Beginning and History

Libraries and history are both products of the commodification of thought. Their primary means of production is writing. Prior to the invention of writing, thought was confined to individual human beings and the communities with whom they were in face to face (usually spoken) communication. Education took the form of a running commentary on daily life by elders who had been there before. If you wanted to learn anything beyond immediate experience, you had to find somebody who knew it already and get them to tell you about it. Individuals considered particularly knowledgeable would find themselves surrounded by disciples seeking to embody that knowledge themselves. If you wanted to learn about things that happened in the past, before everybody you'd ever talked to was born, you'd have to rely on word of mouth reports of hearsay from people you never met. Perhaps pictures were drawn or carved on some durable material to assist the memories of the reciters. History was myth and the closest thing to a library was a council of elders in a cave with paintings on the walls and ceiling.

Writing apparently began as an aid to the commercial activities of religious communities in early Mesopotamian cities. The first books (clay tablets with marks poked and scratched into them) were account books and the baskets they were collected in held something more like business archives than anything we would call a library. Later work orders, requisitions, and letters of credit led to a more comprehensive epistolary including political and diplomatic subjects. As scripture became a more comprehensive transcription of society's verbal repertoire, oracles, hymns and liturgies as well as laws and proclamations and even imaginative narratives became literature. Ideas were no longer bound to the people who spoke them and heard them; they could be embodied in physical objects which could be transported to distant places and endure well beyond the lifetimes of the people to whom they first occurred. The new school of education taught reading and writing by having the student copy lists of words and model exemplars of the different genres. Collections of these exercises began to look more like private libraries.