Oldest written archive

The oldest organized archive of written works was discovered in the ruins of the ancient city of Ebla, located in what is now western Syria, which flourished between around 3500 and 2200 BCE. An archive dated to around 2350 BCE, containing around 2,500 inscribed clay tablets, was found in the ruins of the city's royal palace. The tablets that have been translated since its discovery in 1974 reveal that this collection represented the official records of the Eblaite state, containing information on land ownership, trade deals and dictionaries for translating the languages of other ancient civilizations.

Almost nothing was known about the city-state of Ebla before Italian archaeologist Paolo Matthiae discovered its ruins in 1964, and the people that had once inhabited the city remained largely mysterious until the discovery of the archives in 1974. Since then, translators have managed to learn a great deal about this nation, its politics and people. It is estimated that the state had a population of around 250,000, overseen by a government that included around 11,700 civil servants and functionaries (according to figures given on one tablet).

The archives were key to the efficient running of this vast state. The tablets that have been translated include the full texts of various laws and statues, as well as diplomatic correspondence, treaties and trade agreements. There are also tablets that contain reports on the economy of Ebla, gazetteers of place names and at least 32 bilingual dictionaries matching key words in Eblaite (a previously unknown Semitic language) to the various other languages of ancient near east.

The palace and its library was destroyed when the city was sacked in around 2300 BCE, and the tablets buried in the rubble. The wooden shelves that once held these tablets collapsed, but the library seems to have been otherwise little disturbed by the calamity. The fired clay of the tablets was resistant to fire damage. As a result, when Matthiae and his team unearthed the library, thy discovered that the tablets were still organized in neat rows, piled up where they had once been shelved by subject. The dictionaries were in one area of the room, for example, the trade ledgers in another. The tablets each have a brief title or summary of their contents written on the side, like the spine of a book, and were probably arranged so that a few lines of the text could be read without taking them off the shelf.

Though it represents the oldest organized collection of written documents, the Ebla archive was not a library in the sense that we'd recognize today. There are very few literary works among the tablets, and the vast majority of the material consists of the records of a complex administration. It was used as a refence, kept adjacent to the royal audience chamber where the business of the state was conducted, and not accessible to any but those who needed it for their work.

The oldest known example of a collection consisting primarily of written literary works (poetry, stories, travelogues, etc.) is the Library of Ashurbanipal, assembled at Nineveh (in present-day Iraq) by Ashurbanipal (688-631 BCE), king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. This collection included some 30,000 clay tablets, among them the best-preserved text of the Epic of Gilgamesh -- one of the oldest surviving pieces of literature.