Clay tablet rooms at Ebla were archives before the word existed
An archive is both a curated pile of records and the place that keeps them. English borrowed French archives from Latin and Greek arkheion—the magistrates’ house—attesting the noun in the early 1600s and archivist by the mid-1700s.
An archive holds records that build up naturally as a person or organisation goes about legal, commercial or administrative business, kept to show how that body worked; one metaphor calls them the secretions of an organism. That sets archives apart from libraries of published books, and from the computing sense of a file bundling other files. The people who run them are archivists, and their discipline, covering organisation, preservation and access, is archival science. Oral traditions such as Palestinian hikaye can serve the same purpose for communities.
Record rooms are ancient. Excavations at Ebla, Mari, Amarna, Hattusas, Ugarit and Pylos have turned up collections of hundreds or thousands of tablets from the third and second millennia BC. The Chinese, Greeks and Romans all kept archives, the Romans calling theirs tabularia, and the Justinian Code assumed a society would set aside a place for its documents. England built archives and access methods after 1066, and the Swiss after 1450.
Theory came later. Jacob von Rammingen's manuals of 1571 and Baldassarre Bonifacio's treatise of 1632 are the earliest Western forerunners of archival science. The French Revolution founded the National Archives in 1790 from seized government, church and private holdings, and in 1883 Gabriel Richou wrote the West's first treatise on archival theory, codifying the respect des fonds principle that Natalis de Wailly had set out in 1841.
The scale today is vast. France's National Archives hold 373 kilometres of shelved material, some dating to AD 625, plus almost 75 terabytes of digital files, while the defence ministry's separate archive runs to about 450 kilometres. Britain's National Archives, formerly the Public Record Office, fill 185 kilometres of shelving and keep growing. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble and Levi Strauss run corporate archives, and several European bodies, the European Commission among them, deposit theirs with the European University Institute in Florence.
Source: Archive
