Ashurbanipals

Ashurbanipals is a rarely used plural form of the name of the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. In most scholarship, the singular Ashurbanipal is used to designate the ruler who governed the empire in the late 7th century BCE. The name is of Akkadian origin and has several transliterations, including Aššurbanipal and Ušur-ba-ni-pal, reflecting different cuneiform spellings and pronunciations.

Ashurbanipal reigned roughly from 668/669 BCE to about 627 BCE, succeeding his father Esarhaddon. He is often regarded as the last major king of Assyria, overseeing a period of relative military and administrative strength. His leadership focused on maintaining centralized authority, overseeing frontier campaigns, and managing imperial institutions that sustained a multi-ethnic empire stretched from the Levant to western Iran. The king conducted campaigns against rival states and internal uprisings, preserving the empire’s boundaries during a time of regional turbulence.

One of Ashurbanipal’s enduring legacies is the Library of Ashurbanipal, a substantial collection of cuneiform tablets assembled in Nineveh. The library gathered religious, literary, administrative, and historical texts, and it later became a crucial source for modern understanding of Mesopotamian literature, including a complete or near-complete version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The tablets were excavated in the 19th century and have shaped scholarship on ancient Mesopotamia.

The empire weakened after Ashurbanipal’s death, with Nineveh falling in 612 BCE and Assyria’s power dissolving by around 609 BCE. The term Ashurbanipals thus primarily serves as a pluralized reference to the king’s name, with most sources focusing on the well-documented figure of Ashurbanipal and his cultural and military era.