Small clay cylinders and tablets, invented in Sumer in southern Mesopotamia some 5,000 years ago, often contained just a dozen cuneiform characters in that ancient language, equivalent to a few hundred (or 102) bytes. The Oresteia, a trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus in the fifth century BCE, amounts to about 300,000 (or 105) bytes. Some rich senators in imperial Rome had libraries housing hundreds of scrolls, with one large collection holding at least 100 megabytes (108 bytes).
