Library of Ashurbanipal: tablet
- Gallery: Room 55
- Culture: Neo-Assyrian
- Object type: tablet
- Materials: clay
- Museum number: K.65
- Museum: The British Museum
- Collection record: British Museum website
- Image © The Trustees of the British Museum, shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.
Listen to the free audio guide
About this object
Before you is a clay tablet from the Library of Ashurbanipal. This artifact is part of the Neo-Assyrian tradition, created during a time when scribes meticulously recorded knowledge on baked clay.
This upper fragment has three pieces missing from the back and contains part of an incantation. The surface is covered in cuneiform script, arranged across four columns with varying numbers of lines. A few lines on the last two lines of Column IV hint at an "official note," a signature of authority.
The tablet is written in cuneiform—an ancient script made by pressing a stylus into soft clay, which was then fired to preserve the text. It comes from Kouyunjik, a site that once housed the great Assyrian library of King Ashurbanipal.
This small piece connects visitors to an archive that once held tens of thousands of tablets—knowledge preserved for eternity in clay.
See it in person
Library of Ashurbanipal: tablet is on display in Room 55 at the British Museum on Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, London — free to enter. Choose British Museum on audioguide.london and take a photo of it to hear this free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
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