T3. The earliest libraries and archives

This rather brings up the points:

1. who invented writing?
2. who first invented the printing process?
3. Once writing was invented, how, where & why did libraries develop?

Well, it is a good question.

As long as we have been writing we have been recording important things for present use and future memory.

For example,

Michael Wood, in his PhD, book and TV series from the mid 1980s: ‘In Search of  the Trojan War’ (on You tube if you are interested) ,  tells us that exchanges of written tablet records between the Hittite Empire and Egypt appear to mention a certain ‘Alexandros’  [which is the other name given to Paris of Troy],and a war between a ‘great king’ in Mycenae and peoples on the western seaboard of Asia Minor –  giving a tantalising possibility to the reality to the Trojan war as Homer relates [some 500 years after the events].

So your questions are:

1. Who first invented a system of writing?  Might it have been the Chinese, the long-lost Indus civilisation, the Mesopotamians, the Sumerians, the Egyptians (or others, of course)?  Is there any conclusive evidence that can help us put them in any kind of [even approximate] date order?

2. Identify some of the very oldest libraries and archives centres in existence.  How have they survived and been looked after and revered for so many generations?  Why do we care so very much about them?  An interesting recent article from the BBC to start you off.

3. Where was printing first invented? In which civilisation?  We hear much about Gutenberg and Caxton and their printing presses in the 15th century in Europe, but were they beaten to it?

4. What was the Great Library of Alexandria?  Who founded it? What was the intention behind its creation? How did it meet its demise and why, even today, do scholars and academics of all subjects lament so much its passing?  What have we lost which is considered, even today, to be of inestimable value?

Produce a two page A4 Thinkpiece covering these issues for next year’s Librarianship students and test-run a workshop designed to interest students in the origins of their chosen subject and métier.