amounts of tablets at Kuyunjik, the main mound at Nineveh, were made during excava-
tions by A.H. Layard, H.C. Rawlinson and H. Rassam. The excavations were undertaken
from the middle to the end of the 19th century, and the recovered artefacts included many
literary texts. These probably came from libraries which were situated in the Southwest
Palace, North Palace, and in the Ištar and Nabû temples.^107 The texts include what is re-
ferred to as Ashurbanipal’s royal library, although it seems evident that more than one
location was used to house texts at Nineveh.^108 Many of the ca. 5000 literary texts un-
earthed bear colophons that contain Ashurbanipal’s name. Texts with colophons contain-
ing the names of other kings are likewise thought to have been collected by Ashurbani-
pal, though their original locations may have been in libraries in other cities.^109
A collection that ostensibly comes from the accumulated library of an Assyrian monarch
presents a special opportunity for our analysis. The existence of multiple copies of liter-
ary texts contained within one area may allow us to identify copying practices that are
(^) of the references in many of his inscriptions, colophons, and correspondence. See the primary references in
J.C. Fincke, "Babylonian Texts of Nineveh," 120-122. 107
A.R. George, Gilgamesh, 389, has provisionally suggested that it is possible that the tablets written dur-
ing Ashurbanipal’s reign were stored in the North Palace, while those from an earlier period were kept in
the Southwest Palace. 108
See J. Reade, "Archaeology and the Kuyunjik Archives," Cuneiform Archives and Libraries: Papers
Read at the 30e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (ed. K.R. Veenhof; Istanbul: Nederlands His-
torich-Archaeologich Instituut te Istanbul, 1986) 217-22. Perhaps one is more correct to talk of Ashurbani-
pal’s libraries in the plural, which is the language used by S. Parpola, "Assyrian Library Records," JNES
42, 1 (1983). See also J. Reade, "Archaeology and the Kuyunjik Archives," 218 on the problems of separat-
ing which texts were in the textual collections from the North Palace and the Southwest Palace in antiquity. 109
See O. Pedersén, Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East 1500-300 B.C. (Maryland: CDL
Press, 1998) 158-65. Pedersén determines that the approximate number of 30,000 tablets or fragments of
tablets can be reduced by about one third if joins are taken into account. S. Parpola, "Assyrian Library Re-
cords," 6-8 notes that of the 30,000 tablets or fragments around 6,000 are non-literary texts.