He tried to conquer knowledge itself – instead this ancient Mesopotamian king resorted to rule with terror
Historian Selena Wisnom explores how Ashurbanipal, the last great ruler of Assyria, combined calculated brutality with an unprecedented quest to collect all the wisdom of his world
From the deserts of Egypt to the arid mountains of western Iran, from the Mediterranean coast to the highlands of Anatolia, King Ashurbanipal’s Neo-Assyrian empire dominated the ancient Near East. In the seventh century BC, he ruled the most formidable empire the world had yet seen.
His capital was Nineveh, in what is now northern Iraq, a city of colossal palaces, intricate gardens and monumental gateways guarded by human-headed winged bulls. It was from here that Ashurbanipal commanded powerful armies capable of defeating any regional rival. But he also pursued a more unusual goal for such a ruthless warrior-king: the accumulation of all human knowledge, and the answers to the secrets of the universe.
Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Selena Wisnom, author of The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History, explained the vast scope of his power and ambition. “He wasn’t just a mighty warrior, but someone who was also trying to collect all of the wisdom of ancient Mesopotamia.”
Ashurbanipal’s Neo-Assyrian empire: a Mesopotamian superpower
By the time Ashurbanipal came to the throne in 669 BC, the Assyrian empire had already been expanding for centuries. The Neo-Assyrian period (spanning 911–609 BC) marked the empire’s most aggressive phase of conquest, with kings such as Tiglath-Pileser III and Sennacherib transforming Assyria from a regional kingdom into a vast, centralised superpower.
The Assyrians were known for their military efficiency, sophisticated administration and the use of deportations to control conquered peoples. They built an empire connected by roads, fortified cities and a relay system for messages – a kind of ancient express mail that allowed the king to receive reports from far-off provinces within days.
But he was determined to extend his reach even further – and had ambitions that went far beyond territory.
The Assyrian king of kings
Ashurbanipal’s campaigns pushed Assyrian power onward. “He was instrumental in really expanding the boundaries of this empire to its greatest extent,” Wisnom notes. He fought wars in Elam (in modern-day Iran), suppressed rebellions in Egypt, and brought the small kingdoms of the Levant under tighter Assyrian control.
As for the base of his power, Wisnom explains that “he had his capital at the city of Nineveh”.
This city became the sparkling showcase of his grand power – a metropolis boasting more than 12km of defensive walls and gardens supplied by advanced aqueduct systems. For visitors and subjects alike, it seemed to be the centre of the world.
The ruthless warlord
Ashurbanipal’s reputation as a conqueror was deliberately cultivated. At Nineveh, his palace walls were lined with stone carvings of incredible detail.
“He presented himself as being pretty ruthless. He decorated his palaces with relief carvings of sieges and people being impaled on stakes. All of this was calculated to convey the message that you did not cross the mighty Assyria,” Wisnom explains.
Not content with architectural decoration as a means of projecting his brutal power, Ashurbanipal subjected his defeated enemies to intense humiliation. One rival king, for example, was made to wear a dog collar and stand at the city gates like an animal – a punishment meted out by Ashurbanipal that Wisnom describes as being “fairly standard”.
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Regarding a different wall carving depicting Ashurbanipal’s defeated foes, Wisnom explains that “people are shown grinding the bones of their own ancestors to be made into bricks to be put into the city itself”.
Such acts and imagery were intended to strike fear into the hearts of the empire’s enemies, reinforcing Assyrian dominance and serving as a warning to anyone who might have considered resistance.
A library to conquer knowledge
But beyond his conquest of land and the brutal humiliation of his opponents, Ashurbanipal was much more than a military strongman. He also oversaw the creation of the Library of Nineveh, the most ambitious collection of texts in the ancient Near East.
“It was the library of Nineveh that was Ashurbanipal’s project,” Wisnom explains. “It was started a bit before him, but he was the one who really made it what it was. He was trying to collect all the knowledge of Mesopotamia under one roof; it was an attempt to gather universal knowledge.”
The library’s hundreds of thousands of clay tablets were written in cuneiform, the writing system used in Mesopotamia for more than 2,000 years. The texts covered poetry, myth and medicine, as well as theories of astronomy, mathematics, law and magic.
In Assyrian thought, knowledge was a practical tool for governance and survival. Divination (the reading of omens from animal livers, the stars or patterns in oil) was used to guide state decisions. Wisnom explains that the king could turn to his library to seek answers and ask: Should I go to war? When? Who should command my army?
In reply, the library provided the records, rituals and precedents for such choices.
Ashurbanipal: the warrior and the scholar
Alongside this obsession with preserving and using knowledge, Ashurbanipal also stands out among Assyrian rulers for claiming personal scholarly expertise. In an autobiographical inscription, he boasts that he can read ancient scripts from before the “great flood” (a reference to the Mesopotamian flood myth) and converse with scholars in ancient and obscure languages.
Wisnom explains that the king claimed to be “trained in esoteric law, able to read ancient inscriptions, capable of advanced mathematics, and a student of obscure languages who could debate texts at the same level as his advisors.”
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And such claims might not even have been too self-aggrandising. The library’s holdings reveal the mix of Ashurbanipal’s intellectual curiosity and statecraft, hosting medical texts listing hundreds of plants and remedies, technical instructions for making glass, and epic literature such as the Epic of Gilgamesh.
By preserving these works, Ashurbanipal inadvertently ensured that much of Mesopotamian literary culture survived into the modern age.
The fall of Ashurbanipal’s empire
Despite Ashurbanipal’s dominance, Assyria’s power was ultimately fragile. The empire’s size made it difficult to control, and after his death around 631 BC, a series of internal struggles and external invasions led to a rapid collapse. In 612 BC, Nineveh was sacked by a coalition of competing civilisations: the Babylonians, Medes and Scythians.
Ironically, this destruction helped preserve Ashurbanipal’s library. When the palace burned, the clay tablets were baked hard in the heat, surviving for more than two millennia buried beneath the ruins.
The last great Assyrian king’s reign was as a ruthless conqueror and devoted scholar, dominant on the battlefield and obsessed with understanding the knowledge of the past.
Selena Wisnom was speaking to Dr David Musgrove on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.