"I, Ashur-bani-pal, within it (i.e., the palace) understood the wisdom
of Nebo, all the art of writing of every craftsman, of every kind,
I made myself master of them all (i.e., of the various kinds of
writing)." [3]

These words suggest that Ashur-bani-pal could not only read cuneiform
texts, but could write like a skilled scribe, and that he also
understood all the details connected with the craft of making and
baking tablets. Having determined to form a Library in his palace he
set to work in a systematic manner to collect literary works. He sent
scribes to ancient seats of learning, e.g., Ashur, Babylon, Cuthah,
Nippur, Akkad, Erech, to make copies of the ancient works that were
preserved there, and when the copies came to Nineveh he either made
transcripts of them himself, or caused his scribes to do so for
the Palace Library. In any case he collated the texts himself and
revised them before placing them in his Library. The appearance of
the tablets from his Library suggests that he established a factory
in which the clay was cleaned and kneaded and made into homogeneous,
well-shaped tablets, and a kiln in which they were baked, after they
had been inscribed. The uniformity of the script upon them is very
remarkable, and texts with mistakes in them are rarely found. How
the tablets were arranged in the Library is not known, but certainly
groups were catalogued, and some tablets were labelled. [4] Groups
of tablets were arranged in numbered series, with "catch lines," the
first tablet of the series giving the first line of the second tablet,
the second tablet giving the first line of the third tablet, and so on.

Ashur-bani-pal was greatly interested in the literature of the
Sumerians, i.e., the non-Semitic people who occupied Lower Babylonia
about B.C. 3500 and later. He and his scribes made bilingual lists