Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The first libraries were installed in Mesopotamia, though to begin with they were more like archives than libraries proper. They contained records of the practical, day-to-day activities of the Mesopotamian city-states. This is true whether the library was in Nippur, in the middle of the third millennium BC, or Ebla, where two thousand clay tablets were found in 1980, dating to roughly 2250 BC, or to later libraries. We have to remember that in most cases the libraries served the purposes of the priests and that in Mesopotamian cities, where the temple cult owned huge estates, practical archives – recording transactions, contracts and deliveries – were as much part of the cult as were ritual texts for the sacred services. But the propagandistic needs of the cult and the emerging royal elite – hymns, inscriptions – provoked a more modern form of literacy. Texts such as the epic of Gilgamesh, or the epic of Creation, may therefore have been used in ritual. But these works, which involved some form of mental activity beyond flat records of transactions, appear first in the texts at Nippur in the middle of the third millennium. The next advance occurred at Ebla, Ur and Nippur.⁷⁵ Each of these later libraries boasted a new, more scholarly entity: catalogues of the holdings, in which works of the imagination, and/or religious works, were listed separately. Later still, there was a further innovation: several lines of writing, added at the end of the text on the back surface, identifying what the text contained, more or less as a table of contents does today. This acquired the term colophon, derived from the Greek kolophon, meaning ‘finishing touch’. One, for example, was written thus: ‘Eighth tablet of the Dupaduparsa Festival, words of Silalluhi and Kuwatalla, the temple-priestess. Written by the hand of Lu, son of Nugissar, in the presence of Anuwanza, the overseer.’ The colophons were numbered, and recorded how many tablets the text was comprised of. Some of the catalogues went beyond the detail in the colophons, so that the scribes could tell from perusing just this document what was in the library. The ordering of the list was still pretty haphazard, however, for alphabetisation was not introduced for more than 1,500 years.⁷⁶ As time went by, the number of religious titles began to grow. By the time of Tiglath-Pileser I, one of Assyria’s greatest rulers (1115–1077 BC), the biggest component of the texts dealt with the movements of the heavens, and prediction of the future based on a variety of omens. There were some hymns and a catalogue of musical compositions (‘5 Sumerian psalms comprising one liturgy, for the adapa [possibly a tambourine]’). Ashurbanipal, Assyria’s last important ruler (668–627 BC), also had a fine library and was himself literate. Here too the mass of archival material comprised the bulk of the library; next in number came the omen texts; next largest were the lists, words and names, dictionaries for translating; and finally literary works, such as the epic of Gilgamesh. In all there were about 1,500 separate titles.⁷⁷ A curse was inscribed on many Assyrian tablets to deter people from stealing them.⁷⁸

Libraries undoubtedly existed in ancient Egypt, but because they wrote on papyrus (the ‘bullrushes’ in which the infant Moses was supposed to have been sequestered), little has survived. In describing the building complex of Ramses II (1279–1213 BC), the Greek historian Diodorus says that it included a sacred library which bore the inscription ‘Clinic for the Soul’.