The title of this volume contains a claim: there were libraries before Alexandria, that is, before the legendary building and the collection it housed in Egypt founded by the Ptolemaic kings of the Hellenistic Period. With the subtitle Ancient Near Eastern Traditions the editors characterize the existence of libraries as reaching back as far as the first half of the third millennium bc. Whilst the literary traditions of Egypt and Western Asia have previously been studied from a comparative point of view, this is not the case for their collection and preservation. The intention of this book is to bring Egyptologists and cuneiform scholars together to compare both aspects, in order “to extract new data and ideas [and] to inspire new sets of questions and produce analytical tools that have a wider application” (p. 5).
Over nine chapters, contributors provide rich overviews of textual collections in Mesopotamia from about 2600 to 200 bc, in Egypt from 2600 bc to 250 ad, in Hittite Anatolia (1650–1180 [sic] bc), and in Syria and the Levant (1450–1100 bc). Each chapter contains a wealth of information, textual and non-textual, and many illustrations on the various aspects of collecting and preserving documents in the societies and time periods under consideration. In their introduction (pp. 1–66), Ryholt and Barjamovic offer a useful synthesis of the contributions. They discuss the various aspects of the writing and storing process: from script carriers, medium, and formatting, to collections and their accessibility, the text genres, and the physical structure of rooms and buildings that housed collections. A general index (pp. 473–91) concludes the book.
The book is aimed at both Egyptologists and cuneiform scholars. Although they may not always work closely together, they move within the limited confines of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean and work along similar lines and with similar premises. To “extract new data and ideas [and] to inspire new sets of questions” it might have been interesting and fruitful to include views from the library science perspective: asking library scholars to be part of a dialogue on ancient text collections and the history of what is after all their field could have been mutually enriching, and such a cross-fertilization could have brought new insights to both fields. For such a dialogue to succeed, however, both disciplines need to speak the same language, that is, agree to use the same terms with the same meaning, beginning with the term “library” itself.
Instead, the editors neither define more closely what they mean by “library” (pp. 7–9) nor ask their contributors to work within certain definitional limits. They “allowed authors the liberty to formulate their own personal definition of this and other key terms, such as ‘archive’, ‘literature’, ‘genre’, ‘books’, etc.” (p. 7). The only guidance offered is that “library” “refer[s] to any collection of non-documentary texts found together, without regard to its purpose, access, and ownership” (p. 8). “Non-documentary” is subsequently taken to mean “literary”, a literary text being a “composition that reflects ‘broader mental activities’ as opposed to a unique event” (p. 9). With this, they return to the problematic distinction between archive and library in Olof Pedersén's survey of Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East 1500–300 B.C. (Bethesda, MD, 1998); for some pertinent questions in this regard see the excellent contribution by Robson and Stevens (pp. 319–21). The editors justify their reluctance to hold their contributors to a specific definition by stating that there is no consensus on what a library is. It is true that there are many different kinds of libraries and that they have evolved over time, not least in our modern digital world. The basic notion of a library, however, has remained much the same and is relatively easy to define. The Wikipedia definition, for instance, contains all the key elements: “A library is a curated collection of sources of information and similar resources, selected by experts and made accessible to a defined community for reference or borrowing, often in a quiet environment conducive to study”. The addition of the word “selected” effectively distinguishes a library, which always selects what it wants to collect, from an archive, which within its administrative purview has no choice and grows organically. Note that in this definition nothing is said about genres. On the other hand, in the editors’ description, the addition of the words “without regard to its purpose, access, and ownership” ignores a library's basic function to serve a community, however small. For example, can we really designate the Egyptian “tomb libraries” (see Parkinson, pp. 142–57) as such, if no living soul was allowed in them? Or, can we still call tablets dumped as fill for building purposes (see Delnero, p. 187) a “library”? It certainly cannot have been considered one when they were discarded and lost their readership and, moreover, the texts may have originated from different collections.
As a result, there is an explicit uncertainty on the part of most contributors about what they are dealing with. The terms “archive” and “library” are frequently interchanged and/or said to be difficult to separate (see, for instance, Parkinson p. 138 f., 142, Delnero p. 173, Dardano p. 196 f., Rutz p. 210, Hagen pp. 245, 248, Robson and Stevens pp. 320 f., 329, 339, 342). If there is one thing that becomes clear throughout the book, it is that libraries in the physical sense of designated spaces with exclusively “literary” material never existed. There is always a mix of archival and “literary” material. Moreover, in many cases (see Zand, pp. 69, 76, 97, 102, Parkinson, pp. 116, 135f., 156f., Hagen p. 304, Robson and Stevens p. 352 f., Finkel p. 377, Ryholt pp. 391, 392, 405, 451) those same “literary” documents had the very practical function of enabling an institution to perform its tasks, and thus belonged to their core business. The line between the two kinds of materials is easily blurred and difficult to draw. For example, that the administration of a religious institution includes prayers and hymns is to be expected, but does that make it a library? In both Mesopotamia and Egypt many documents were generated in a school context. The constant copying of curricular works of all kinds served the honing of scribal (Delnero pp. 173 f., 179, 188, Dardano p. 193, Robson and Stevens p. 340, Ryholt p. 395) and memory skills of students (Hagen 264 f., Robson and Stevens pp. 343, 347, 358). Given the overwhelmingly oral nature of all societies considered here, one wonders whether true libraries perhaps only existed in the minds and memories of scholars with the written materials functioning largely as aides-mémoire. As teachers and specialists, these scholars curated and selected their knowledge and made it accessible to communities of aspiring scholars.
Because of the restricted audience and the authors’ reluctance to work with their contributors from a common notion of the term “library”, it remains to be seen whether this book can deliver on the hope for “new … ideas [and] … new sets of questions”. Readers from farther afield may end up confused. Perhaps we should accept that there were no libraries – certainly no physical ones – “before Alexandria” and see their emergence in the Graeco-Roman period as something new, which evolved out of a long eastern tradition of mostly orally transmitted knowledge.
