Ashurbanipal

Assyrian king (r. 669-627 b.c.e.)

• Born: c. 685 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Nineveh, Assyria (now in Iraq)
• Died: 627 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Nineveh, Assyria (now in Iraq)

Early Life

Ashurbanipal (ah-shur-BA-neh-pal) was born toward the end of a fifteen-hundred-year period of Assyrian ascendancy. His name in Assyrian is Ashur-bani-apli (the god Ashur has made a[nother] son), affirming that he was not intended to stand in the line of royal accession.

His father, Esarhaddon, youngest son of Sennacherib, had become heir when the crown prince, Ashur-nadin-shumi, was deposed by rebels from his position as vassal for Babylon. Esarhaddon was not the son of Sennacherib’s queen, Tashmetum-sharrat, but of the West Semitic “palace woman” Zakutu, known by her native name, Naqi’a. The only queen known for Esarhaddon was Ashur-hamat, who died in 672 b.c.e.

Ashurbanipal grew up in the small palace called bit reduti (house of succession), built by Sennacherib when he was crown prince in the northern quadrant of Nineveh. In 694, Sennacherib had completed the “Palace Without Rival” at the southwest corner of the acropolis, obliterating most of the older structures. The “House of Succession” had become the palace of Esarhaddon, the crown prince. In this house, Ashurbanipal’s grandfather was assassinated by uncles identified only from the biblical account as Adrammelek and Sharezer. From this conspiracy, Esarhaddon emerged as king in 681. He proceeded to rebuild as his residence the bit masharti (weapons house, or arsenal). The “House of Succession” was left to his mother and the younger children, including Ashurbanipal.

The names of five brothers and one sister are known. Sin-iddin-apli, the intended crown prince, died prior to 672. Not having been expected to become heir to the throne, Ashurbanipal was trained in scholarly pursuits as well as the usual horsemanship, hunting, chariotry, soldierliness, craftsmanship, and royal decorum. In a unique autobiographical statement, Ashurbanipal specified his youthful scholarly pursuits as having included oil divination, mathematics, and reading and writing. Ashurbanipal was the only Assyrian king who learned how to read and write.

In 672, on the death of his queen, Esarhaddon reorganized the line of succession at the instigation of his mother. He used the submission of Median chieftains to draft a treaty. The chieftains swore that if Esarhaddon died while his sons were still minors, they and their descendants would guarantee the succession of Ashurbanipal as king of Assyria and Shamash-shum-ukin as king of Babylon. A monumental stela set up two years later in a northwestern province portrays Esarhaddon in high relief on its face and each of the sons on a side. These portraits, the earliest dated for Ashurbanipal and his brother, show both with the full beard of maturity.

The princes pursued diverse educations thereafter. Extant letters from Shamash-shum-ukin offer his father reports of the situation in Babylon; Ashurbanipal at home received letters as crown prince. The situation came to an immediate crisis in 669, when Esarhaddon, on campaign to Egypt, died suddenly. Ashurbanipal did not accede to the kingship of Assyria until late in the year. His grandmother required all to support his sole claim to the throne. The official ceremonies of coronation came in the second month of the new year, and within the same year (668), Ashurbanipal installed his brother as king of Babylon. The transition took place smoothly, and the dual monarchy of the youthful brothers began. Texts describe their relationship as if they were twins. It was clear, however, that Ashurbanipal, as king of Assyria, like his fathers before him, was also “king of the universe.”

Life’s Work

One of the first challenges that Ashurbanipal had to face was a rebellion in a region of Egypt over which Esarhaddon had established Assyrian sovereignty. In 667, the ousted king Taharqa came as far north as Memphis, which he recaptured. The Assyrian army rushed south to defeat him, but he again fled. Ashurbanipal enlisted new troops from Syria and followed, capturing Thebes. Three vassals were found guilty of plotting against Assyria, and they were sent to Nineveh. One of them, Necho, convinced Ashurbanipal of his personal loyalty and was returned to his position in Sais in the Nile River Delta.

After Taharqa’s death, Tanutamon tried to drive out the Assyrians. He captured Memphis and drove the Assyrian vassals into the Delta. With the return of Ashurbanipal and the Assyrian army, Tanutamon fled back to Thebes, which again fell to the Assyrians. In the course of this war, Necho had fallen, and his son Psamtik I was installed as vassal at Sais; he became king of all Egypt on the death of Tanutamon.

These events in Egypt, and Ashurbanipal’s success in maintaining his position, made a considerable impression on the contemporary world. The Phoenician states, such as Sidon, quieted down. In Anatolia, Gyges, king of Lydia, sought Ashurbanipal’s help against the Cimmerians, offering to acknowledge Assyrian suzerainty. There was a similar gesture from the Urartian king. Ashurbanipal did not, however, succumb to the temptation to get entangled in an impossible war with the Cimmerians.

Rather, he turned against the Elamites. In the campaign against their capital at Susa, the Elamite army was routed, and their king, Tept-Humban (Teumman), was killed. This event was portrayed afterward in a chamber of Sennacherib’s “Palace Without Rival,” which had become Ashurbanipal’s residence on accession. In Teumman’s place, a prince, Ummannish, who had earlier fled to the Assyrian court, became king.

The Assyrian Empire stretched from Egypt to Urartu, from Lydia to Susa, along the full extent of both the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. Shamash-shum-ukin could not help feeling overshadowed by his brother, who, though technically his equal, treated him as another vassal. Messengers went out secretly from Babylon to other discontented states; in 651, Shamash-shum-ukin initiated a full revolt, together with Gyges of Lydia, Ummanigash of Elam, Arabians, and others. Ashurbanipal implored the gods to save him. The chronicle of his inscriptions reflects the new situation created by the revolt; the one who had been called his “full brother” became the “faithless, hostile brother.”

The army from Arabia was delayed, so that Shamash-shum-ukin had to face the entire Assyrian army alone. He withdrew into the fortified cities in Babylonia. The Assyrians proceeded to lay siege to one after another. In 648, realizing that all was lost, Shamash-shum-ukin threw himself into the fire that consumed his palace at Babylon. For the remainder of Ashurbanipal’s reign, Babylon was held directly by Assyria. The official in charge, according to all subsequent Babylonian sources, was named Kandalanu; he is impossible to identify further, unless the name is a Babylonian throne name for Ashurbanipal. Kandalanu disappeared in the same year in which Ashurbanipal died.

Ashurbanipal undertook several more campaigns between 648 and 642, including at least two against Elam. He penetrated to Susa and sacked it thoroughly. There was one final campaign against the Arabs, fought as a running battle between his cavalry and the Arabs’ mounted camel corps. Ashurbanipal returned from these forays with ample spoils to finance the construction of his grand new palace on the site of the old “House of Succession.”

In decorating the walls of this palace, Ashurbanipal repeated the artistic narration of the earlier defeat of Teumman, giving thereby a second version to that in Sennacherib’s palace. The most intriguing detail is the final celebration of the victory, in which Ashurbanipal, with his queen, are served a repast outdoors under some grapevines, within which hangs the severed head of the disobedient vassal. Fully illustrated are the victories over Shamash-shum-ukin in 648, the Elamites in 642, and the Arabians. More noteworthy are the extensive scenes of a rather boyish Ashurbanipal hunting—none more exquisitely rendered than the one in which he single-handedly slaughters a pride of lions. Visitors to his palace got a clear impression that this king of Assyria was not merely a great king but indeed “king of the universe.”

From any later perspective, the destructive events of the 640’s may be judged as contributory to the final end of Assyria. However, the last fifteen years of reign appear so quiescent that Ashurbanipal went to his grave assured of the permanence of the land of Ashur that had been his inheritance.

Significance

Ashurbanipal left behind an impressive legacy in architecture, in artistic decoration, and in the collection of the literary treasures of the past, which he greatly enjoyed personally. This is borne out not merely by inscriptional claim but also by lengthy colophons that he personally added to a wide variety of texts, gathered for the library at Nineveh from all parts of Mesopotamia and from all periods of time, going beyond the Babylonia of Hammurabi to what Ashurbanipal called the “obscure Akkadian and even more difficult Sumerian” on tablets he thought to have come “from before the Flood.”

The letters he wrote to request manuscripts indicate that he knew where older collections existed and what they contained: the scholarly apparatus for reading and writing the cuneiform script, including multilingual dictionaries; collections of omens, essential for prognostication of every element of the royal life; and cycles of conjurations, incantations, and prayers, often with interlinear translation of the original Sumerian. To these essentials were added epics of gods or heroes, including previous kings; collections of fables, proverbial wisdom, and unusual tales, some humorous; and a miscellany reflecting the operations of the scribal school and its scholarship, especially in law.

Ashur-etil-ilani and Sin-shar-ishkun, two of his sons, succeeded him but immediately faced increasing pressure from many opponents. The last Assyrian ruler was an army general, Ashur-uballit II, who held off as long as he could the final destruction of the Assyrian state by retreating to Harran, after the capitals fell to the combined strength of the Medes and Babylonians.

The biblical tradition recalled Ashurbanipal as “the great and noble Asnappar” who had “deported and settled, in the cities of Samaria and in the rest of the province called ‘Beyond-the-River,’” various conquered peoples from Babylonia and Elam. The Greek tradition conflated Ashurbanipal with his brother Shamash-shum-ukin into a cowardly, effeminate “Sardanapalus” who presided over Assyria’s destruction and committed suicide. Sardanapalus became well known through George Gordon, Lord Byron’s verse drama Sardanapalus (1821) and Eugène Delacroix’s 1827 painting Death of Sardanapalus. Neither of these is characterized by historical veracity, as they were both products of the Romantic era, which immediately preceded the archaeological rediscovery of the real Ashurbanipal.

Rulers of the Assyrian Empire

Rulers are listed with their reign dates

c. 1814-1782

• Shamshi-Adad I

1782-1741

• Ishme-Dagan I

c. 1363-1330

• Ashur-uballit I

934-912

• Ashur-dan II

c. 911-891

• Adad-nirâri II

c. 890-884

• Tukulti-Ninurta II

c. 883-859

• Ashurnasirpal II

c. 858-824

• Shalmaneser III

823-811

• Shamshi-Adad V

810-783

• Adad-nirâri III

Bibliography

Attila, Raija. Legal Transactions of the Royal Court of Nineveh: Assurbanipal Through Sin-Sarru-Iskun. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2002. Part of the series of critical text editions of the state archives of the Assyrian Empire, primarily from Nineveh, edited by the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project in Helsinki.

Barnett, R. D. Sculptures from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (668-627). London: British Museum, 1976. The history of the excavations and of the reconstruction of the plans of the palace is covered, with an explanation of the location within the chambers of all known sculpted slabs. Photographs and drawings are laid out to illustrate the slabs in their discovered configuration in this massive folio.

Cole, Steven W., and Peter Machinist, eds. Letters from Priests to the Kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1999. From the State Archives of Assyria Series of the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project in Helsinki.

Grayson, A. K. “The Chronology of the Reign of Ashurbanipal.” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 70 (1980): 227-245. This study serves as a guide to the texts, historiographically evaluated, and to the correlation of detail within the various text editions to the actual events and their dates. It does not address the problems of the conclusion of the reign.

Luckenbill, Daniel David, trans. From Sargon to the End. Vol. 2 of Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927. An English translation of the inscriptions of the kings of Assyria, this volume covers Ashurbanipal and his three predecessors, Sargon II, Sennacherib, and Esarhaddon.

Oates, J. “Assyrian Chronology, 631-612 b.c.” Iraq 27 (1965): 135-159. This effort to identify the sources and define the issues related to the conclusion of Ashurbanipal’s reign judiciously sifts the conflict of opinion that has dominated Assyriology. Extensive bibliographical notes and internal catalogs of data guide the reader.

Olmstead, A. T. History of Assyria. 1923. Reprint. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960. Written in the immediate wake of World War I, this comprehensive history was selected for reprinting for its mastery of Assyrian materials and their critical evaluation. Ashurbanipal and his capital receive extensive treatment in chapters 30-34.