Our oldest archival records originate from the Near East. Systems of archival record-keeping developed over several millennia in Mesopotamia before spreading to Egypt, the Mycenean world, and the Persian empire, and continuing through the Hellenistic and Seleucid periods. Yet we know little about the way archival practices were established, transmitted, modified, and adapted by other civilizations. This interdisciplinary volume offers a systematic approach to
archival documents and to the societies which created them, addressing questions of formal aspects of creating, writing, and storing ancient documents, and showing how archival systems were copied and adapted across a wide geographical area and an extensive period of time.
archival documents and to the societies which created them, addressing questions of formal aspects of creating, writing, and storing ancient documents, and showing how archival systems were copied and adapted across a wide geographical area and an extensive period of time.
The quality of the contributions is uniformly high ... Several of the chapters offer excellent surveys of the archival materials and practices of the civilizations on which they focus, and these ought to be accessible to motivated undergraduates as well as graduate students and teachers; those by Steinkeller, Palaima, and Davies stand out in this respect. New England Classical Journal