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For two thousand five hundred years no one saw these treasures or knew that they existed. One hundred generations of men came and went without once pronouncing the name of kings Shalmaneser or Asumazirpal or Asurbanipal.
It would be nothing strange, but rather in keeping with their previous mutations of fortune, if the names of Asurnazirpal and Asurbanipal should be familiar as household words to future generations that have forgotten the existence of an Alexander, a Caesar, and a Napoleon.
A little further evidence can be drawn from other Mesopotamian sites. The city of Asshur had a long, broad avenue like the sacred road of Babylon, but the one insula of its private houses which has yet been excavated, planned and published, shows no sign of rectangular planning. Mitt, deutsch. Orient-Gesell. 28, Sept. 1905; 31, May 1906. F. Delitzsch, Asurbanipal und die assyr.
The notion was to rehabilitate the reputation of Asurbanipal, the second-last King of Assyria, whom the Greeks called "Sardanapalus," who reigned in Nineveh six hundred years before Christ, over Ethiopia, Babylon and Egypt, and whom Lord Byron, accepting the Greek story, represented as the most effeminate and debauched monarch the world had ever known.
There was at least one king of Assyria namely, Asurbanipal, whose palace boasted a library of some ten thousand volumes a library, if you please, in which the books were numbered and shelved systematically, and classified and cared for by an official librarian.
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