A History of Archival Practice

Paul Delsalle, Margaret Procter

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367882266
• eBook ISBN: 9781317187868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This revised translation of the classic 1998 Une histoire de l'archivistique provides a wide-ranging international survey of developments in archival practices and management, from the ancient world to the present day.

The volume has been substantially updated to incorporate recent scholarship and provide additional examples from the English-speaking world. These new additions complement the original text and offer a broad and up-to-date survey, with examples spanning Europe, Africa, Asia and North and South America. The bibliography has also been updated with new material and supplementary English language sources, making it an accessible and up-to-date resource for those working and researching in the field of archives and archival history.

This book is an essential reference volume for both archivists and historians, as well as anyone interested in the history of archives.

Chapter 1
The ancient world

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The history of archives, and of their management in the ancient world, is comparatively recent as a discrete area of research. Though valuable studies exist, it is still not possible to give a wholly reliable overview or make wholly plausible comparisons.¹ The wide-ranging account given in this introductory chapter is therefore both cursory and provisional. It attempts to highlight the evidence that does exist and while the examples can only be limited, they are drawn from across the most important ancient civilisations of antiquity.

1.1 Before records, before writing: signs and symbols²

1.1.1 Durability and permanence

Early humans, wherever located, all showed the same urge to make marks or leave foot or handprints in order to transmit information. Cave art, whether intended as a memorising or magical act, remains the most beautiful example of this impulse. Notable rock paintings are found throughout the world, from Scandinavia, France and Spain – Cro-Magnon examples are thought to date back 40,000 years – to Nubia, Brazil and Argentina as well as in Australia and China. But there are more recent examples: the most recent rock art in the Ndedema Gorge, South Africa, may date to the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries CE, while paintings and carvings were still being made during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by indigenous peoples throughout North America.

1.1.2 Petroglyphs

One of the largest groups of rock carvings (or petroglyphs) can be found in what is now alpine Italy. The collection, recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site, comprises more than 140,000 symbols and figures carved primarily between 8,300 and 500 BCE, though additions continued to be made through the Roman, medieval and early modern periods. The carvings show not only human figures and objects of daily life – including agriculture, navigation and ritual – but also include a whole series of spectacular carvings of a topographical character. These so-called mappiforms, often several metres long, resemble maps and mark land divisions.

The most extraordinary of these is the Bedolina map, dated variously between the fifteenth and eighth centuries BCE, which appears to shows a village with six buildings (at least) and 30 fields and, apparently, a network of trackways:³ whether or not it is a land survey or other cadastral record, it clearly held some kind of meaning or memory for the community. A wall painting from the early urban centre of Çatal Hüyük, now Turkey, dated to around 6,200 BCE is also claimed (not without dispute) as a similar, but even earlier, example of a rock ‘map’.⁴

1.2 The Ancient Near East: Mesopotamia (Sumeria, Akkadia, Babylonia and Assyria)

1.2.1 The dawn of writing – and of records

The urge to record was an early and automatic one: a human compulsion to organise the world, to put things in order and make lists, as complete and detailed as possible. The Near East was once considered the sole cradle of writing though it is now acknowledged that writing emerged independently in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica.⁵ The most commonly found writing support, the clay tablet, appears to have developed from the earlier use of clay for tokens, or counters, to represent types and numbers of commodity.⁶ In Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq/south-west Iran) and specifically the city of Uruk, the cuneiform writing system grew out of the development of early written signs on a clay tablet to represent the amount and type of commodity. Cuneiform spread throughout the Ancient Near East and Egypt, and was to remain the most widely used system of writing in those areas for nearly 4,000 years; the earliest accurately dated examples, around 3300 BCE, come from Egypt (see section 1.5 below) as well as from Mesopotamia itself. The largest number of clay tablets found, around 40,000, were excavated from the Sumerian city of Ngirsu or Girsu (modern Tell Telloh in Iraq); more than 25,000 have so far been located at Nineveh (today Kuyundjik). But to date, the greatest archaeological discoveries to bear on the history of archival practice have been those at Mari (now in Syria) and, even more so, at Ebla.

Figure 1.1 Near and Middle Eastern sites mentioned in this chapter.

There is extensive evidence for the importance attached to authenticity. Tablets bearing a seal impression (often from a rolled cylinder seal) have been found at Uruk and Susa, at Nineveh (in Iraq), at Choga and Godin Tepe (now Western Iran) and at Habuba Kabira in northern Syria; the seals themselves, often hollow allowing them to be worn on a cord or as jewellery, are a common archaeological find. As a further security measure, the tablets themselves were often encased in a clay ‘envelope’: the envelope bore the same information as the inner tablet, ensuring that any tampering with that outer envelope would be obvious when the intended recipient broke it to read the tablet within.⁷

1.2.2 Ebla: the archive room

Around 3000 BCE the town of Ebla (now Tell Mardikh, around 60 km south of Aleppo, Syria) was a flourishing urban centre. Excavations, first started around 1964, revealed that this powerful city-state was destroyed by fire around 2300 BCE (following invasion by an Akkadian army); among the initial finds were 17,000 tablets and tablet fragments, representing some 5,000 original single documents, in the king’s palace.⁸

The archival importance of Ebla lies in the extraordinary fact that these tablets, although they had fallen to the floor because of the collapse of the shelving, ended up more or less in their original order. It was therefore possible to understand how they had been arranged. At least three levels of shelves, one above the other could be distinguished within the main archive room. The room itself was connected to the royal audience hall, a layout also found in the royal palaces of Mari and Ugarit (see below). The tablets had been placed upright on the shelves, one in front of the other, and leaning against the wall. Other smaller tablets were stored in earthenware jars and in baskets.

They were arranged on the basis of their contents, so, for example, accounts were differentiated from royal decrees and each record type was separated from the others. Within each series of documents, arrangement was not necessarily chronological. No finding aid has yet been discovered. These are certainly archives, documents retained for administrative purposes, rather than a library of literary productions. They relate, in particular, to the distribution of textiles and the distribution and export or delivery of metal objects (silver and gold). There are also some records of agricultural production and foodstuffs and a relatively small number of royal letters or royal decrees. The records kept together in the main room are a homogenous corpus – perhaps describable as a fonds – deriving from the palace administration. In two further rooms fitted out for the purpose were found other types of document, though the origin of these was more varied: administrative, economic or religious texts, letters and so on.

The Ebla discovery is one of the greatest accumulations of records from this era so far discovered. At the same time, given that the tablets appear to date from a single period of around 40 years (c.2350–2300 BCE) it appears that the archive itself was not particularly long-lived, and a similar limited time span is typical of most of the archives or record groups discussed here.

1.2.3 Mari and Nippur

Mari (now Tell Hariri, Syria, towards the Iraqi border) was conquered by the Babylonian empire in c.1760 BCE. Excavations of the palace of the king Zimri-Lim (c.1782–1759 BCE) revealed more than 20,000 clay tablets, often described as an extensive administrative archive.⁹ The tablets were consolidated into three main categories: those relating to internal government, to diplomacy and to the economy. It is clear that while the majority of records were retained for only short periods there was also some attention given to the arrangements for their retrieval: a letter from the royal steward records how he identified ‘two chests containing the tablets … that were sealed’.¹⁰

Beyond the palaces, temples were as much centres of economic activity as of religious activity and possibly offered a more stable environment for record-keeping. There are instances of archival accumulations extending for far l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Introduction to the French edition (1998)
• Introduction to the English edition
• 1 The ancient world
• 2 The classical world: from Greek city states to the Roman empire
• 3 Archives and archival practices in Asia and Africa, antiquity to the eighteenth century
• 4 Archives and archival practices in the Americas, to the eighteenth century
• 5 In the chanceries and muniment rooms of medieval Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries
• 6 Buildings and equipment in Western Europe, late antiquity to the seventeenth century
• 7 The defining era: Simancas, the Habsburgs and the sixteenth century
• 8 State bureaucracy and archival centralisation in early modern Europe
• 9 Being an archivist in early modern Europe
• 10 Methods and techniques for classification and arrangement in the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries
• 11 Legislation, literature and practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• 12 Buildings and readers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• 13 Archives destroyed, protected and reconstituted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• 14 The rise of a profession in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• 15 From mutual assistance to international networks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• 16 Conclusion: the value of the historical perspective
• Afterword to the English edition
• Index