Far from being simply a power-grabbing ruler and military strategist, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal was a scholar, who assembled the first comprehensive library in the world, discovers Dominic Green when he visits the British Museums new exhibition.
Knowledge may be power, but the powerful are not always knowledgeable. A leader issues orders, but these require translation and distribution through chains of command, civil or military. Holding the most powerful office in the world, President George W Bush styled himself ‘The Decider’. But his most fateful decisions failed to translate into reality.
Ashurbanipal (circa 668–627 BC) ruled one of the ancient world’s largest and most powerful civilisations. Born at the end of more than a millennium of Assyrian ascendancy, he inherited the largest empire that the world had yet seen, extending from the Caucasus in the north to the deserts of Cush in the south, and from Cyprus in the west to central Persia in the east. He was both powerful, with perhaps the first standing army and a centralised bureaucracy at his disposal; and knowledgeable, a scholar-emperor who, unlike many of his predecessors on the throne, could read cuneiform in both Akkadian and Sumerian. Yet none of this prevented him from being remembered as ‘Sardanapulus’, the debauched final emperor of a failed empire.
The image and reality of Ashurbanipal is the subject of the British Museum’s new exhibition, I am Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria. The remains of the Assyrian empire, already buffeted by time, received further abuse after the rise of so-called Islamic State (Daesh) in 2014.
‘A lot of modern Iraq was occupied by Daesh,’ says Gareth Brereton, archaeologist and curator of the British Museum’s Mesopotamian collections. ‘They systemically targeted archaeological heritage sites in the region. Some of the major sites were ancient Assyrian cities like Nineveh, which is right in the middle of modern Mosul, in north-east Iraq, and Nimrud and Khorsobad, which are nearby. They damaged a lot of the Assyrian sculptures, palace gates and palace reliefs.’
This story is from the November/December 2018 Volume 29 Number 6 edition of Minerva.
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This story is from the November/December 2018 Volume 29 Number 6 edition of Minerva.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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