What is a book?
A book in its most general sense is a document or text recording something.
Ancient books and their materials
The oldest form of writing is the cuneiform (wedge-shape) found on clay tablets from the Middle Eastern region between the Tigris and Euphrates known as Mesopotamia (from the Greek for ‘between the rivers’), the modern Iraq and Syria. In about 3200BC the temple accountants of Sumer began to record their assets – animals, grain, financial records – with symbols based on pictures; these became more abstract, and were eventually used to record inventories, royal proclamations and literature.
The Sumerian tablet shown is from Uruk; it is one of the earliest known and records the allocation of beer rations to workers. The later version in stone is from the ruined city of Erebuni in Armenia, and this form of writing spread over all the countries of the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean.