But a more fascinating scene engages our attention. It recalls one described in the book of Esther,[364] in which King Assuerus is represented as having his annalists and wise men read for him “the histories and chronicles of former times.” Before us is Asurbanipal—the Grand Monarch of Assyria—surrounded by his scribes and sages and intent on the examination of a recent addition to the royal library. For, after many years spent in military campaigns in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Susiana, and elsewhere, he resolved to devote the remainder of his life to the arts and avocations of peace. Numerous temples and palaces in many parts of Assyria and Babylonia bear witness to his activity as a builder and to the magnificence of the structures erected to his own glory and to that of his gods.
But it was in his gorgeous palace at Nineveh that he had the joy of his life—that which was to perpetuate his name to the end of time. This was his library—the largest and most valuable collection of documents that the world had yet seen. Composed of myriads of inscribed tablets, they were fortunately made of a material—baked and unbaked clay—which, for more than two millennia, successfully withstood all the ravages of war and the elements. They treated of mathematics, astronomy, history, poetry, grammar, lexicography, law, religion—in a word, of the entire circle of the sciences of the ancient world.
Asurbanipal—an Assyrian Mæcenas—was not only the patron of scholars, whom he encouraged to produce new books on every branch of science and literature, but was also, as a collector, the worthy forerunner and rival of the bibliophilous rulers of Pergamum and Alexandria. He had his scribes visit all the libraries of Babylonia—the earliest home of science and letters—and had them make copies of all works of value which did not exist in his own library. So indefatigable, indeed, was the King as a collector that it is probably true—as has been stated—that he had in his extensive library a copy of all the books that existed in the numerous libraries of Assyria and Babylonia.
The discovery of Asurbanipal’s library surpassed in importance any that had ever been made in either the valley of the Tigris or of the Euphrates. But every tablet in this immense collection was absolutely a sealed book, for there was not anyone living then who was able to decipher a single sentence of those mysterious documents which had thus so unexpectedly been brought to day. When Layard, in the course of his exploration of the vast palace of Asurbanipal, first beheld the priceless contents of the royal halls of records, his emotions must have been like those of Shelley’s Alastor in the temples of Egypt, for
Among the ruined temples there,
Stupendous columns and wild images
Of more than man, where marble demons watch
The zodiac’s brazen mystery, and dead men
Have their mute thoughts on the mute walls around.
He lingered, pouring on memorials