Palace archive and library
Archivo y biblioteca de palacio
- Date
- c. 2500 BCE · confidence high
- Place
- Ebla (Tell Mardikh), Syria; Nippur, Iraq
- Credited to
- Kingdom of Ebla
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
The Palace G room at Ebla with more than 17,000 tablets arranged on shelves by subject (administration, diplomacy, bilingual word lists), which fell in place when it burned around 2300 BCE. It is the earliest known organised archive-library.
Temple archives exist since Uruk (c. 3200 BCE); Ebla is the first with a recognisable spatial organisation and catalogue.
What it led to
- Institutional memory of the state independent of individuals: treaties, censuses, dictionaries
- Sumerian-Eblaite bilingual word lists and dictionaries, the beginning of philology
- The tradition of royal libraries (Hattusa, Ugarit, Ashurbanipal) and later Alexandria
- Training of scribes with a canonical corpus of texts
Built on
Made possible
- Library of Alexandria and catalogue (Pinakes)c. 285 BCE
- Nineveh and the Library of Ashurbanipal1845-1851
- Bilingual dictionary
- Text catalogue
- Library of Alexandria