News, Thames & Hudson Ltd Defined Benefit Pension Scheme. Raiding the Arab tribes, he defeated the Nabataean Uate and his allies and isolated the Qadar tribe. As for those men and their vulgar mouths, who uttered vulgarity against Assur, my god, and plotted evil against me, the prince who fears him, – I slit their tongues and brought them low. In the place of Yauta a loyal Arabian warlord called Abiyate was granted kingship of the Qedarites. He met the forces of Necho at Memphis, the Egyptian capital, and though Tantamani was defeated, Necho also died in the battle. Their heads I cut off in front of each other. [60] To get the attested lengths of the reigns of his successors to match, it is generally agreed that Ashurbanipal either died, abdicated or was deposed in 631 BC. At the time of Ashurbanipal's reign, the Neo-Assyrian Empire was the largest empire that the world had ever seen and its capital, Nineveh, was probably the largest city on the planet. Esarhaddon had conquered Egypt in 671 BCE but the Egyptians had revolted soon after and driven many of the Assyrian governors from their posts. [4], Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BC and the Library of Ashurbanipal was buried under the walls of Ashurbanipal's burning palace and lost to history for more than two thousand years. The Assyrian’s ancient enemies of Urartu and Elam were both defeated and, even though Egypt had broken free, it had still been stamped with Assyrian culture. Shamash-shum-ukin is traditionally believed to have committed suicide by setting himself and his family on fire in his palace,[44][6] but contemporary texts only say that he "met a cruel death" and that the gods "consigned him to a fire and destroyed his life". It was unearthed in the 19th century by Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam and the translations of the contents within it by George Smith brought the ancient Mesopotamian texts to the modern world. [9] He is often regarded as the last great king of Assyria[9][13][4] and is recognized, alongside his two predecessors Esarhaddon and Sennacherib, as one of the greatest Assyrian kings. Shamash-shum-ukin was no more pleased than he had been before at being his brother’s puppet, however, and in 652 BCE openly rebelled. Not one escaped; not one sinner slipped through my hands, of those whom the gods had counted for my hands.The chariots, coaches, palanquins, his concubines, the goods of his palace, they brought before me. The governors of some Babylonian cities, such as Nippur, Uruk and Ur, and the rulers in the Sea Land (the marshy lands in southern Sumer, near the shores of the Persian Gulf), all ignored the existence of a king in Babylon and saw Ashurbanipal as their monarch. In 663 BC Thebes, the stronghold of the Kushites in Egypt, was sacked for a third time in less than a decade, and Tantamani abandoned the campaign and escaped back to Kush. Oil on canvas, 1827. Ashurbanipal was a great patron of the arts and now turned his attention to these pursuits. Its capital Nineveh (in modern-day Iraq) was the world’s largest city. Relief depicting the Assyrian capture of Babylon. [4], Ashurbanipal's war against tribes in the Arabian Peninsula has received relatively little attention from modern historians but is the campaign with the longest account in his own writings. [58], The end of Ashurbanipal's reign and the beginning of the reign of his successor, Ashur-etil-ilani, is shrouded in mystery on account of a lack of available sources. The Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal, a set of Assyrian palace reliefs from Ashurbanipal's palace, can be seen at the British Museum in London. Ashurbanipal as High Priestby N/A (CC BY-SA). He elevated Babylon to its former status as a great city and refers to Shamash-shum-ukin as “my favorite brother”. Ashurbanipal, it seems, knew nothing of his brother’s schemes and was only aware that the armies of Elam were mobilizing for an assault on Babylon and, taking the offensive, he marched his army to Elam and attacked. When Ashurbanipal died in 627 BCE the empire broke apart. Crushing enemies was not confined to external threats – he also destroyed his own brother. [9], Most of the traditional Mesopotamian stories and tales known today, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Enûma Eliš (the Babylonian creation myth), Erra, the Myth of Etana and the Epic of Anzu, only survived until the modern era because they were included in Ashurbanipal's library. [4] Egypt had been conquered by Esarhaddon in 671 BC, one of Ashurbanipal's father's greatest accomplishments. Ashurbanipal was probably King Esarhaddon's fourth eldest son, younger than the crown prince Sin-nadin-apli and the other two sons Shamash-shum-ukin and Shamash-metu-uballit.