To Represent Us Truly: The Job and Context of Preserving the Cultural Record

Аннотация

The preservation of government records has been a natural activity of governments since the estabhshment of the first government. The earliest libraries were really archives of government documents, including the records of rituals that kings performed to assure the favor of the gods. Those documents made up the collections of the first libraries in Mesopotamia, dating to about 1500 BC, and ofthe classics on which Chinese civilization has rested for more than three thousand years. Historians rely on the government records preserved in those libraries and classical works—truly they are anthologies—to reconstruct the ancient cultures that produced them. For them, government records are cultural records. They still are, but when we moderns talk about the cultural record, we have in mind a much broader range of cultural productions than those produced by government, even a government that had religious as well as secular functions.