As soon as writing was invented in Sumer, Pharaonic Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula, the city of Byblos on the Phoenician coast (Lebanon), and Ras Shamra (Ugarit in Syria), the world did not just enter the age of history by crossing prehistory, but it also entered the age of science. Emperor Ashurbanipal ordered in the second millennium BC the establishment of a library and the translation of all Sumerian and Babylonian myths into the classical Assyrian language. Likewise, Ugarit in Syria did the same, as a massive archive filled with epics and myths appeared there too. The Phoenicians took the use of skin and gazelle parchment from the ancient Egyptians after writing had been a scratching on clay tablets.  

In an article published by "Ahwal Al-Ma'rifa" magazine in Shawwal 1417 AH by Professor Dr. Hassan Zaza, the consultant at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, he revealed that writing went through different stages. The first of these stages was pictorial writing, which is drawing the image of the thing subject of talk and its shape. The second stage: the abstract symbolic stage, which is converting these images into shapes agreed upon in drawing, and close in shape to the ancient image. The third stage: syllabic writing, which are symbols that refer to syllables in the structure of the word. The fourth stage: alphabetic writing, which is the highest level of ancient writing, and it is the fruit of developing technology in recording by moving from picturing the thing or abstracting and summarizing it to analyzing it into phonetic syllables that have no relation to the pronunciation of words, and then finally to analyzing these syllables into the European language and others. Diacritics may be found distributed above and below the consonant letters, such as the vowel marks in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac languages and the like.

The messages of recording by writing were the fruit of very long human attempts to transform the audible sound into speech perceived by the sight. Since the first Hieroglyphic eras in Egypt and Sumer, writing was the key that opened the doors of libraries in the world, as evidenced by what we pointed out that the Assyrian pottery tablets were the complete archive for the heritage of that civilization, whether the original or the translated ones. Pictorial writing in Egypt does not deviate from this rule except a little, and this little is the Egyptian's pride in his intellectual heritage. There was no papyrus or text carved on stone or metal that was translated; rather, they were all authentic Egyptian. Even the Egyptian scribe's job was considered sacred.

Types of Egyptian writings were known, including Hieroglyphic, which is the Pharaonic royal monumental writing that maintains the symbol as it is, and Hieratic writing or the writing of the priests in which Hieroglyphic images decrease, and writing on papyrus papers or on animal parchment increases to be preserved in scrolls or in pages that later became notebooks. Phoenicia came and analyzed the image and syllables into their primary elements, i.e. sounds, which reduced the numbers of units used from a few thousands in Babylonian-Assyrian writing to a few hundreds in Pharaonic writing, to an alphabet circling around thirty letters in Phoenician writing. Therefore, and because of Phoenicia's proximity to Europe, this step moved from recording by writing and invaded the entire ancient civilized world, especially Europe. It is not possible to separate the idea of the library and the idea of the book, for since the first steps man felt that converting the audible sound into visible forms was not in vain, but it was to preserve the heritage.