Pre-historic times

Abstract:

Why do we sometimes call ancient collections of information archives and sometimes libraries? This is the question raised in this chapter. Due to misunderstanding of the concepts and for practical reasons, people and scholars have through the ages preferred libraries. We still suffer today from this misunderstanding. Based on our knowledge of the clay tablets of the ancient city-state of Ebla and the numerous witnesses of the probably more than 700 000 scrolls of Alexandria, this chapter argues that in reality, all information from before 1000-500 BC is in fact archive material. When oral traditions were written down on papyrus and parchment, which happened in the first millennium BC, libraries were established for the first time in Assyria and Egypt.

Key words

archive history

library history

Ebla

Alexandria

Ebla - archive or library?

Why are Ebla's clay tablets sometimes called an archive and sometimes a library in the literature? I will try to answer this question.

The existence of Ebla had been known for decades, but no one really knew where it was situated and its place in history. Some of the old city-states of northern Syria were poorly excavated and little information about Ebla poured out from the scarce sources. Earlier findings did not say very much about the structure of this part of the so-called Fertile Crescent compared with our knowledge of Egypt.

It was therefore really front-page news when the first 40 tablets of Ebla were discovered in 1974 by Italian archaeologists. The next year another 1000 were found and some months later, more than 15 000 tablets were found written in an old Semitic language. Altogether almost 20 000 tablets or fragments were recovered from Ebla. This was the most comprehensive mass of information of the political and socioeconomic situation in a society during the third millennium BC, with no comparison. Ebla has been described as the discovery of the century and thanks to its archives, the history of not just Syria but of the whole region can be written. When the Italian archaeologist Giovanni Pettinato had deciphered and translated the text (which took him a year), it was obvious that the great city-state of Ebla had been found and that the tablets were about 4500 years old. The palace of Ebla was destroyed in about 2250 BC, which meant the end of this advanced culture.

What did the information found look like? How was it stored and organised? These are important questions with respect to my initial question. The term tablets:

refers to a clay form on which a scribe incised cuneiform signs. Most of the Ebla documents are written on big slabs of clay almost a foot square. There are texts that, when transliterated, fill almost more than fifty pages of thirty lines each.

(Pettinato, 1991)

Four categories of the information can be perceived, according to Pettinato: administration, agricultural business, trade and others (education science, etc.). Most of the text contains information about:

1. the administration of Ebla;

2. the organisation of the state;

3. diplomatic contacts with other city-states;

4. agricultural business; and

5. trade, which was extremely important.

There are also word-books and documents about education and science, but very few literary texts.

We know little about the organisation of the archive and the tablets, since the wooden shelves that they were stored upon had been destroyed during the centuries. But there is evidence that at least some systematic criteria existed and that the content was important for the shelving, and that the tablets were marked in such a way that they could easily be found. This is of course of no surprise, considering the number of items (almost 20 000). We also know the name and background of one person working as chief archivist: Azi.

Figure 2.1 Preserved clay tablet from the old Sumerian city-states. These were often small and from the size one can guess at the content: administrative letters and regulations
Photographer: Marie-Lan Nguyen (2007). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AClay_cone_Lagash_Umma_Louvre_AO12779.jpg).

He started as a public servant and signed many documents in the archive. He later became head of the academic school in Ebla, which attracted students from other city-states in Syria, and after 20 years he was acting as chief archivist of the Eblaite government - a career not very far from that of a national archivist today. We could with some pride call him the father of the archive profession.

Something also has to be said about what we can learn from the information we got. Ebla's written documents are not just a page of political history, but above all an account of the development of institutions and a viable economy. We know now much better the political geography of the region; we have a good opinion of the internal structure of the state of Ebla itself. We understand how economic transactions took place and the regulations behind them. Ebla was known by its contemporary city-states for its extraordinary political, institutional and economic activities at the time of the royal archives, but its role did not end with the destruction of the palace. Its impact for centuries on Near Eastern culture was immense. With its conception of royalty, social customs and economic initiatives, Ebla left a valuable message even for us today (Pettinato, 1991; Matthiae, 1981,1984; Järv, 2008).

So back to my initial question: could the tablets of Ebla be described as parts of an archive or a library? I will not try to give an immediate answer. I will go through the centuries and make another stop at the much better-known - the world-famous - library of Alexandria before answering this question.

Alexandria - library or archive?

The modern literature about the ancient library of Alexandria is extensive. Roy McLeod lists 189 works about this institution in his anthology (The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World, 2000), and still misses a lot of interesting contributions made by non-English-speaking scholars. Compared with the number of works about Ebla, it is surprising considering that we have 20 000 pieces of information left over from Ebla but really none from Alexandria, as everything relating to the latter was destroyed or spread out around the Mediterranean. We rely solely on second-hand or third-hand sources about Alexandria, but these are numerous. I will not specify them here, but for further reading I recommend Järv (1997,2008), McLeod (2000), Mustafa el-Abbadi (1991), Parpola (1983) and Posner (1972).

The written language was known by very, very few before the growth of the Greek culture, which happened most prominently in Athens in the first millennium BC. Famous and often cited is Socrates' criticism of this development in his 'dialogue', Gorgias. The written word has a lot of disadvantages compared with the spoken, he argues. The ability to memorise will disappear, you will miss the direct contact with your counterpart in a discussion, 'it pretends to be alive, but is silent' and, lastly, the text can be misunderstood and spread by people who do not understand anything of the content. Nevertheless it was in Greece that we saw the birth of the written language. In just a couple of decades, authors like Plato, Euripides and Sophocles saw the light of the day and in a way they stand as a prerequisite for the later establishment of Alexandria's library.

But Alexandria had its precursors. Most famous and well described is the library of Ashurbanipal (668-c.627 BC) in his palace in Nineveh. Ashurbanipal collected tablets - these still functioned as bearers of information - the way certain despots even today, in times of war, collect art. There exists letters from Ashurbanipal to his governors where he explicitly orders 'the confiscation of all kinds of literary works both from temple and private libraries for inclusion in the Ninevite library'. The amount of tablets in Nineveh is uncertain but it is estimated to be approximately 5000 unique works together with a vast number of copies. A library catalogue has been found that defines 31 different genres. Most of them deal with religious matters, trying to predict the future of the nation and the king. We also know the name of some 'librarians' or 'chief scholar-experts' whose main task was to construe or give voice to the text (Parpola, 1983). Records from the administration were stored in other parts of the palace, which is interesting to note: the records and literary texts were separated. So some basic library and archive conditions existed, as we can see already in Ebla and in Nineveh.

Our knowledge about the library of Alexandria relies very much on the Greek historian and geographer Strabo, who was born c.64 BC and died in AD 21 (or later). He travelled widely throughout the then known...