Ashurbanipal

Biography

The last great king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Ashurbanipal was unusually literate and boasted of reading cuneiform. His library at Nineveh, rediscovered in the 1850s, preserved tens of thousands of tablets including the Epic of Gilgamesh. He sacked Thebes in Egypt, crushed a revolt by his brother in Babylon, and destroyed Susa in Elam. The empire collapsed within two decades of his death.