As soon as humans developed systems of writing, they faced a problem, what to do with all the things that were written down.

If you were going to document the lives of kings or tax records, then you needed to be able to reference these details at some later date.

The solution of the problem was the creation of repositories for documents.

While they've changed dramatically over time,

the same basic institutions are still with us today.

Learn more about libraries and how they change it over time

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. When humans first started to write things down, they did so using canyophore and clay tablets.

This was a big advancement in that it allowed for the preservation of thoughts, ideas, and information.

However, it then introduced a new problem.

What do you do with all the clay tablets?

The answer was pretty simple.

You build a large storage facility or warehouse for them.

There are rooms with clay tablets found in Sumerian temples which date back about 4,500 years.

These weren't really libraries as they would become known, but that's how

libraries got started. They were just places to store writings where the

literate class, usually priests or scribes, could access them.

The first thing we could call a proper library was probably the library of Escher Bonapal

in Nineveh in modern day Iraq.

Escher Bonapal was the last great king of the Assyrian Empire around the year 700 BC.

In addition to being a great general, Escher Bonapal was also an intellectual.

He had his library built for his own purposes.

It was discovered in 1849 and the library contains over 30,000 clay tablets, most of which are broken.

...