Ashurbanipal was king of Assyria from 668-626 BC. A warrior, scholar and great patron of the arts, he assembled a systematically organized library in his palace at Nineveh. Over 20,000 tablets from this library are now in the British Museum in London, including the Epic of Gilgamesh. Other tablets contain information on events, people, plants, animals and natural phenomena. Bas reliefs in the Museum show Ashurbanipal hunting lions from a chariot and dining in a garden with his queen Ashur-sharrat. The Assyrian empire then extented from Persia to lower Egypt and he led an expidition to deal with a revolution in the Nile delta.
