Also excluded is the famous library of Alexandria with its equally famous librarian Callimachus, who affi xed inventories of texts on clay pinakes on the shelves, as well as the Roman laterculi or administrative registers.

The great library of Alexandria, which began around 300 B.C.E., created a cataloguing system called Pinakes to manage the estimated 500,000 books in the collection of the Ptolemaic pharaohs. The Pinakes were sophisticated bibliographical lists containing title, incipit (the first few lines of each text), the number of lines for each work, and a subject and author index.