was maintained in activity. Other tablets contain
authentic copies of works which were looked upon as
classics in the sanctuaries of the Euphrates.
Probably, when Babylon was sacked, Sennacherib had
ordered the books which lay piled up in E-Sagilla
and the other buildings of the city to be collected
and carried away to Nineveh along with the statues
and property of the gods. They had been placed
in the treasury, and there they remained until Esarhaddon
re-established the kingdom of Karduniash, and Assur-bani-pal
was forced to deliver up the statue of Marduk and
restore to the sanctuaries, now rebuilt, all the wealth
of which his grandfather had robbed them: but
before sending back the tablets, he ordered copies
to be made of them, and his secretaries set to work
to transcribe for his use such of these works as they
considered worthy of reproduction. The majority
of them were treatises compiled by the most celebrated
adepts in the sciences for which Chaldaea had been
famous from time immemorial; they included collections
of omens, celestial and terrestrial, in which the
mystical meaning of each phenomenon and its influence
on the destinies of the world was explained by examples
borrowed from the Annals of world-renowned conquerors,
such as Naramsin and Sargon of Agade; then there were
formulae for exorcising evil spirits from the bodies
of the possessed, and against phantoms, vampires, and
ghosts, the recognised causes of all disease; prayers
and psalms, which had to be repeated before the gods
in order to obtain pardon for sin; and histories of
divinities and kings from the time of the creation
down to the latest date. Among these latter were
several versions of the epic of Grilgames, the story
of Etana, of Adapa, and many others; and we may hope
to possess all that the Assyrians knew of the old Chaldaean
literature in the seventh century B.C., as soon as
the excavators have unearthed from the mound at Kouyunjik
all the tablets, complete or fragmentary, which still
lie hidden there. Even from the shreds of information
which they have already yielded to us, we are able
to piece together so varied a picture that we can
readily imagine Assur-bani-pal to have been a learned
and studious monarch, a patron of literature and antiquarian
knowledge. Very possibly he either read himself,
or had read to him, many of the authors whose works
found a place in his library: the kings of Nineveh,
like the Pharaohs, desired now and then to be amused
by tales of the marvellous, and they were doubtless
keenly alive to the delightful rhythm and beautiful
language employed by the poets of the past in singing
the praises of their divine or heroic ancestors.
But the mere fact that his palace contained the most
important literary collection which the ancient East
has so far bequeathed to us, in no way proves that
Assur-bani-pal displayed a more pronounced taste for
literature than his predecessors; it indicates merely
the zeal and activity of his librarians, their intelligence,