page_title: Book
section_title: Antiquity
hierarchical_section_title: Book / History / Antiquity
caption_attribution_description: English: Exhibit in the Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA. This work is old enough so that it is in the public domain. Photography was permitted in the museum without restriction. Translation: "As I, Inanna, approached the mountain it showed me no respect, as I approached the mountain range of Ebih it showed me no respect. Since they showed me no respect, since they did not put their noses to the ground for me, since they did not rub their lips in the dust for me, I shall personally fill the soaring mountain range with my terror. Against its magnificent sides I shall place magnificent battering rams . . . . ".
context_page_description: A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is codex. In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page.
  As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and a still considerable, though not so extensive, investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage that reflects the fact that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's Physics is called a book. In an unrestricted sense, a book is the compositional whole of which such sections, whether called books or chapters or parts, are parts.
  The intellectual content in a physical book need not be a composition, nor even be called a book.
context_section_description: When writing systems were created in ancient civilizations, a variety of objects, such as stone, clay, tree bark, metal sheets, and bones, were used for writing; these are studied in epigraphy.
caption: Sumerian clay tablet, currently housed in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, inscribed with the text of the poem Inanna and Ebih by the priestess Enheduanna, the first author whose name is known[6]
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