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Christine Edison LIS 701.03 November 13, 2008 The First Librarians Edison/ The First Librarians 1 Six thousand years ago in what is now southern Iraq, civilization flourished, thanks in part to the creation of a writing system to record commercial agreements. The invention of writing meant, among other things, the creation of a way to keep an historical record, the development of literature and the birth of schools to teach reading and writing. Mesopotamian cultures valued literacy and texts, and they created the first libraries to collect and preserve their works. A succession of empires conquered the Sumerians, including the Akkadians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians. Each wave of invaders learned to read and write, and literacy spread through the Middle East and beyond – the Minoan civilization on Crete wrote on clay tablets beginning 1,000 years after the Sumerians did. Sumerian written works were still studied and imitated by their Akkadian conquerors after the language itself had become extinct, and the Akkadians compiled dictionaries to help translate the works (Kramer 7). Mesopotamians established schools to teach the cuneiform writing system, a stylized series of pictures impressed with a reed stylus into small slabs of clay. Students worked for years to memorize the 2,000 characters needed, and they also learned history, mathematics, botany, zoology, astronomy, astrology, law and medicine so that they could write words used in those fields. Much of the schoolwork involved writing lists of related words – local animals and familiar plant life, for example. Schools tended to be located in temple complexes so that students could use tablets stored there to practice copying tests. Scribes could move up in rank from “dub-sar (scribe) to ses-gal (great brother) to um-mi-a (great brother) who was above all laws” (Baéz 23). Individual scribes also taught students in what was the equivalent of a high school education. Even women became scribes in this way. These scribes might be Edison/ The First Librarians 2 businesspeople who needed only to learn enough to read and write transactions, or perhaps to send and receive letters (Sayce 47-8). “Without doubt, the most important man in the ancient society of Mesopotamia was the scribe. … Ancient Mesopotamian civilization was above all a literate civilization” (Bertman 147). Scribes lived in the palace and prayed before and after writing to the goddess of grain, Nidaba, who was believed to have invented writing (Baéz 22). Books were considered to be under the gods’ protection, and copying a work was considered a pious act. Although sources conflict as to the literacy of the general population in Mesopotamia, in Babylonia there is a record of “the son of an ‘irrigator,’ one of the poorest and lowest members of the community, copying a portion of the ‘Epic of Creation,’ and depositing it in the library of Borsippa for the good of his soul” (Sayce 54-55). Records were so important to the Babylonians that even the walls tell tales; each brick used in construction of a temple was stamped with a notice telling of a king’s sponsorship, and large clay cylinders or nails in the palace walls and in its library told of royal exploits. The Babylonian king Hammurabi (1795-1750 BCE) is best known for his collection of laws, but he was also instrumental in preserving Sumerian culture. Hammurabi made his own Semitic language the standard used in his kingdom, and as a result, there was a rush to put down Sumerian stories, poems and other works in writing and translate them before the language vanished entirely (Chiera 110). Why would a civilization go to so much trouble to preserve the works of a previous people? They must have realized the written word could preserve Sumerian culture as well as their own. “… [T]he scribe played a critical role in maintaining his culture’s spiritual longevity. … By making multiple copies of Mesopotamia’s literary masterpieces, the Edison/ The First Librarians 3 ancient scribe – like the monks in the European Middle Ages – preserved a precious literary legacy and made it accessible to later generations” (Bertman 148). The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668-627 BCE) founded “the first systematically collected library in the ancient Near East … some brought to his palace in Nineveh after his successful war against Babylon” (Casson 9). Ashurbanipal prided himself on knowing how to read and write, and he checked the accuracy of his advisers’ predictions against literary works used in magic and ceremonies. His scribes not only copied these works but translated them into Assyrian. “The royal courts at this time must have been centers of culture as notable as those of the patrons of science during the Renaissance” (Chiera 174). Because of the elevation of the scribe to a high position in Mesopotamian society and the space, time and energy devoted to developing library collections and teaching writing, I believe ancient Mesopotamian cultures placed a high value on being able to read and write, as well as on written works. Although we do not have a complete record of these civilizations, their cultures are preserved in part due to the diligence of the recordkeeping of their scribes – the first librarians. Edison/ The First Librarians 4 Bibliography Baéz, Fernando. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq. trans. by Alfred MacAdam. New York: Atlas & Company, 2008. Bertman, Stephen. Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Casson, Lionel. Libraries in the Ancient World. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Chiera, Edward. They Wrote On Clay. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938. Kramer, Samuel Noah. History Begins at Sumer: The Nine Firsts in Man’s Recorded History. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956. Sayce, Rev. A. H. Babylonians and Assyrians: Life and Customs. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906.