Nineveh was home to the famous library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal.
Ashurbanipal ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 669 to about 631 BCE and established a major collection of clay tablets at his palace in Nineveh. Unlike many ancient rulers, he is known to have been trained as a scholar and scribe. He ordered texts to be copied and gathered from across Mesopotamia.
The library’s tablets cover royal correspondence, omens, medicine, rituals, mathematics, lexical lists, and literature. One of its most celebrated works is a substantial version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, including the story of a great flood.
Nineveh was located on the eastern bank of the Tigris River near modern Mosul in Iraq. The city was destroyed in 612 BCE by a coalition including the Babylonians and Medes, but the buried tablets survived to be excavated in the nineteenth century.