The creation of the Library of Alexandria is widely regarded as one of the great achievements in the history of humankind - a giant endeavour to amass all known literature and scholarly texts in one central location, so as to preserve it and make it available for the public. In turn, this event has been viewed as a historical turning point that separates the ancient world from classical antiquity. Standard works on the library continue to present the idea behind the institution as novel and, at least implicitly, as a product of Greek thought. Yet, although the scale of the collection in Alexandria seems to have been unprecedented, the notion of creating central repositories of knowledge, while perhaps new to Greek tradition, was age-old in the Near East where the building was erected. Here the existence of libraries can be traced back another two millennia, from the twenty-seventh century BCE to the third century CE, and so the creation of the Library in Alexandria was not so much the beginning of an intellectual adventure as the impressive culmination of a very long tradition. This volume presents the first comprehensive study of these ancient libraries across the 'Cradle of Civilization' and traces their institutional and scholarly roots back to the early cities and states and the advent of writing itself. Leading specialists in the intellectual history of each individual period and region covered in the volume present and discuss the enormous textual and archaeological material available on the early collections, offering a uniquely readable account intended for a broad audience of the libraries in Egypt and Western Asia as centres of knowledge prior to the famous Library of Alexandria.

The term canonicity implies the recognition that the domain of literature and of the library is also a cultural and political one, related to various forms of identity formation, maintenance, and change. Scribes and benefactors create canon in as much as they teach, analyse, preserve, promulgate and change canonical texts according to prevailing norms. From early on, texts from the written traditions of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt were accumulated, codified, and to some extent canonised, as various collections developed mainly in the environment of the temple and the palace. These written traditions represent sets of formal and informal cultures that all speak in their own ways of canonicity, normativity, and other forms of cultural expertise. Some forms of literature were used not only in scholarly contexts, but also in political ones, and they served purposes of identity formation. This volume addresses the interrelations between various forms of canon and identity formation in different time periods, genres, regions, and contexts, as well as the application of contemporary conceptions of canon to ancient texts.

This study includes a revised model of the historical geography of Anatolia in the Old Assyrian Colony Period (c. 1969-1715 BC) that is based on topographical, archaeological and written records. The author challenges traditional views of Anatolian geography by using arguments based on logistics, infrastructure and the organisation of the trade to suggest a new interpretation focused on central markets, fluctuating prices and interlocking regional systems of exchange. The historical implications of this revised geography for Old Assyrian and early Hittite history and Bronze Age archaeology are extensively discussed. The book contains translations and discussions of passages from hundreds of published and unpublished Old Assyrian texts and gives a comprehensive inventory of Anatolian toponyms with photographs and maps.