BCE map shows Assyria shortly before his reign, alongside Babylonia, Elam and the Kingdom of Kush, whose rulers he drove from Egypt; see also the Assyrian conquest of Egypt. By the 500 BCE map, all these lands lie within the Achaemenid Empire.