From Gutenberg to the Internet: Timeline 899 BCE to 501 BCE.

Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria during these years, collects a library at Nineveh, of 20,000 - 30,000 clay tablets written in cuneiform script in an effort to collect all knowledge. Of this library approximately 1200 texts remain, mostly preserved in the British Museum. The library was rediscovered at Nineveh in 1853, and is considered the earliest systematically collected library. Among its treasures on 11 clay tablets are the most complete version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.Discovery of these tablets and their deciphering in 1872 by George Smith at the British Museum, caused this epic to be rediscovered by the world. The library includes 660 cuneiform tablets that concern medicine. These were published in facsimile for the first time by Reginald C. Thompson as Assyrian Medical Texts. From the Originals in the British Museum (1923).

Unlike archives of business records or inventories, or state or institutional records, libraries are collections of fiction or non-fiction books, though later libraries will sometimes incorporate archives.To deter thieves, Ashurbanipal has the following curse written on many of his tablets. It is the earliest known book curse: "I have transcribed upon tablets the noble products of the work of the scribe which none of the kings who had gone before me had learned, together with the wisdom of Nabu insofar as it existeth [in writing]. I have arranged them in classes, I have revised them and I have placed them in my palace, that I, even I, the ruler who knoweth the light of Ashur, the king of the gods, may read them. Whosoever shall carry off this tablet, or shall inscribe his name on it, side by side with mine own, may Ashur and Belit overthrow him in wrath and anger, and may they destroy his name and posterity in the land." (quoted by Drogin, Anathema! [1983] 52-53.)

Circa 800 B.C.E.	A writing tablet in Greek/Phoenician dating from this time is thought to be "the oldest European alphabet, the oldest writing tablet extant, and part of the world's oldest book in codex form. The other old writing tablets are 2 from Nimrod, one ivory, the other walnut wood, dated 707 - 705 BC., in addition to a 8th c. BC Neo-Hittite wood tablet. (Roberts/Skeat: The Birth of the Codex, pp. 11-12.) Apart from the present MS the oldest Greek inscription of any length is the Dipylon oinochoe from Athens, ca. 740 BC. The oldest short inscriptions are dated ca. mid 8th c. BC. A tablet originally bound with the present ones is: "The Würzburger Alphabettafel", published by A. Henbeck: Würzburger Jahrbücher für Altertumswissenschaft, 12, pp. 7-20, 1986. The codex originally consisted of at least 5 tablets. . . .The Alphabet is repeated over and over, and contains the North Semitic (Phoenician) number of letters (22), ayin/aleph to taw/tau in Phoenician and Greek order, written in continuous retrograde lines. It represents the earliest and most complete link between Greek letter forms and the North Semitic parent forms. Writing tablets were familiar to Homer. It was on a folded tablet Proitos scratched the "deadly marks" that were intended to send Bellerophon to his death. The Iliad VI:168-179." (Schoyen Collection MS 108).
Circa 750 B.C.E.	Scholars generally agree that the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey, products of the oral tradition, undergo a process of standardization and refinement out of older material around this time. The standardization may have been caused by the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus who reformed the recitation of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaic festival. Classicists will later argue that this reform must have involved the production of a canonical written text. "Most Classicists would agree that, whether there was ever such a composer as 'Homer' or not, the Homeric poems are the product of an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets, aoidoi. An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems consist of regular, repeating phrases; even entire verses repeat. Could the Iliad and Odyssey have been oral-formulaic poems, composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorized traditional verses and phases? Millman Parry and Albert Lord pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of epic poetry in an exclusively oral culture. The crucial words are 'oral' and 'traditional.' Parry started with 'traditional.' The repetitive chunks of language, he said, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and they were useful to the poet in composition. He called these chunks of repetitive language 'formulas.' "Exactly when these poems would have taken on a fixed written form is subject to debate. The traditional solution is the 'transcription hypothesis', wherein a non-literate 'Homer' dictates his poem to a literate scribe in the 6th century or earlier. More radical Homerists, such as Gregory Nagy, contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems as 'scripture' did not exist until the Hellenistic period."
668-627 B.C.E.	Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria during these years, collects a library at Nineveh, of 20,000 - 30,000 clay tablets written in cuneiform script in an effort to collect all knowledge. Of this library approximately 1200 texts remain, mostly preserved in the British Museum. The library was rediscovered at Nineveh in 1853, and is considered the earliest systematically collected library. Among its treasures on 11 clay tablets are the most complete version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.Discovery of these tablets and their deciphering in 1872 by George Smith at the British Museum, caused this epic to be rediscovered by the world. The library includes 660 cuneiform tablets that concern medicine. These were published in facsimile for the first time by Reginald C. Thompson as Assyrian Medical Texts. From the Originals in the British Museum (1923). Unlike archives of business records or inventories, or state or institutional records, libraries are collections of fiction or non-fiction books, though later libraries will sometimes incorporate archives.To deter thieves, Ashurbanipal has the following curse written on many of his tablets. It is the earliest known book curse: "I have transcribed upon tablets the noble products of the work of the scribe which none of the kings who had gone before me had learned, together with the wisdom of Nabu insofar as it existeth [in writing]. I have arranged them in classes, I have revised them and I have placed them in my palace, that I, even I, the ruler who knoweth the light of Ashur, the king of the gods, may read them. Whosoever shall carry off this tablet, or shall inscribe his name on it, side by side with mine own, may Ashur and Belit overthrow him in wrath and anger, and may they destroy his name and posterity in the land." (quoted by Drogin, Anathema! [1983] 52-53.)
Circa 646 B.C.E.	King Ashurbanipal records his rebuilding of Ezida, the temple of Nabû, the god of writing on a limestone slab in Neo Assyrian cuneiform script. "TO NABÛ, EXALTED LORD, WHO DWELLS IN EZIDA, WHICH IS IN NINEVEH, HIS LORD: I ASHURBANIPAL, KING OF ASSYRIA, THE ONE LONGED FOR AND DESTINED BY HIS GREAT DIVINITY, WHO, AT THE ISSUING OF HIS ORDER AND THE GIVING OF HIS SOLEMN DECREE, CUT OFF THE HEAD OF TE'UMMAN, KING OF ELAM, AFTER DEFEATING HIM IN BATTLE, AND WHOSE GREAT COMMAND MY HAND CONQUERED UMMAN-IGASH, TANMARIT, PA'E AND UMMAN-ALTASH, WHO RULED OF ELAM AFTER TE'UMMAN. I YOKED THEM TO MY SEDAN CHAIR, MY ROYAL CONVEYANCE. WITH HIS GREAT HELP I ESTABLISHED DECENT ORDER IN ALL THE LANDS WITHOUT EXCEPTION. AT THAT TIME I ENLARGED THE STRUCTURE OF THE COURT OF THE TEMPLE OF NABÛ, MY LORD, USING MASSIVE LIMESTONE. MAY NABÛ LOOK WITH JOY ON THIS, MAY HE FIND IT ACCEPTABLE. BY THE RELIABLE IMPRESS OF YOUR WEDGES MAY THE ORDER FOR A LIFE OF LONG DAYS COME FORTH FROM YOUR LIPS, MAY MY FEET GROW OLD BY WALKING IN EZIDA IN YOUR DIVINE PRESENCE" (Schoyen Collection MS 2180)
604-562 B.C.E.	Under King Nebuchadnezzar II, the king who is named more than 90 times in the Old Testament, the restoration and enlargement of the ziggurat in Babylon is completed after 43 years of labor. The ziggurat was originally built around the time of Hammurabi. It has been calculated that for its construction at least 17 million bricks had to be made and fired. Some of these bricks are stamped with inscriptions in cuneiform. Later the ziggurat will be known as the Tower of Babel and the few bricks from this that survive are known as Tower of Babel bricks, or Nebuchadnezzar II bricks. "Babylon with the ziggurat was captured by Kyros 538 BC, Dareios I 519 BC, Xerxes ca. 483 BC, and entirely destroyed by Alexander I the Great in 331 BC. It is this tall stepped temple tower which is referred to in Genesis 11:1-9, and became known as 'The Tower of Babel'. The bricks are specifically mentioned in Genesis 11:3: 'Come, let us make bricks and bake them in the fire. - For stone they used bricks and for mortar they used bitumen'. The black bitumen is still visible on the back of the present baked brick. These bricks are considered so important and interesting that British Museum had their copy on exhibit with special handout descriptions, from where parts of the present information is taken. For a stele illustrating The Tower of Babel, see MS 2063. Nebuchadnezzar II was the founder of the New Babylonian empire. He captured Jerusalem in 596 and 586 BC, burnt down the temple and all of Jerusalem, carried its treasures off to Babylon, and took the Jews into captivity (2 kings 24-25). Nebuchadnezzar II is the king who is named more than 90 times in the Old Testament. Daniel 1-4 is almost entirely devoted to the description of his greatness and reign, his rise and fall, and submission to God." (Schoyen Collection MS 1815/1).
586 B.C.E.	Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed and the Jews are exiled into the Babylonian Captivity.
Circa 550 B.C.E.	The DUENOS inscription found on a vase on Quirnal Hill in Rome, is inscribed with the second earliest known Old Latin text. Old Latin, the precursor of classical Latin, is known from non-book writing such as stone inscriptions.
537 B.C.E.	After the overthrow of Babylonia by the Persians, King Cyrus II (Cyrus the Great) permits various religious groups, including perhaps 40,000 Jews, to return to their native land. Upon conquering Babylonia Cyrus issues a declaration inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform on a clay cylinder which was discovered in in Babylon in 1879. Known as the Cyrus Cylinder, it is preserved in the British Museum. On the cylinder Cyrus announces a number of reforms that he made after conquering the country. These include arranging for the restoration of temples and organizing the return to their homelands of a number of people who had been held in Babylonia by the Babylonian kings.
535 B.C.E.	Having taken 4 months to walk from Babylon to Jerusalem, the Jews begin construction of the Second Temple. Missing from the Second Temple are the Ark of the Covenant and the Ten Commandments.
circa 501 B.C.E.	Panini, an Indian grammarian from Gandhara, composes his formulation of 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology known as Ashtadhyayi. This is the earliest known work on descriptive linguistics. It includes the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the root, and metarules, transformation, and recursion.