Libraries from Late Period and Graeco-Roman Egypt, c.800 BCE–250 CE

This chapter is a survey of collections of literary texts from Late Period and Graeco-Roman Egypt, c.750 BCE–250 CE, effectively the last millennium of the ancient Egyptian culture. Examples of different forms of collections are described and discussed in detail: temple libraries and private libraries, as well as groups of literary texts found in tombs, in rubbish dumps, in waste paper collections, and re-used in cartonnage. The texts include narratives, wisdom instructions, science (esp. divination and medicine), and cultic texts (esp. ritual guidelines, religious treatises, and hymns). Additional paragraphs concern the use of master copies, different types of storage, the abduction of libraries, and the so-called House of Life.

Assurbanipal’s Library

This illustrated chapter is intended to convey something of the wonder of the great royal library of cuneiform tablets assembled at Nineveh by King Assurbanipal (668–c.627 BC), the last great king of Assyria, of which some 20,000 items are now in the British Museum, London. The king’s intention was to bring together under his control the whole of inherited lore and knowledge recorded in cuneiform documents, for editing and recopying by his chancery calligraphers, to constitute a unique resource both for the running of the state and his own edification. The result exceeded all expectations, in that the modern recovery and decipherment of its contents has conferred immortality on the great scholar king and endowed the Humanities with one of its greatest treasures.

Libraries in Ancient Egypt, c.1600–800 BCE

The chapter surveys the evidence for ancient Egyptian libraries during the period 1600–800 BCE. It looks at both private and institutional libraries, defined as collections of papyri with literary texts, with a notable focus on archaeological context, and the use and materiality of manuscripts. Given the paucity of archaeological remains of temple and palace libraries, many indirect sources play a key role in the analysis, including book labels, administrative titles, and patterns of transmission for literary texts. Private libraries are better attested, and here the main groups are described with a particular focus on their importance for reconstructing the circulation and reception of literature. Finally, the chapter includes a rare case study where an historical individual and his family can be identified as the owners of a private library.

The Tablet Collections of the Hittite State, c.1650–1080 BCE

The tablet collections discovered in the Hittite capital are the largest collections of cuneiform texts in the Hittite language. In this paper the organization of the Hittite tablet collections will be examined on the basis of internal and external factors, i.e. colophons, labels, and catalogues. In particular, catalogues are not exhaustive lists of texts, but inventories of texts that were intended to be preserved for a longer period of time, and which were therefore continuously monitored and copied, and, in the course of time, reworked in various ways. Finally, collections management allows some reflections on genres of texts collected, copying practices, and typology of text collection (libraries or archives).

The Rise of Libraries in Western Asia, c.2600–2300 BCE

The chapter compares the find-spots of lexical and literary texts from three different places: Shuruppag and Tell Abu Salabikh in Mesopotamia and Ebla situated in modern-day Syria. In Shuruppag and Ebla lexical and literary texts have been found in official buildings of the ruling elite, also combination with a massive amount of administrative texts. It can be seen that lexical and literary texts were produced, kept, and transmitted by scribes in the context of the administration of the different cities. They played therefore not only an important role in transmission and mastery of the cuneiform writing system, the main administrative tool. Their importance for the elites resulted in the development of a network of knowledge that spread Mesopotamian myths and lore over the Near East in the third millennium BCE.

Libraries before Alexandria

Ancient Egypt and Western Asia had a library tradition many centuries before the advent of the Greek script and the building of the Library of Alexandria. The chapter provides an overview of this tradition from the third millennium BCE onwards. It presents a rich archaeological record of many thousands of texts; the scripts, languages, and different types of manuscripts and writing equipment; the scholarship, acquisition, and curation that went into their creation; the various types of collections and assemblages of texts; literacy, reading, and access; and the architecture, storage, and maintenance of these early collections.

Libraries in Ancient Egypt, c.2600–1600 BCE

This chapter surveys the textual and archaeological evidence for libraries in ancient Egypt c.2600–1600 BCE, discussing surviving administrative ‘archives’ as models for how literary texts could have been circulated and stored. The implications of the material form of surviving manuscripts for issues of manufacture and storage are discussed. Possible evidence for extensively centralized systems of circulation and storage is reviewed, together with specific case studies of private archives form the town of el-Lahun and examples of Middle Kingdom tomb-libraries—collections of manuscripts deposited in private individual’s burial chambers as displays of culture and prestige.

Scholarly Tablet Collections in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia, c.700–200 BCE

The half-millennium 700–200 BCE was the heyday of the cuneiform ‘library’: Pedersén counts nearly forty of them from that period in his foundational book Libraries and Archives in the Ancient Near East (1998). Yet there have been surprisingly few studies of cuneiform libraries per se. This chapter first summarizes, updates, and evaluates Pedersén’s survey, then uses a selection of this impressive array of evidence to explore some questions, raised in the authors’ respective recent work, about the functions of ‘libraries’ in first-millennium Assyria and Babylonia. The chapter focuses on three case studies which examine the relationships between Mesopotamian ‘libraries’ and two other notoriously complex Mesopotamian institutions: the temple and the scribal school. In particular, it is argued that ‘libraries’ as collections of artefacts were much more mobile within the scholarly community than many have acknowledged. Single archaeological find-spots will rarely reveal an intact collection, even assuming perfect conditions of preservation.

Archives and Libraries in the Old Babylonian Period, c.1900–1600 BCE

In this chapter two substantial textual assemblages of Sumerian literary compositions from Ur and Nippur (two major urban centres in southern Mesopotamia in the late third and early second millennium) are described and compared to address the question of the extent to which assemblages such as these can be considered textual archives or libraries. Particular emphasis is given to the types of compositions that are found in the two assemblages, as well as to how the archaeological contexts in which the assemblages were discovered and the material aspects of the texts themselves (the format and layout of the clay tablets on which the compositions were copied) might shed light on how and why the texts in these assemblages were copied (and possibly archived) as a group.

Libraries in Syria and the Levant in the Late Bronze Age, c.1450–1100 BCE

Syria and the southern Levant has a long and rich epigraphic tradition that was rediscovered in the last century through archaeological excavation. Written remains stretching from the Bronze Age (Ebla, Mari, Alalakh, Ugarit, and Emar) down into the Roman period (Qumran) provide ample evidence for the collecting of literary texts, broadly conceived, and the formation of ancient libraries. This survey gives an overview of the archaeological distribution of what modern scholarship has termed ‘libraries’ and considers the chronological, geographic, and textual depth of the data from the region as whole. It then considers the principal case studies from ancient Syria and the Levant—cuneiform libraries from the north Syrian sites of Ugarit and Emar dating to the last centuries of the second millennium BCE.