by: Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, Jochem Kahl, Eun-Jeung Lee || The use of writing for the preservation and transmission of administrative, sci-entific, literary or religious knowledge – to name but a few instances – has a long history in ancient and pre-modern Near and Far Eastern civilizations. From the third millennium BCE onwards, systematic societal implementation of writing produced an incredible amount of written documents on e.g. clay, stone, bone, papyrus, bamboo, plant leaves, parchment or paper. Together with the emergence and systematic production of written data, the need for keeping, even safeguard-ing at least part of them became an important issue. Writing as a social institution requires long-term organizational framework to take charge of collecting and preserving written lore. In most societies...