How big of a book nerd am I? While researching book history this morning, I pulled these three volumes out of my personal library. Here’s some of what I found:
Canadian railroad economist Harold Innis wrote one of the most interesting books about the nature of media – Empire and Communications. In it, he argued that any given medium has a bias of lasting a long time or of being easy to distribute. In the ancient world, clay and stone would be durable media biased toward the concept of time, while papyrus and parchment writings were easy to distribute and thus biased toward space.
How well these writing surfaces preserve their documents is fascinating. Lionel Casson, writing in Libraries in the Ancient World, notes that if you burn a library full of papyrus or parchment, the documents all are reduced to ashes, but if the documents are inscribed onto clay tablets, a massive fire would bake the pages into a more permanent form – fired clay.(9e0877) Clay tablets also had the advantage of being inexpensive and easy to produce. They had the disadvantage, of course, of being heavy, bulky, and difficult to transport.
The Sumerian angular cuneiform writing style also worked well with being cut into soft clay. These date back to the third millennium BCE. And their survivability is part of the reason that so much of our early history of writing comes from clay tablets.
Among the most spectacular early documents was a collection of several thousand tablets that had been in a burned room in Syria, dating back to approximately 2300 BCE. While most of these tablets were inventories and business records, there were also tablets that were bilingual word lists, and a pair of tablets contained a copy of a Sumerian myth. Casson says that this was likely a palace scribe’s library.
The most famous of the ancient libraries was the one in Alexandria, Egypt, founded in about 300 BCE. Created by Aristotle, it had books on virtually every topic and was open to the public. At its peak, the library contained more than 490,000 scrolls, some of which contained multiple books or documents, and some of which were duplicates. A popular, but likely incorrect, story says the library burned in 48 BCE, but there is substantial evidence that at least a large part of the library lasted until 270 AD when heavy fighting in Alexandria burned much of the city, likely including the library.