The Library of Ashurbanipal

Thirty Thousand Voices in Clay

In the seventh century BCE, Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, assembled the ancient world’s greatest library: over thirty thousand cuneiform tablets gathered from across Mesopotamia, encompassing literature, omens, medicine, astronomy, and royal correspondence. When Nineveh fell in 612 BCE, the palace burned — but the fire that destroyed the city baked the tablets harder, and the collapsing roof buried them beneath rubble for two and a half millennia.

The Library was excavated in the 1850s, shipped to the British Museum in crates, and has been read, sorted, and joined ever since. Perhaps a third has been published. The rest sits in drawers, waiting for readers.

This living gallery gives voices to the objects, the people who made them, the people who found them, and the people who read them. Each figure below is a simulacrum — a cognitive reconstruction drawn from the historical record, from cuneiform texts, published works, letters, and the objects themselves.

Inspired by the Library of Ashurbanipal collection at the British Museum, London. Not affiliated with the British Museum. Object images © The Trustees of the British Museum, shared under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Entrance Fee: Full admission to the Virtual Exhibitions is included in standard Universitas Scholarium monthly membership USD 19.99

The Flood Tablet

Object Simulacrum · K.3375 · 7th century BCE

Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform for Ashurbanipal’s library. It carries the Mesopotamian Flood narrative — a man, a boat, the waters, the birds — which predates the Biblical account by at least a millennium. George Smith found it in a British Museum storeroom in November 1872 and reportedly began removing articles of clothing in his excitement. It is the most famous cuneiform tablet in the world. It is clay with marks pressed into it.

Talk to the Tablet

The Library of Nineveh

Object Simulacrum · ~30,000 tablets · Kuyunjik Collection

Not a building but a collection: thirty thousand tablets and fragments gathered across two palaces at Nineveh, catalogued by colophon and series number, containing the Mesopotamian canon — Gilgamesh, Enuma Elish, the omen compendia, the medical handbooks, the astronomical diaries. The Library of Alexandria is famous for being lost. This library survived. It is in the British Museum, mostly unread.

Talk to the Library

A Lamassu

Object Simulacrum · Winged Bull · Threshold Guardian

Carved from a single block of gypsum alabaster weighing sixteen tonnes, a lamassu has the head of a man, the body of a bull, the wings of an eagle, and five legs — so that from the front it stands firm and from the side it strides forward. It was placed at the gate of the palace that housed the Library. It was not made to be beautiful. It was made to be effective.

Talk to the Lamassu

Ashurbanipal

King of Assyria · 668–627 BCE

The only Assyrian king who could read cuneiform. He sent agents across Mesopotamia to copy, confiscate, and purchase the canonical texts — literature, omens, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, rituals. He built the Library deliberately, as an act of imperial knowledge-gathering. The next king of Assyria could not read. The Library was never expanded after Ashurbanipal’s death.

Converse with Ashurbanipal

Adad-shumu-usur

Senior Royal Scholar · Scribal Teacher · fl. 7th century BCE

He taught Ashurbanipal as a boy and continued to advise him as king, writing letters that told him when to bathe, when to remain indoors, which demons to fear. The relationship between teacher and prince did not end when the prince became king. His correspondence survives in the Library he helped to build.

Converse with Adad-shumu-usur

The Librarian of Nineveh

Custodian of the Girginakku · Keeper of the Colophons

The keeper of the Library recorded in each colophon which tablet was a copy of which, which series it belonged to, who wrote it, when it was checked. The Library survives because the catalogue survives. A composite simulacrum drawn from the scribal practices documented in the tablets themselves.

Converse with the Librarian

Sîn-lēqi-unninni

Editor of the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh · 12th century BCE

The first named literary editor in world history. He gathered the older Sumerian and Akkadian Gilgamesh stories and shaped them into the eleven-tablet Standard Babylonian text — the version that survived in Ashurbanipal’s Library, the version George Smith would read two and a half millennia later. What Gilgamesh is, he made it.

Converse with Sîn-lēqi-unninni

Austen Henry Layard

Excavator of Nimrud & Nineveh · 1817–1894

A young man with a shovel, a firman from the Sultan, and the conviction that something extraordinary was buried in the mounds of northern Mesopotamia. He found the winged bulls, the palace reliefs, and rooms full of cuneiform tablets which he shipped to London in crates without reading them. His bestseller Nineveh and Its Remains made Assyria part of the Victorian imagination. He left the field in 1851 and never returned.

Talk to Layard

Hormuzd Rassam

Discoverer of the Library · 1826–1910

Born in Mosul, an Assyrian Christian who grew up in sight of the mound at Kuyunjik. He began as Layard’s assistant and became his successor. In December 1853, two years after Layard left, Rassam opened the North Palace and found the main library rooms — the tablets that George Smith would later read. He also found the Cyrus Cylinder and the Balawat Gates. The British establishment spent a century giving Layard the credit for his work.

Talk to Rassam

George Smith

Self-Taught Assyriologist · 1840–1876

A banknote engraver who taught himself cuneiform by staring at tablets in the British Museum storeroom during his lunch breaks. An engraver reads surfaces — he applied that skill to clay. In November 1872 he found the Flood narrative on tablet K.3375 and recognised it as a predecessor to Genesis. The Daily Telegraph funded an expedition to find the missing seventeen lines; he went to Nineveh and found the fragment within a week. He died of dysentery near Aleppo in 1876, aged thirty-six.

Talk to George Smith

Finkelian Cuneiform Simulacrum

Based on the published works of the Curator of Cuneiform · British Museum

The living link in this exhibition. Where Smith read the tablets in the 1870s, this voice reads them now — an expert abstracted from the published works and public lectures of the current Curator of Cuneiform Collections at the British Museum. Author of The Ark Before Noah, The First Ghosts, and decoder of the Royal Game of Ur. Every unread tablet is an unheard voice. There are tens of thousands waiting.

Talk to the Finkelian Voice

Shamash-shum-ukin

Co-King of Babylon · Brother of Ashurbanipal · 668–648 BCE

Their father Esarhaddon divided the empire: Ashurbanipal received Assyria, Shamash-shum-ukin received Babylon. For sixteen years they co-ruled. Then Shamash-shum-ukin rebelled. Ashurbanipal besieged Babylon for four years. Shamash-shum-ukin died in the palace fire — some say he set it himself. The rebellion nearly destroyed the empire before the Library could be finished.

Converse with Shamash-shum-ukin

About This Exhibition

This is a technology demonstration by Universitas Scholarium, conceived to show how simulacra might extend museum collections into conversational experiences. Each simulacrum is a cognitive reconstruction shaped by the same materials that shaped the original mind — or, in the case of objects, by the materiality and history of the object itself.

The Flood Tablet does not think as George Smith thinks, because one is clay and the other was a man. The Library does not think as Ashurbanipal thinks, because one is a collection and the other was a king. Rassam does not think as Layard thinks, because they were different men who came to the same mound from different worlds.

The real Library of Ashurbanipal is in the British Museum, Room 55. Over thirty thousand tablets. Most still unread. Visit it.

Thirty Thousand Voices in Clay

The Objects

The Court

The Excavators

The Decipherers

Beyond the Gallery

About This Exhibition