Libraries before Alexandria

Kathryn E. Piquette, University College London, LIBRARY & INFORMATION HISTORY The material presented provides an insightful overview that, together with detailed case studies and analyses, raises new questions and provokes fresh ideas that will doubtless foster continued study to further progress our understanding of the role and nature of libraries and the past practices of collecting texts of tradition.


Kathryn E. Piquette, Library & Information History This volume ... brings together a substantial body of knowledge that is examined skilfully


Bradley Wiles, University of Wisconsin Madison, Libraries: Culture, History, and Society ... the immediate appeal is to other archaeologists, classicists, linguists, and ancient historians who rely on primary sources to fill in the knowledge gaps of sparsely documented premodern life. But the book also implies numerous possibilities for multidisciplinary scholarship in the library and archival studies fields, particularly regarding resource description and access, the historical relationship between our institutions and social power, and the evolution of
recorded human communication.


Bernhard Schneider, Bryn Mawr Classical Review The volume is valuable for specialists but also a useful introduction into the topic of ancient libraries for an interested broader public...

Kim Ryholt is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Copenhagen, specializing in ancient Egyptian history and literature. He was director of the Centre for Canon and Identity Formation under the University of Copenhagen Program of Excellence from 2008 until 2013 and has been responsible for the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection and its publication since 1999. Gojko Barjamovic is Senior Lecturer on Assyriology at Harvard University. His main areas of research are the economic and social history of Western Asia in the second and first millennia BC, with a particular focus on the study of trade in the Bronze Age period and the development of early markets and trans-regional interaction. He also writes on early state power and civic institutions of governance, historical geography, intellectual history, and absolute chronology.

Frontmatter List of Maps and Figures List of Tables List of Contributors 1: Kim Ryholt and Gojko Barjamovic: Libraries before Alexandria 2: Kamran Vincent Zand: The Rise of Libraries in the Near East, c. 2600-2300 BCE 3: R. B. Parkinson: Libraries in Ancient Egypt, c. 2600-1600 BCE 4: Paul Delnero: Archives and Libraries in the Old Babylonian Period, c. 1900-1600 BCE 5: Paola Dardano: The Tablet Collections of the Hittite Empire, c. 1450-1100 BCE 6: Matthew Rutz: Libraries in Ancient Syria and the Levant in the Late Bronze Age, c. 1450-1100 BCE 7: Fredrik Hagen: Libraries in Ancient Egypt, c. 1600-800 BCE 8: Eleanor Robson and Kathryn Stevens: Scholarly Tablet Collections in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia, c. 700-200 BCE 9: Irving Finkel: Assurbanipal's Library: An Overview 10: Kim Ryholt: Libraries from Late Period and Greco-Roman Egypt, c. 800 BCE-250 CE Endmatter Index