The most extensive campaigns of Ashurbanipal were those directed towards Elam, an ancient enemy of Assyria, and against Shamash-shum-ukin, who gradually began to resent the overbearing control that his younger brother held over him.

A distorted legend of Ashurbanipal was remembered in Greco-Roman literary tradition under the name Sardanapalus, purportedly the effeminate and decadent last king of Assyria whose vices led to the fall of his empire.

[19] Letters between the two heirs from this time show that Ashurbanipal managed the empire's intelligence network, gathering strategic information from abroad and compiling reports for his father.

[31] Some conspirators who had remained at Memphis, including the local vassal ruler Necho I, were taken back to Assyria, and after swearing new oaths of loyalty were unexpectedly allowed to return and resume their posts in Egypt.

Three of Urtak's sons, chief rival claimants to the Elamite throne, escaped to Assyria and were harbored by Ashurbanipal, despite Teumman demanding them to be returned to Elam.

In Dananu's stead, Ashurbanipal appointed a noble called Rimutu as the new Gambulian chieftain after he had agreed to pay a considerable sum in tribute to the Assyrian king.

The extent to which the Assyrian army was involved in the Lydian campaign is unknown, but it appears that Gyges was disappointed with the help since he just twelve years later broke his alliance with Ashurbanipal and allied with the increasingly independent Egypt instead.

Ashurbanipal identified three groups who aided his brother: first and foremost there were the Chaldeans, Arameans and the other peoples of Babylonia, then there were the Elamites, and lastly the kings of Gutium, Amurru and Meluhha.

Shamash-shum-ukin's ambassadors to the Elamites had offered gifts (called "bribes" by Ashurbanipal) and their king, Ummanigash, sent an army under the command of Undashe, the son of Teumman, to aid in the conflict.

The war quickly turned chaotic; several minor players repeatedly changed sides and both Ashurbanipal and Shamash-shum-ukin found it difficult to keep track of their allies.

According to his own inscriptions, Ashurbanipal initiated a bloodbath: "their carved up bodies I fed to dogs, to pigs, to wolves, to eagles, to birds of the heavens, to fishes of the deep".

Tammaritu II's rule was brief and despite success in some battles against the Assyrians, alongside the rogue governor Nabu-bel-shumati (already notorious for his role in the war with Shamash-shum-ukin), he was deposed in another revolt in 649.

[66] The detail and length of Ashurbanipal's inscriptions concerning the destructions suggest that the events were meant to shock the world, signalling the defeat and eradication of the Elamites as a distinct cultural entity.

[68] Elam was ultimately unable to ever fully recover from Ashurbanipal's efforts in 646 and was left open to attack from tribes and kings in the surrounding lands, eventually disappearing altogether from the historical record.

These later accounts also explicitly connect Yauta's rebellion to the revolt of Shamash-shum-ukin, placing it at the same time and suggesting that the western raids by the Arabs were prompted by the instability caused by the Assyrian civil war.

[73] Ashurbanipal's account of this conflict largely concerns the movements of his army through Syria in search of Uiate (conflated with Yauta but possibly a different person) and his Arabian soldiers.

After becoming king in 664 as a loyal Assyrian vassal, Psamtik slowly extended his control across all of Egypt, unifying the country in 656 and initiating a period of renaissance and prosperity, eventually becoming fully independent of Ashurbanipal.

[82][79] If Ashurbanipal's reign had ended in 627 the inscriptions of his successors Ashur-etil-ilani and Sinsharishkun in Babylon (covering several years) would have been impossible, given that the city was seized by Nabopolassar in 626 and never again fell into Assyrian hands.

[102] Though Ashurbanipal, contrary to the image presented in some of his reliefs and sharply contrasting with his predecessors, probably only rarely (if at all) participated in the military campaigns during his reign,[26][63] he clearly stands out among the Assyrian kings for his exceptional brutality.

[106] He is one of only four Neo-Assyrian kings (alongside Esarhaddon, Tiglath-Pileser III and Ashurnasirpal II) who in their inscriptions claimed to have killed civilians and the one with the most varied acts against them (including live flaying, dismemberment and impalement).

Typically portraying himself as carrying both weapons and a stylus, Ashurbanipal's inscriptions make him out to be unlike the kings before him, exceptionally well-versed in literature, writing, mathematics and scholarship.

Inscriptions and annals from Ashurbanipal's time however offer no evidence that foreigners were seen as racially or ethnically different in terms of biology or physiognomy, which means that this might only have been an artistic choice.

According to the Assyriologist Maria de Fátima Rosa, the Sardanapalus of legend was conceived as "more effeminate than a woman, a lascivious and idle man, a governor who loathed all expressions of militarism and war".

In Siculus's account, Sardanapalus's satrap of Media, Arbaces, saw him mingling with women in the palace and quickly revolted, assaulting Nineveh together with the Babylonian priest Belesys.

Since concrete evidence of Assyria and Babylonia was lacking, authors and artists during the Renaissance and Enlightenment based their interpretations of ancient Mesopotamia on classical Greco-Roman writings.

In late 17th-century Italy, the composer Domenico Freschi wrote and performed the opera Sardanapalo, a comedic tragedy wherein Sardanapalus was portrayed as a woman-like and sex-eager king.

When the British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard found evidence of a major fire in the ruins of Nimrud (which he believed to be Nineveh) in 1845, his colleagues suggested that this was proof of the Sardanapalus legend.

Two films based on the Sardanapalus legend have been produced in Italy; Giuseppe de Liguoro's Sardanapalo re dell'Assiria (1910) and Silvio Amadio's Le sette folgori di Assur (1962), both heavily influenced by Byron's play.

In 1958, surrealist painter Leonora Carrington painted Assurbanipal Abluting Harpies, an oil on canvas at the Israel Museum depicting Ashurbanipal pouring a white substance onto the heads of pigeon-like creatures with human faces.

[62] The exhibition was well received, particularly due to its use of inventive technology, such as using lights to illustrate how many of Ashurbanipal's reliefs would have been painted in his lifetime, and its acknowledgement of the colonialist history of the collection itself.