"[3] The materials were found in the archaeological site of Kouyunjik (ancient Nineveh, capital of Assyria) in northern Mesopotamia.

Three years later, Hormuzd Rassam, Layard's assistant, discovered a similar library in the palace of King Ashurbanipal (668–627 BCE), on the opposite side of the mound.

[7] In collecting texts for his library, he wrote to cities and centers of learning across Mesopotamia, instructing them to send him copies of all work written in the region.

[13] The majority of the tablet corpus (about 6,000) included colloquial compositions in the form of legislation, foreign correspondences and engagements, aristocratic declarations, and financial matters.

[13] The remaining texts contained divinations, omens, incantations and hymns to various gods, while others were concerned with medicine, astronomy, and literature.

The group of the legal documents covers letters, contracts and administrative texts and consists of 1128 Babylonian tablets and fragments.

[15] The texts were principally written in Akkadian in the cuneiform script; however many of the tablets do not have an exact derivation and it is often difficult to ascertain their original homeland.

It is believed that during the burning of the palace, a great fire must have ravaged the library, causing the clay cuneiform tablets to become partially baked.

The original library documents, however, which would have included leather scrolls, wax boards, and possibly papyri, contained perhaps a much broader spectrum of knowledge than that known from the surviving clay-tablet cuneiform texts.

[15] Created in collaboration with the University of Mosul and funded by the Townley group, the British Museum has been compiling a catalogue record of artifacts from Ashurbanipal's library since 2002.

The images have been released on the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative website and British Museum Collections online site.

[23] The goal of the project was to examine the scribal notes added to the end of the tablets (known as "colophons") to understand how and why the collection was produced.