668 - Circa 627 B.C.E.
King Of Assyria

The Royal Library. Digging in mounds of ancient Assyria during the 1840s, the British explorer Austen Henry Layard discovered a library of some thirty thousand fragments of cuneiform tablets, which had been preserved because they were baked in the conflagration that swept the city when it was sacked in 612 B.C.E. When pieced together these fragments constitute a royal library of more than two thousand tablets. The library also originally included three hundred wooden and ivory writing boards covered with a thin layer of wax and inscribed with cuneiform texts. The cuneiform texts are no longer preserved.

Tablet Acquisition. The tablets in the library were acquired during the reign of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria. The monarch, one of the few Mesopotamian rulers who claimed to be literate, ordered his courtiers to search for copies of texts throughout the...