Lost Libraries of Ancient Mesopotamia

Abstract

Ancient Mesopotamia (roughly modern Iraq) can boast an uninterrupted sequence of literate cultures over nearly three and a half millennia, from c. 3400 BC to the first century AD. Institutions which can be identified as libraries existed at several periods, and because these are chronologically the most ancient of those that will be discussed in this volume, it provides the opportunity to at least raise the question ‘what makes a library?’. For the ancient pre-classical world it is convenient to distinguish between ‘libraries’ and what can be called ‘private scribal collections’, the personal assemblages of individual scribal masters or scribal families, which might include both their own work and inherited or acquired works written by others. It is also helpful to distinguish between those and ‘archives’, collections of legal, business or commercial documents. These several categories have discrete archaeological realities, even if individual excavated buildings might contain collections in which the distinctions were blurred.¹ The libraries discussed here were all located either within palaces or within temples, which were the two major categories of what archaeologists call ‘public buildings’ in ancient Mesopotamia. But this does not mean that they were in any sense publicly accessible; there is no evidence that royal libraries were available to anyone except their scholarly staff and their royal owners, while we know that temple libraries were restricted to priestly functionaries.