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List making has always constituted an important form of writing. Long before anyone started producing the familiar narrative documents that we associate with “writing” today, the first true writers were list makers. Indeed, we may have an epigenetic proclivity for creating lists rooted in the lateral sequencing of the human brain, as evidenced in the tiered oral lists of folk taxonomies. The first written lists emerged as a growing tide of transactions produced more and more documents, forcing people to develop new mechanisms for organizing the growing sprawl of data: tokens, then lists, then lists of lists, then bibliographical systems for organizing entire collections. By 3000 BC the scope of written knowledge had grown to the point where Sumerian temple libraries contained commercial records, grammars, mathematics texts, books on medicine and astrology, and religious scriptures. Also fueling the Sumerian writing boom was the emerging institution of the temple. Ancient temples functioned as more than just purveyors of ritual; they were also the first national banks, lending out money at interest to individuals and small businesses. The Sumerian Savings and Loan managed an enormous volume of transactions, each recorded on a separate clay record, which in turn found its way into periodic “roll-up” reports issued on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis. Indeed, while we might think of information technology as a newish field, in fact Information Technologist may rank among the world’s oldest professions.

Invoices and accounting records paved the way for records of taxes and tributes, property records, deeds, and property transactions, with graphic symbols confirming their legality. These early records, written on clay tablets or papyrus or engraved in bronze or copper, formed the foundation of government archives that would eventually grow to include laws, decrees, property records, contracts, treaties,
and chronicles of events involving the state itself: the outcome of battles, the succession of monarchs, and other chronologies. Slowly, these chronological records took on the trappings of literature. “Since records of military conquests and biographies of kings often included as much fiction as fact, they added an element of literature to an otherwise staid collection.”
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Over time the great stream of oral tradition found its way into print.

As the scope of recorded information expanded, scribes began dividing into professional specialties with increasingly narrow domains of knowledge: the
dubsar kengira
specialized in the classics; the
dubsar nishid
plied mathematics; the
dubsar ashaga
labored at geometry. In the temples, scribes began to write down old spells and legends. As academic specialties began to coalesce, temples began to establish formal writing education programs to ensure the continuity of skills from generation to generation. As growing numbers of scribes mastered the literary arts, they began to produce more varied texts on, for example, astronomy, prophesies, and scientific observations.
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The prolific Sumerian scribes created such a bulwark of recorded knowledge that by the time Sumerian civilization fell into decline it had created a written legacy that would reverberate for millennia.

Eventually a new Semitic power rose in Babylon, displacing the Sumerians. Although the Babylonians spoke their own language, they preserved the written record of Sumerian religious texts, whose ancient pedigrees lent them an air of authority not unlike the veneration that more recent cultures have ascribed to the Bible, Koran, or Torah. As the Babylonians displaced the Sumerians, they placed a great emphasis on preserving the old civilization’s textual legacy, in much the same way that European nations went to great pains to preserve the ancient legacies of Greek and Latin literature. Like learned Europeans during the Middle Ages, the Babylonians established a bilingual standard: with a spoken vernacular for the common people and an exalted written text—Sumerian—for preserving ancient holy truths.
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Why did the Babylonians invest so much effort in maintaining old texts in the language of an older empire? Historian A. C. Moorehouse speculates that for the Babylonians “there was
a deep bond between producing documents and maintaining political legitimacy.” Recognizing the essential relationship between the written word and political power helped cement the authority of the state over the older, preliterate, symbolically minded tribal cultures.

The relationship between written language and political legitimacy stretches deep into antiquity. Just as the earliest literate cultures had invented fables to explain the spellbinding power of the written word, later civilizations would invoke mythologies to assert the bond between writing and the political authority of the state. Ancient Romans attributed the prosperity of their empire in part to the purchase of three divine books by the ancient King Tarquin. According to the story, Tarquin bought the volumes from the prophetess Sibyl only after spurning her original offer of nine books, six of which she proceeded to burn out of spite. Realizing his mistake, Tarquin quickly came to his senses and snapped up the remaining volumes. Those books would later occupy a place of honor in the Roman forum, providing a tangible bridge from the mythic world to the present, until they were finally destroyed along with the empire during the great sieges. The Assyrians assigned a similar mythological significance to the power of writing in their tale of Zu, a lesser god who steals a divine tablet from the ruling god Enlil and brings it to Assyria. The tablet is said to reveal the fate of the gods, thus granting the Assyrian kingdom a measure of power over the gods themselves.

Throughout the ancient world, writing played a crucial role in the expansion of empires. In the seventh century BC, King Ashurbanipal took control of Mesopotamia, establishing the great Assyrian empire. As one of his first acts, he commanded his scribe Shadunu to collect every available written artifact in the kingdom. “No one shall withhold tablets from you,” the king decreed, “and if you see any tablets and ritual texts about which I have not written to you, and they are suitable for my palace, select them, collect them and send them to me.” Executing the king’s decree, Shadunu traveled the countryside impounding every written tablet he could find. He confiscated every single document from every temple and private home in the kingdom. Eventually, he returned with a vast collection of poems, proverbs, hymns, fables, omens, horoscopes, incantations,
prayers, and more than 500 drug recipes.
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From this act of imperial confiscation the world’s first library emerged. In addition to a vast array of factual records, King Ashurbanipal’s collection included a literary component: the now-famous legend of Gilgamesh, 12 tablets of the old Babylonian account of the great flood, and numerous translations of older Sumerian stories. Of the 25,000 tablets later excavated at the vast Royal Library at Nineveh, more than two-thirds were created in response to orders from the king. Just as Ptolemy would later build his library at Alexandria by confiscating books from incoming ships, Ashurbanipal built his library through coercion. And lest there be any doubt about who owned the books, the king ordered that every book in the kingdom carry this royal inscription:

Some manuscripts he further commended to posterity, “for the sake of distant days.” The books also included a warning that anyone who stole or vandalized a book would be subject to a curse “terrible and merciless as long as he lives.” The king instituted rules requiring a high degree of bibliographic control: Every text would be copied in a consistent format, bearing the name of the scribe and the name of the king. The library also bore several hallmarks that would become characteristic of subsequent early libraries: forming part of a temple dedicated to the worship of a deity, following stated acquisitions guidelines, and employing a dedicated staff conversant in multiple languages. Of the organization of the library we know almost nothing. But we do know that it proved instrumental in supporting the expansion of the Assyrian empire. Armed with a vast arsenal of recorded information about governance, military strategy, weapon making, agriculture, mathematics, and other topics, the empire stood poised to dominate the region.

The earliest libraries were first and foremost vessels of political power, consolidating the accumulated intellectual capital of the early nation-states and providing a durable link with the past by invoking religious authority and asserting a relationship to the gods. The gods, by extension, protected the library, and the genealogical relationships of the gods, echoing old folk taxonomies, found a new manifestation in the nested hierarchies of state institutions.

The first libraries existed primarily to support these growing imperial hierarchies. In China, the earliest known library dates to 1400 BC. In Egypt, Rameses II established a sacred library at Thebes in 1225 BC. The first Indian manuscript collections date as far back as 1000 BC. Each of these great imperial civilizations seems to have progressed along a markedly similar (though far from identical) path: Agricultural settlements developed a commercial facility for writing, enabling them to make the transition from tribal societies to nation-states. As some of those nation-states grew into empires, they began producing more varied forms of literature that were eventually gathered into libraries.

The fates of those libraries would prove no less turbulent than the empires that built them. Indeed, the advent of literacy and book making has invariably been accompanied by violence and political turmoil. When the Emperor Shi Huangdi consolidated power over the Chinese Empire in 213 BC, he promptly ordered an imperial biblioclasm, commanding the destruction of every book in the kingdom. Soldiers demolished the old royal library, a priceless trove of early Confucian and Taoist texts known as the Heavenly Archives (whose most famous curator was Lao Tzu). After clearing the brush of the prior regime’s intellectual legacy, the emperor created a new library, complete with a new classification system to reflect the new imperial order. That system eventually coalesced into the great ancient Chinese library classification system known as the Seven Epitomes. The scheme divided the library’s holdings into six top-level categories: Military, Science, Technology, Medicine, Poetry, and Philosophy. The epistemological hierarchy also manifested itself in the political structure of the new empire. As a ministerial administration took shape to support the new imperial priorities, the hierarchy of
the library became the hierarchy of the state. But this new classification, like the one it supplanted, would last no longer than the empire that supported it. When the Wei Dynasty later took power, the new imperial librarian Cheng Moe established yet another new classification scheme to replace the old one, reflecting a new set of imperial priorities, boiling everything down to four categories: Classics, Philosophy, History, and Literature.

Centuries later, when the Spanish conquistador Cortés arrived in sixteenth-century Mexico, he discovered a civilization that had mastered the art of book making a full thousand years earlier. The Aztec libraries contained an enormous collection of manuscripts about history, myth, biographies, herbalism, mathematics, and all kinds of local lore. When the conquistadors arrived, Bishop Diego de Landa ordered them to burn every one of the bark-clothed books, because they “contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the Devil.”
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While it may be tempting to bemoan the wanton destruction of an indigenous culture at the hands of a European imperialist power, the Spanish were not the first invading force to raze an Aztec library. Just a century before the Spanish arrived, a conquering Aztec ruler named Itzcóatl burned the previous royal library to the ground, clearing the intellectual brush for a new Aztec history written in his own mold.

The violent history of libraries is a mirror of empire building: hierarchical systems emerging from violent political upheavals, only to collapse, disintegrate, and give rise to new emergent systems. Ever since the first temple libraries emerged in Sumeria around 3000 BC, libraries have flourished and fallen with the empires that supported them. From ancient Sumer to India to China to the Aztec kingdom, the same pattern manifested again and again: first came literacy, then the nation-state, the empire, and ultimately the intellectual apotheosis of the empire, the library. When empires fall, they usually take their libraries with them.

The greatest library of the ancient world, of course, was the legendary Library at Alexandria. Today, Alexandria enjoys an almost mythic status as the archetypal temple of ancient wisdom. Why does Alexandria, alone among all the great libraries of antiquity, occupy such a special place in the popular imagination? Alexandria was more than just a large collection of books; it was the apotheosis of a whole new way of thinking that departed radically from the old imperial information systems of the preclassical era. To understand why Alexandria still matters, we need to understand a thing or two about the Greeks.

Sometime after 2000 BC, troops of mounted warriors swooped down from the Caucasus Mountains, through the Balkans, and into the valleys of the Greek peninsula. They terrorized the indigenous population of farmers, ultimately subduing them and establishing a series of new kingdoms throughout the region. During the so-called Mycenaean Age (approximately 1600 to 1200 BC), a succession of small monarchies emerged that looked a lot like other regional kingdoms throughout the Near East. Like the Sumerians and Babylonians before them, the Minoans and Mycenaeans established a caste system predicated in part on the legitimating power of the written word. A ruling class of kings, attended by literate scribes and priests, established royal institutions, hoarded wealth, and wielded power over the illiterate populace of farmers and soldiers. Once again, it seemed, literacy was emerging along a familiar trajectory, with the technology of the written word serving to prop up ruling institutional hierarchies. But this time things would turn out differently.