Ashurbanipal and the Library of Nineveh

Ashurbanipal was one of the few kings who could read and write, and he was proud of it. He sent orders to the temples to seek out tablets and dispatch them to Nineveh, and his scribes copied what was found: epics and myths, dictionaries, omens, medical recipes, mathematics, king lists. More than twenty thousand tablets and fragments accumulated. When Nineveh was burned, the fire baked the clay and so preserved it. Nineteenth-century excavations recovered from this palace the Epic of Gilgamesh and most of what we know of Babylonian and Sumerian letters at all.