Which modern day country originally housed the oldest known library of the ancient Western world?

The king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 668 BC to his death in 631 BC was Ashurbanipal. There are various spellings of his name, too numerous to mention here, but he was the fourth king of the Sargonid dynasty. At the time, the Assyrian Empire was the largest that the world had ever seen and its capital Nineveh, was probably the largest populated city on the planet.

His library is the one of the world’s oldest known libraries founded sometime in the 7th century BC for the “royal contemplation” of the Assyrian ruler. It was located in Nineveh, in modern day Iraq.

Located within the library were some 30,000 cuneiform talblets organized according to subject matter. Most of its titles were archival documents, religious incantations and scholarly texts, but is also housed several works of literature including the 4,000-year-old tale called the “Epic of Gilgamesh.”

The ruler Ashurbanipal acquired much of his collections in the library by looting other kingdoms including Babylonia and other territoires that he conquered during his reign.

Archaeologists accidentally stumbled upon its ruins in the mid-19th century, and the majority of its contents are now housed in the British Museum in London, England.

While Ashurbanipal acquired many of his tablets through plunder, he was particularly worried about theft. An inscription in one of the texts warns that if one steals its tablets, the gods will “cast him down” and “erase his name, his seed, in the land.”