It is 150 years since Manchester opened the first public lending library in Britain, but the idea of library is very ancient.
Palace archives were the first ‘libraries’. From third-millennium bc Syria and Babylon (modern Iraq) we have found stores of documents on clay tablets – bills, deliveries, receipts, inventories, court judgments, with some hymns, myths and lists of gods – put together for reference purposes, with crude content-lists for catalogues. In 13th-century bc Hattusas (central Turkey) we find works being given summaries, titles and authors: e.g., ‘One tablet, the end [i.e., the end of the work is marked], on the purification of murder. When the exorcist-priest treats for a murder. Words of Erija.’ Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria (668-627 bc), had a private library ‘for royal contemplation’ of some 1,500 books (including the epic of Gilgamesh). As now, many of the tablets from such collections contained warnings against late return, maltreatment and theft.
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