Jessica Gössl

One of the best-known copies was discovered in the ruins of an ancient library, the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal.

Ashurbanipal was a king of the Assyrian Empire who lived in the 7th century BCE.

He had a reputation as an intellectual, and over the years, he built up an extraordinary collection of clay tablets, more than 30,000.

The king's library in Nineveh, now Mosul, Iraq, was one of the most important in the ancient world.

It housed a variety of religious and scientific works, as well as legal and financial texts.

The clay tablets were written in different languages and were carefully categorized and organized.

Interestingly, it was the destruction of the library that helped to preserve many of the texts.

It's thought that in 612 BCE, when Nineveh was burned during an invasion, a fire raged through the library, baking many of the tablets.

This made them harder and more durable, preserving the texts for posterity.

The existence of Asher Beneeple's library shows us how the written text had grown in importance over the centuries.

Originally a practical object, it came to represent something more profound, collective knowledge and learning.

Written texts were something to be kept, perhaps even treasured.

Over time, they would become a symbol of civilization itself.

Around 3200 BCE, about the time the Sumerians were developing cuneiform, the ancient Egyptians were coming up with their own writing system.

While Egyptian hieroglyphics seem to have emerged independently, some scholars believe that there was likely a Mesopotamian influence.

Either way, the hieroglyphic writing system, which combined a variety of symbols and phonetic elements, is recognized as something distinctly Egyptian.

And although the Egyptians may not have invented writing itself, they came up with another important innovation, one that would transform the evolution of the book.

As early as the third millennium BCE, about 5,000 years ago, Egyptians began to harvest the stem of the papyrus plant, turning it into a writing material.

Individual sheets of papyrus could be pasted together to form scrolls, some of which were several meters long.

Papyrus scrolls might be considered the books of ancient Egypt.