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Everyone has a different way of displaying books and keeping papers. These habits teach much about the people to whom these writings belong and the purposes the documents serve. Have you ever wondered how, in antiquity, people managed their libraries and kept their archives?

Students of the ancient Near East often become acquainted with its written remains through collections of translations, such as James B. Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (third ed.; Princeton University Press, 1969) or its eventual successor, the planned three-volume Contexts of Scripture (Brill), edited by William W. Hallo (volume 1, Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World, appeared in 1997). Scholars read ancient texts in journals or in tablet collections published by museums. Such texts are usually presented to the public after they have been classified by content or genre, and documents from many sites are generally lumped together. Unless they appear in a publication detailing the excavation of a single archaeological site, ancient writings are almost always removed from the contexts in which they were found. So we tend to think of them as disembodied texts rather than as “living” documents—monumental stelae, administrative tablets, liturgical scrolls and commercial seals with specific functions at specific times and places.

Olof Pedersén’s Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East 1500–300 B.C. is a valiant attempt to give context to these ancient, mostly cuneiform texts from the Middle Babylonian period (1558–1085 B.C.E.), the Middle Assyrian period (1375–1155 B.C.E.), the neo-Assyrian period (1155–626 B.C.E.), the neo-Babylonian period (625–539 B.C.E.) and the Achaemenid period (539–332 B.C.E.). Pedersén systematically records all Near Eastern document collections, describing their scope and composition, how they were put together, the identity of their owners and the ways in which they were stored.

Pedersén has identified 253 archives and libraries—some containing a few texts, some tens of thousands—from Egypt to Elam (in modern Iran). The ancient Assyrian city of Assur, in modern Iraq, boasts as many as 38 distinct archives and libraries. But this is only a fraction of the original material. More often than not, texts come out of the ground broken; the better part of any newfound collection of writings has generally been lost or is so badly damaged that its contents cannot be read. The text collections themselves are also frequently mixed up. Assyrian Nineveh has yielded 12,000 tablets, for example, but only three 057distinct archives can be identified; in antiquity there were certainly more than that. To compound these problems, much of the material discovered so far remains unpublished, or has been published in a faulty manner. Even so, Pedersén, while exercising the utmost scholarly caution, tries to extrapolate the original state and size of some archives from their extant remains. He even makes predictions about collections we might find in the future.

To reconstruct the original tablet collections, Pedersén has had to contend with the forces of nature, history and human shortcomings, which have wreaked havoc with the material. The ancients did take care to store their precious documents in pottery jars, clay or wooden boxes, and reed baskets; and at times they arranged them on shelves, as we do today. But the archives and libraries ultimately fell prey to destructive forces. In antiquity, tablets no longer needed for administrative or ritual purposes were frequently reused as landfill in buildings, while others were “recirculated” by being broken down, or smoothed out, and made into new tablets. Conquering armies willfully or inadvertently destroyed important collections. Time and the elements wore away at archive buildings, leaving the collections exposed to the weather and to vandals. Tablets kept in upper-story rooms, as was often the case, were left scattered below when the building collapsed.

And this sad, sometimes infuriating annihilation of the past has gone on for millennia. Modern antiquities thieves have plundered ancient mounds and removed, or seriously disturbed, their tablet collections (which can then be reconstructed only by internal examination of the documents). Most tragically, insensitive or hasty excavators have not always been careful to mark the exact recovery spot of every individual tablet. In some early excavations at major sites, hundreds of documents were simply taken out of the ground, packed up and shipped to museums. All this has diminished what we know about ancient tablet collections.

Pedersén provides maps of each site, taken from excavation reports, that point out the findspots of the archives. He also supplies detailed bibliographies of the excavations and a statistical summary of all relevant textual collections, including a tabulation of the finds, bar graphs and indices of personal names, professions, ancient city names and modern site names.

Although lucid and informative, Pedersén’s book, like reference tools in general, hardly lends itself to gripping reading. Much of this tome’s information could have been provided just as effectively in the form of tables and charts. Still, individual lodes of tantalizing information are scattered throughout the volume. Archives, for instance, were often found in rooms adjoining central courtyards, where light would be available for reading. In Assur, family archives were kept in rooms housing family graves. Tablets were usually stored in containers, often pottery jars, and in one instance, the tablets stored in a jar were wrapped in straw. Was this a unique occurrence? Or does it imply that in most cases the original packing material has disintegrated? At one archive from Babylon, 56 tablets were carefully arranged in a sand level placed between two floors. But nothing is said about how these tablets were arranged. Were they being stored, or were they being used as supports for the upper floor?

The most exciting single item in the book concerns the recently discovered library at neo-Babylonian Sippar. This amazing find (a complete library!) features over 800 individual tablets still standing on almost 50 original shelves. If the Assyriologists who publish these tablets take the time to record their precise locations, the result could be the most important contribution ever made to the early history of library organization and classification. Unfortunately, however, Pedersén’s description of the shelves in the Sippar temple library is difficult to follow. A photograph or a drawing by the author would have been helpful.

This is an important and useful book, full of interesting surprises and a great service to scholarship. We can only hope that Pedersén will provide a sequel treating the archives and libraries dating to 3000–1500 B.C.E., including such important sites as Old Babylonian Mari, Old Assyrian Kanish (Kultepe), neo-Sumerian Nippur, Ur III Puzrish-Dagan (Drehem) and Ebla.

Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East should also inspire better handling of archival materials in the future, leading scholars to pay more attention to the contexts in which tablets are discovered. If so, Pedersén’s work may contribute to its own demise and quickly become outdated.

Everyone has a different way of displaying books and keeping papers. These habits teach much about the people to whom these writings belong and the purposes the documents serve. Have you ever wondered how, in antiquity, people managed their libraries and kept their archives?