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This is the website for the project Reading the Library of Ashurbanipal: A Multi-sectional Analysis of Assyriology's Foundational Corpus, generously funded through an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) Bilateral funding grant (AH/T012773/1). The project is based at the British Museum and Ludwig Maximilian University Munich

What was the famous Library of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria (668-c. 630 BC)? The contents of this foundational corpus of Assyriology have been the subject of intense study for almost two centuries. But still we know very little about the collection as a whole. How big was it? What was in it? Where did it come from? How and why was it put together?

From 2020 to 2023 a collaborative project between the British Museum and Ludwig Maximilian University Munich will explore the Library and its origins. We are grateful to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Arts and Humanities Council for funding this research. The project is directed by Enrique Jiménez and Jon Taylor.

Some of our preliminary results will soon be available via:

• J. Taylor, E. Jiménez, B. Schnitzlein, S. Cohen, "The colophons of Ashurbanipal, King of the World", in S. Schmidtke and G.A. Kiraz (eds), Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time (forthcoming)
• B. Schnitzlein and S. Cohen, "News from Ashurbanipal's Library", in: S. de Martino, E. Devecchi, C. Lippolis, V. Messina and M. Viano (eds.), Proceedings of the 67th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (forthcoming)

Ashurbanipal Library display at the British Museum's Ashurbanipal exhibition, 2018/2019. Copyright Trustees of the British Museum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 [https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permissions]