Revisiting the history of the archives

registration practices in antiquity

Abstract

This paper describes the historical trajectory of the Assyrian records, specifically from the city of Kanesh, Anatolia region, in the period from the years 2025 BC to 1776 BC; from the records of ancient Ptolemaic Egypt (305 B.C. - 30 B.C.), Roman (30 B.C. - AD 641) and Byzantine (395 B.C. - AD 641); and records from the Babylonian period of the first dynasty, in the 20th to 17th centuries BC, seeking to demonstrate that the archive and its documents, in the studied periods, they were linked to everyday practices of a commercial, administrative, personal and social nature, without necessarily keeping a strict link with the central political powers of each government. Methodologically, this work presents a descriptive approach, of bibliographic character, specifically based on results of recent archaeological investigations. It concludes that the trajectory of the archives is strictly linked to the cultural aspect of civilizations, to the way they undertook the creation and preservation of their written documents; and that the archive is constituted, in the periods presented, as a space for consignment of documents and information accumulated and made available by its producers and eventual interested parties.