In 1977, Ben-Michael Schueler published a paper titled "Update Reconsidered" in "Architecture and Models in Data Base Management Systems", the proceedings of the IFIP Working Conference on Data Base Management.
Following the year 1347 B.C., when Amenophis IV died, a mass update of a large Egyptian Data Base was undertaken. Every record pertaining to Aton was erased with hammer and chisel throughout the country. We shall call updating of records on the ground that a truth valid up to a certain point in time becomes untrue, an Aton-Update.
In the year 47 B.C., the most important Data Base of that time, the library of Alexandria was updated by a fire, leaving most of the 700,000 book scrolls as a cinder. We shall call this kind of update an Alexandria-Update (whether through fire or other causes).
From ancient times through and culminating in the Middle Ages, books made of vellum and other recording media were reused by scraping of old writing - such as the Iliad or Euclid's Elements -