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He ruled from 668-627 BCE, & oversaw the golden age of an empire spanning the known world.
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From a young age, he was trained in priestly arts such as oil divination, liver reading, mathematics, & reading and writing.
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Kings usually stuck to more kingly activities like riding a chariot & hunting lions.
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“All the art of writing of every kind, I made myself the master of them all.”
He also boasts about reading ancient texts written "before the flood".
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This led to him gathering together all the tablets he could find, in all the languages of the world.
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The library also included stone prisms, cylinder seals, waxed wooden writing boards & parchment.
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However, a great deal of them also dealt with divinations, omens, incantations & hymns to various gods, as well as medicine, astronomy, & literature.
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One of his letters was found at Nineveh, written to the governor of Borsippa, asking for old texts, & specifying what he wanted: rituals, water control, spells to keep a person safe in battle, & how to purify villages.
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He was also not beyond using war to fill his library’s shelves, & demanded them in tribute along with other treasures.
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The library also held The Epic of Gilgamesh, a masterpiece of ancient Babylonian poetry & the world’s first story
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The epic ends with Gilgamesh losing the secret to a snake & returning empty-handed.
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It even includes mention of a bird being released and returning with an olive branch.
(the snake is quite biblical too!)
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The city of Nineveh was sacked so thoroughly that it was still an abandoned ruin when Xenophon marched past it 200 years later (which he writes about in his Anabasis).
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Their techniques were clumsy by modern standards, & they mixed tablets from different collections together, confusing the record.
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Some legends even suggest that it inspired the creation of the great Library of Alexandria.
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The human hand hasn’t changed so much over the millennia…
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