As places that preserve written evidence, libraries existed as early as the third millennium B. C. E. Those from Mesopotamia featured baked clay tablets with cuneiform writing, and those from Egypt featured papyrus rolls. Great collections from this time are still being uncovered, such as the one at Ebla in modern Syria. They tell mostly of record-keeping agencies. In the centuries just before the birth of Christ, their records also came to be viewed as religious, political, and literary texts, and as this happened, the modern library emerged. It was a place, but it was also a center of the society's thought.

The most impressive library of antiquity was in Egypt at Alexandria, the city named for Aristotle's most famous pupil, Alexander the Great. The Pinakes ("tablets") of Callimachus listed its holdings, and probably also the titles that needed to be found and added...