The colophons of Ashurbanipal, King of the World

Colophons mark the constituents of what may have been the first attempt to assemble all significant written scholarly knowledge in one place. The 7th century BC cuneiform collection of Ashurbanipal of Assyria lets us understand intellectual life in the ancient Middle East. More than twenty different, apparently standardised, colophon texts have long been identified. It was also known that many of Ashurbanipal’s tablets bore one. But these texts were incompletely reconstructed, and no-one knew how many there really were, how many tablets bore each, or how a scribe would have selected which to attach to any Library tablet. Now for the first time we can gauge more accurately the size of what survives of Ashurbanipal’s Library, and identify meaningful groups within it. Some colophons were attached to particular types of text, while others were applied more widely. These reflect different streams of material flowing into the collection. They reveal depth and complexity in the collecting process.