The great libraries of the ancient world served as archives for empires, sanctuaries for sacred writings, and depositories of literature and chronicles.
Ancient Near East
Bogazköy Archive (1900–1190 B.C.) (Hattusa, modern Bogazkoy) This archive constituted the largest collection of Hittite texts discovered with approximately thirty thousand inscribed cuneiform tablets. The tablets had also been classified according to a precise system. The Library of Ashurbanipal (established 668–627 B.C.) in Nineveh (near modern Mosul, Iraq) Long considered to be the first systematically collected library, was rediscovered in the 19th century. While the library had been destroyed, many fragments of ancient cuneiform tablets survived, and have been reconstructed. Large portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh were among the many finds. Nuzi (Modern Yorgan Tepe) (1500 B.C.) This archive consisted of over 6,000 tablets written primarily in Babylonian cuneiform, however a select few were composed in the indigenous Hurrian language. Ugarit (Modern Ras Shamra) (1200 B.C.) Several thousand texts consisting of diplomatic archives, census records, literary works and the earliest privately owned libraries yet recovered. Even though the tablets were written in several different languages, the most important aspect of the library were the 1400 texts written in Ugaritic, unknown when the library was discovered in 1928. Tell Leilan (Northeast Syria) (1900 B.C.) This archive housed over a thousand clay tablets. Mari (Modern Tell Hariri) (1900 B.C.) The archive held approximately 15,000 tablets which included works on litigation, letters, foreign negotiations, literary, and theological works.
The Academy of Gondishapur in western Iran, established during the Persian Sassanid Empire in the 3rd through 6th centuries. The breadth of this institution was enormous and included a university, teaching hospital, and a library with over 400,000 titles. The academy was the epitome of the Sassanid Empire with its faculty proficient in the conventions of Zoroastrianism and ancient Persian as well as classical Indian scholarship. Sarouyeh was a large library in ancient pre-Islamic Iran.
