increased the national collection, most of his works being of a religious character.
Assurbanipal, son of Esarhaddon, the Sardanapalus of the Greeks, B.C. 673, was the greatest of the Assyrian sovereigns, and he is far more memorable on account of his magnificent patronage of learning than on account of the greatness of his empire or the extent of his wars.
Assurbanipal added more to the Assyrian royal library than aU the kings who had gone before him, and it is to tablets written in his reign that we owe almost all our knowledge of the Babylonian myths and early history, beside many other important matters.
The agents of Assurbanipal sought everywhere for inscribed tablets, brought them to Nineveh, and copied them there; thus the literary treasures of Babylon, Borsippa, Cutha, Akkad, Ur, Erech, Larsa, Nipur and various other cities were transferred to the Assyrian capital to enrich the great collection there.
The fragments brought over to Europe give us a good idea of this librarv and show the range of the subjects embraced by this collection of inscriptions. Among the different classes of texts, the Genesis stories and similar legends occupied a prominent place; these, as they will be further described in the present volume, need only be mentioned here. Accompanying them we have a series of mythological tablets of various sorts, varying from legends of the
