Chapter Sixteen

The Return of Assyria
 

Ashurbanipal’s Attack

    Do you remember reading about Shamshi-Adad, the Assyrian king who wanted to rule the whole world?  He led his armies out to conquer the cities all around him, and he built an empire – the Assyrian empire.  But when they fought the Babylonians, the Assyrians lost.  They became part of Babylon’s empire, and had to obey the king of Babylon.  But all the time they were thinking, “One day we will be free, and we will try to conquer the world again!”
    Finally, that day came!  The Assyrians rebelled against their masters, the Babylonians.  They dug canals through the city of Babylon and flooded it with water, washing the city away.  And then they started out to rebuild their empire.  “We are like an evil rain that washes its enemies away!” they boasted.  “We are like a net that tangles the feet of those who fight against us!”
    The Assyrians raged up and down the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, taking over every city in their path.  They stampeded over to Canaan and scattered the Israelites like dust; the Israelites were never allowed to return back to their own land again.  They marched up into Asia Minor and forced the people there to obey them.  And one of the greatest Assyrian kings of all, Ashurbanipal, led his soldiers all the way down into Egypt – and took it over!  Even the mighty pharaohs of Egypt had to obey Assyria.·
    Ashurbanipal terrified his enemies.   For fun, he went on lion-hunts, chasing the lions down on horseback and shooting arrows at them.  And when he led his soldiers into battle, he fought like an angry lion himself.  With Ashurbanipal leading them, the Assyrians were almost impossible to beat!
    Why were they so hard to conquer?  The Assyrian soldiers fought in pairs.  One man would hold a shield made out of baskets, tied together with leather.  The other would shoot arrows from behind the shield.  These basket shields were very light – but they kept arrows and spear-points out.   The Assyrians would put their basket shields side by side and march towards their enemies like a moving wall with arrows spitting out from behind it.
    Soon, the only way to escape the invading Assyrians was to hide inside a city with strong brick or stone walls.  But Ashurbanipal, the king who was as strong as a lion, knew how to get over city walls.  First, he ordered his soldiers to build a ramp out of dirt.  They hauled buckets of earth up to a city’s wall, holding their basket-shields over their heads to protect themselves.  They dumped the earth into a heap against the wall and went back for more.      Slowly, the heap grew larger and larger – until it reached all the way up to the top of the wall.
    Then Ashurbanipal commanded his men to build a siege tower – a wooden tower on wheels!  The soldiers pushed the tower up the ramp, towards the city walls!  On top of the tower, Assyrian archers fired arrows into the city.  A battering ram jutted out of the tower’s front.  The soldiers pushed it right into the wall, breaking up the brick and stone.  Soon, a section of the wall tottered and fell.  The Assyrian army poured through the gap, into the city.  Another city had fallen to Ashurbanipal and his army!
    Ashurbanipal wasn’t very kind to the cities he conquered.  He burned houses, smashed walls, and killed anyone who tried to disobey him.  He scattered salt in their fields, poisoning the land so that no crops would grow.  He took captured people off to be slaves and never let them go home again.  Most cities were too frightened to resist Ashurbanipal!  They agreed to become part of the Assyrian empire and to pay part of their money to the Assyrian king.
    Ashurbanipal became very rich.  He ruled the biggest empire that the world had ever seen.  But all across Assyria, people hated him.  The cities conquered by Ashurbanipal obeyed him because they were afraid, but all the time they hoped that Assyria would soon collapse.  “When we finally hear the news of your destruction,” one conquered man wrote, “we will clap our hands with joy!  And no one will cry over you.”
 

The Library of Nineveh

     Ashurbanipal, the king of all Assyria, stood on his palace walls looking out over the city of Nineveh.  He had spent years making Nineveh beautiful.  It was his favorite city, and he was the strongest king in the world!  He had built himself a magnificent palace, full of high, cool rooms hung with silk and painted with rich colors: royal blue, scarlet, yellow as bright as the sun.  The fifteen great gates of Nineveh’s walls had been decorated with sculptures of bulls and lions and edged with gold.  Carved pictures of Ashurbanipal’s conquests lined the walls of Nineveh’s greatest buildings.  Canals brought water into the city, so that all Nineveh’s people could drink; and throughout Nineveh Ashurbanipal had planted gardens of strange and beautiful plants, so that his subjects could wander through green grass and admire the trees and flowers from far away.
     “But it isn’t enough!” Ashurbanipal thought.  “I have made this city beautiful, but will it last after I am dead?  A hundred years from now, how will anyone know of my greatness?”
     “Excuse me, sir.”  A voice interrupted him.  He turned to see one of his chief scribes, holding a clay tablet.  The scribe held the tablet out.  Ashurbanipal saw that it was covered with writing.
     “Have you brought me a new book to read?” he asked.  Ashurbanipal’s scribes, the men who were in charge of writing down all the events of his reign, knew that he loved to read.  They were always on the lookout for new books for him!  And in those days, books weren’t written on paper.  They were carved into clay.
     “We’ve found you a wonderful book!” the chief scribe said.  “It’s a tale from the court of Hammurabi, the great king who ruled Babylon so long ago.  No one has ever read it before!  One of your men found it in the ruins of Babylon’s old walls, and kept it safe until we could bring it here to you.”
     Ashurbanipal glanced down at the tablet.  This was indeed a find – a story from the days of a famous king of old!  Now he could look forward to a good long evening of reading.
     That night, as Ashurbanipal sat in his rooms reading his new tablet by lamplight, he had an idea.
     “How many of these tablets are left in the ruins of old cities?” he said to himself.  “If they are not rescued, they will crumble away into dust.  Then we’ll never know these stories from old times!  What if I were to collect them all together, and keep them here in my palace?  That would be a great project indeed!  And then I would become known as the king who collected books – and people could read my books hundreds of years from now.”
     Ashurbanipal set his new idea into action at once!  He sent his scribes out into all parts of the vast kingdom of Assyria, ordering them to collect all the tablets they could find and bring them back to Nineveh.   He commanded other scribes to go out and ask the people of Assyria to repeat the stories they had heard from their grandfathers and grandmothers.  These stories had been told to children for centuries – but no one had every written them down.  Ashurbanipal’s scribes wrote them on clay tablets, so that they could be kept forever.  He ordered the priests of Assyria to write down the words of their prayers.  The court astrologers wrote down the movements of the sun, moon and stars.   The court doctors wrote down everything that they knew about illness and medicines.  The court historians recorded all of the details of Ashurbanipal’s reign, and everything that they knew about the kings who had come before him.
    All of those clay tablets were thick and heavy!  So Ashurbanipal built more and more rooms to keep them in.  Soon he had collected thousands and thousands of clay tablets full of stories, prayers, instructions, history, science, medicine, and law.  He had created the first library in the world!
    And Ashurbanipal’s wish came true.  Although many of the tablets were destroyed in Assyria’s wars with other countries, some of them still survive today, thousands of years later.  They can still be read.  And because we have Ashurbanipal’s clay tablets, we remember him as the king who collected books – the first librarian ever.

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