The Library Kids : The Library of Ashurbanipal and Dr. Samuel Noah Kramer

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

The Library of Ashurbanipal and Dr. Samuel Noah Kramer

Tablet containing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh (Tablet 11 depicting the Deluge), now part of the holdings of the British Museum

The last king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, King Ashurbanipal, created a library consisting of thousands of clay tablets from the 7th century BC. This library was burned down after an attack on the kingdom and the fire actually preserved the clay tablets. This library contained famous stories from Ancient Sumerian-Akkadian-Assyrian-Babylonian mythology such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and various other mythological stories.

The material was found at the archaeological site of Kouyunjik which is ancient Ninevah (the capital of Assyria) in northern Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) during the middle 1800s. The Library was discovered by Austen Henry Layard and most of the tablets were taken to the British Museum. Many of the tablets were written in Akkadian in the cuneiform script. Per Wikipedia:

The library is an archaeological discovery credited to Austen Henry Layard; most tablets were taken to England and can now be found in the British Museum, but a first discovery was made in late 1849 in the so-called South-West Palace, which was the Royal Palace of king Sennacherib (705 – 681 BC).

Three years later, Hormuzd Rassam, Layard's assistant, discovered a similar "library" in the palace of King Ashurbanipal (668 - 627 BC), on the opposite side of the mound. Unfortunately, no record was made of the findings, and soon after reaching Europe, the tablets appeared to have been irreparably mixed with each other and with tablets originating from other sites. Thus, it is almost impossible today to reconstruct the original contents of each of the two main "libraries".

Ashurbanipal was known as a tenacious martial commander; however, he was also a recognized intellectual who was literate, and a passionate collector of texts and tablets.^[5] As an apprentice scribe he mastered both the Akkadian and the Sumerian languages ^[6] He sent scribes into every region of the Neo-Assyrian Empire to collect ancient texts. He hired scholars and scribes to copy texts, mainly from Babylonian sources.^[2]^[3]

Ashurbanipal was not above using war booty as a means of stocking his library. Because he was known for being a scholar and being cruel to his enemies, Ashurbanipal was able to use threats to gain materials from Babylonia and surrounding areas.^[7]

The royal library consists of approximately 30,000 tablets and writing boards with the majority of them being severely fragmented. ^[8] It can be gleaned from the conservation of the fragments that the number of tablets that existed in the library at the time of destruction was close to two thousand and the number of writing boards within the library can be placed at a total of three hundred.^[9] The majority of the tablet corpus (about 6,000) included colloquial compositions in the form of legislation, foreign correspondences and engagements, aristocratic declarations, and financial matters. ^[10] The remaining texts contained divinations, omens, incantations and hymns to various gods, while others were concerned with medicine, astronomy, and literature. For all these texts in the library only ten contain expressive rhythmic literary works such as epics and myths.^[11] The Epic of Gilgamesh, a masterpiece of ancient Babylonian poetry, was found in the library as was the Enûma Eliš creation story, and myth of Adapa the first man, and stories such as the Poor Man of Nippur.^[12]^[13]^[14]

The texts were principally written in Akkadian in the cuneiform script, however many of the tablets do not have an exact derivation and it is often difficult to ascertain their original homeland. Many of the tablets are indeed composed in the Neo-Babylonian Script, but many were also known to be written in Assyrian as well. ^[15]

It is from this library that the mythology of ancient Sumer was determined.

Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BC by a coalition of Babylonians, Scythians and Medes, an ancient Iranian people. It is believed that during the burning of the palace, a great fire must have ravaged the library, causing the clay cuneiform tablets to become partially baked.^[13] Paradoxically, this potentially destructive event helped preserve the tablets. As well as texts on clay tablets, some of the texts may have been inscribed onto wax boards which because of their organic nature have been lost.

The British Museum’s collections database counts 30,943 "tablets" in the entire Nineveh library collection, and the Trustees of the Museum propose to issue an updated catalog as part of the Ashurbanipal Library Project.^[17] If all smaller fragments that actually belong to the same text are deducted, it is likely that the "library" originally included some 10,000 texts in all. The original library documents however, which would have included leather scrolls, wax boards, and possibly papyri, contained perhaps a much broader spectrum of knowledge than that known from the surviving clay tablet cuneiform texts.

Ashurbanipal on a chariot during a royal lion hunt. (Reign 668-627 BC)

King Ashurbanipal was not a very nice man, but a rather violent king despite his scholarly achievements. Per Wikipedia:

Despite being a popular king among his subjects, he was also known for his cruelty to his enemies. Some pictures depict him putting a dog chain through the jaw of a defeated king and then making him live in a dog kennel.^[8] Many paintings of the period exhibit his brutality.^[original

Assyria was by then master of the largest empire the world had yet seen, stretching from The Caucasus in the north to North Africa in the south, and from the east Mediterranean in the west to central Iran in the east. Ashurbanipal enjoyed the subjugation of Babylon, Chaldea, Media, Persia, Egypt, Elam, Gutium, Phrygia, Mannea, Corduene, Aramea, Urartu, Lydia, Cilicia, Commagene, Caria, Phoenicia, Israel, Judah, Samarra, Moab, Edom, Nabatea, Arabia, the Neo-Hittites, Dilmun, Nubia, Scythia, Cimmeria, Armenia and Cyprus, with few problems during Ashurbanipal's reign. For the time being, the dual monarchy in Mesopotamia went well.^[10]

The famous library of king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh

Among the findings was the Enuma Elish, also known as the Epic of Creation,^[23] which depicts a traditional Babylonian view of creation where the god Marduk slays Tiamat, the personification of salt water, and creates the world from her body. In this particular version, man is created from the blood of a revolting god, Qingu, in order to toil on behalf of the gods.

I will soon show in future posts, that Marduk is a Babylonian name for the Greek Uranus (who killed his great-grandmother and great-grandfather).

Dr. Samuel Noah Kramer

A PHD named Dr. Samuel Noah Kramer was one of the world's leading Assyriologists and a world renowned expert in Sumerian history and Sumerian language. He came from Russia and ended up working on deciphering the tablets at the University of Pennsylvania. From Wikipedia:

In his autobiography published in 1986, he sums up his accomplishments: "First, and most important, is the role I played in the recovery, restoration, and resurrection of Sumerian literature, or at least of a representative cross section . . . Through my efforts several thousand Sumerian literary tablets and fragments have been made available to cuneiformists, a basic reservoir of unadulterated data that will endure for many decades to come. Second, I endeavored . . . to make available reasonably reliable translations of many of these documents to the academic community, and especially to the anthropologist, historian, and humanist. Third, I have helped to spread the name of Sumer to the world at large, and to make people aware of the crucial role the Sumerians played in the ascent of civilized man".^[3]

Kramer died at age 93 on November 26, 1990 in the United States.

So you can see that Dr. Samuel Noah Kramer along with his mentor, Ephraim Avigdor Speiser, was one of the first to decipher the Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets from the Library of Ashurbanipal.

Here are some of his selected writings that we will be studying from:

Kramer, Samuel Noah. Sumerian Mythology: Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium B.C. 1944, rev. 1961.

Kramer, Samuel Noah. History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Man's Recorded History. 1956/1e (25 firsts), 1959/2e (27 firsts) 1981/3e. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0-8122-7812-7.

Kramer, Samuel Noah. The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963. ISBN 0-226-45238-7.

Kramer, Samuel Noah and Diane Wolkstein. Inanna : Queen of Heaven and Earth. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. ISBN 0-06-090854-8.

Kramer, Samuel Noah. In the World of Sumer, An Autobiography. Wayne State University Press, 1988. ISBN 0-8143-1785-5.

There are other scholars who have deciphered the cuneiform text that we will be looking at as well. The most famous self-professed, self-taught anthropologist who has claimed to have given a new interpretation to the Sumerian-Akkadian Cuneiform clay tablets is Zechariah Sitchin. We'll be looking into his work as well and comparing the decipherments versus the interpretations.

As you can see by the description from Wikipedia, Zechariah Sitchin did not have the credentials claimed to decipher the Sumerian tablets, but it appears to me he made interpretations of work done by Dr. Samuel Noah Kramer. However, I will be open to the case of him being self-taught as many have done in the past as he has claimed.

Sitchin was born in the Azerbaijan SSR, but was raised in Mandatory Palestine. He received a degree in economics from the University of London, and was an editor and journalist in Israel, before moving to New York in 1952. While working as an executive for a shipping company, he taught himself Sumerian cuneiform and visited several archaeological sites.^[3]^[4]