A literary people like the Babylonians needed libraries, and libraries were accordingly established at a very early period in all the great cities of the country, and plentifully stocked with books in papyrus and clay. In imitation of these Babylonian libraries, libraries were also founded in Assyria by the Assyrian kings. There was a library at Assur, and another at Calah which seems to have been as old as the city itself. But the chief library of Assyria that, in fact, from which most of the Assyrian literature we possess has come, was the great library of Nineveh (Kouyunjik). This owed its magnitude and reputation to Assur-bani-pal, who filled it with copies of the plundered books of Babylonia. A whole army of scribes was employed in it, busily engaged in writing and editing old texts. Assur-bani-pal is never weary of telling us, in the colophon at the end of the last tablet of a series which made up a single work, that 'Nebo and Tasmit had given him broad ears and enlightened his eyes so as to see the engraved characters of the written tablets, whereof none of the kings that had gone before had seen this text, the wisdom of Nebo, all the literature of the library that exists,' so that he had 'written, engraved, and explained it on tablets, and placed it within his palace for the inspection of readers.' A good deal of the literature was of a lexical and grammatical kind, and was intended to assist the Semitic student in interpreting the old Accadian texts. Lists of characters were drawn up with their pronunciation in Accadian and the translation into Assyrian of the words represented by them. Since the Accadian pronunciation of a character was frequently the phonetic value attached to it by the Assyrians, these syllabaries, as they have been termed—in consequence of the fact that the cuneiform characters denoted syllables and not letters—have been of the greatest possible assistance in the decipherment of the inscriptions. Besides the syllabaries, the Semitic scribes compiled tables of Accadian words and grammatical forms with their Assyro-Babylonian equivalents, as well as lists of the names of animals, birds, reptiles, fish, stones, vegetables, medicines, and the like in the two languages. There are even geographical and astronomical lists, besides long lists of Assyrian synonyms and the titles of military and civil officers. Other tablets contain phrases and sentences extracted from some particular Accadian work and explained in Assyrian, while others again are exercises or reading-books intended for boys at school, who were learning the old dead language of Chaldea. In addition to these helps whole texts were provided with Assyrian translations, sometimes interlinear, sometimes placed in a parallel column on the right-hand side; so that it is not wonderful that the Assyrians now and then attempted to write in the extinct Accadian, just as we write nowadays in Latin, though in both cases, it must be confessed, not always with success.