Download A History of Libraries in the Ancient World

Christine Edison
LIS 701.03
November 13, 2008
The First Librarians
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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
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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
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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.
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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.