L is for Library

Libraries might seem too modern a topic for an ancient history compilation that focuses elsewhere on the first bit of thread or shaped dish. Libraries do come much later in sequence. By definition, libraries are historic rather than prehistoric, since writing has to exist in order for someone to keep collections of it. Yet even if today’s examples are all after 3300 BCE, it’s true that most societies that developed writing also created a way of storing it.

One of the most famous ancient institutions–a wonder perhaps bigger than the other seven ancient wonders–was the Library of Alexandria. It was the most ambitious and likely biggest: the Internet of its day. But Alexandria was by no means the first or even only great library of the ancient era. Moreover, different cultures took different approaches to what they stored, and that difference says something about what cultures value.

As we explore libraries, we should consider:

1. What constitutes a “library”?
2. What cultures created libraries in ancient times?
3. What did the creation of libraries suggest about humans, and what lessons can be learned from Alexandria?

How to Re-invent the Wheel

Several fantasy/sci fi stories concern beings who have ancestral or infinite memory, who keep all the important events, stories, and ideas in their heads. Unfortunately, humans don’t have that capability, but we still like to know things. We don’t like to–as the saying goes–re-invent the wheel. The best way for people to know how to not re-invent the wheel is to write down how to make a wheel, why wheels are useful, and how best to improve wheels. That’s a library.

The Greeks called it bibliotheka. Byblos was the Egyptian port where papyrus was made and theke meant repository, case, a place where you set things. The Romans used the word liber for book, after lubhro, tree bark, or stripping leaves. Hence, the cultures which spoon-fed their words into English created terms that referred to where the words were put. In contrast, the Greek word for “word” is logos and for “writing” is graphe; the Latin word for writing is scriptus. Yet a scriptorium was where the clerks did copying. The library, according to the Greeks and Romans, was a place where the physical records were stored.

An even better word for what the earliest civilizations–Egypt, Sumeria, Babylonia–had was archive. Archive refers to arche–the government or ruler. The earliest libraries were archives or storage of government documents, in particular. Over time, the most enlightened of the leaders began to include not just list of taxes, laws, or council meetings but also all the important information that a society might want to know. That might mean including all the scientific, historical, and creative (storytelling) information as well.

It Goes in Your Permanent Record

Say what you will about accountants–and you do make jokes, I hear you!–but they invented writing, numbers, and libraries. The first writing, which I’ve discussed before, derived out of tax and financial records between farmers, businesses, and the government of Mesopotamia. It was cuneiform, from the Latin cuneus meaning wedge-shaped.

These wedge-shaped characters evolved over a long time from pictures were created by pressing a stick into clay. By 3300 BCE, the pictures had been replaced by mere symbols, the stick had a triangular end, and the clay was cut out in rectangles. As long as the tablet wasn’t buried or dropped, the writing still exists. Cylinders were preserved by especially important documents, like the history of the current king.

Thus, the earliest libraries of the leaders of Babylon, Ur, Nineveh, and all the hot spots across Sumeria, Assyria, &c &c were clay tablets. If they were rectangular, they could be stacked or lined up. Because they were thick clay, their contents were labeled on the edge, just like a book.

The Houses of Maat

The Egyptians developed a different-looking writing system. Egyptian hieroglyphics were both pictorial and logographic, which means sometimes the pictures mean the “thing” and sometimes the pictures are a sound of a part of the word, like a rebus. Egypt also scratched the words out with a little color on to the bark of a plant, papyrus. Papyrus fibers were stripped, watered, rolled together, and dried–a more complex manufacturing compared with cutting out rectangles in clay. Remember, though, that Egypt had created a robust textile industry built around linen, so they were no strangers to manufacturing what they needed.

The rolled papyrus scrolls were stored atop each other, slightly less efficiently than the tablets, perhaps, but using less space. It seems logical to assume that the archivists–librarians, records storage experts, data miners–would have grouped like things together. While papyrus did last for centuries, little is left to examine, and none of the original Egyptian libraries.

The god who ruled over Egyptian libraries, logically, was Maat, creator of logic, law, order, efficiency, and bureaucracy. Document storage happened in several categorized Houses, as listed by Egyptologist Katarina Zinn:

per-medjat (“house of books”); per-medjat-netjer (“house of divine
books”); per-medjat-netjer-per-aa (“house of divine books of the great house,” i.e., pharaoh/palace); per-ankh (“house of life”); per-medw-netjer (“house of the divine words/hieroglyphs”); per-(nw)-seshw (“house of writings”); khwt-jrjw (“house of ritual writings”); and js-n-seshw (“chamber/office of writings”).

In other words, these were not–for Egypt–storage rooms for poems or epics, the fiction that we think of libraries housing today. These were storage rooms for the most vital of Egyptian documents of the Middle Kingdom (@2050 BCE): administrative records, bureaucratic archives, temple-cult sacred, divinatory, and magical texts. As Zinn nicely puts it, “These writings documented the progress of Maat, the cosmic order of right routine and rules, and reflected the specific specialization of the library.”

Hence, while the folks in the Fertile Crescent created writing, the oldest known archival system was found in Egypt. The Mesopotamians were not to be outdone.

The Legacy of Ashurbanipal

In roughly 600 BCE, after numerous wars raged back and forth across everything east and south of the Mediterranean, an empire under Assyria had conquered not only all the Middle East but also Egypt. The great ruler of all this territory was Ashurbanipal (669-631 BCE). He probably would enjoy us knowing now that he “had” all that, but what we really appreciate him for is his library.

While today only bits and pieces remain, the great Assyrian library contained at least 30,000 tablets because these were uncovered by archaeologists in the mid-19th century, excavating the city of Nineveh. Ashurbanipal was an excellent military strategist and shrewd negotiator who spoke multiple languages. Because he appreciated arts, culture, and acquiring things, he created a massive storehouse for all of it. This was not a public library, mind you, but a library for him personally. You know the type.

Still, we are lucky that he had the foresight from thinking of library as government archives to a broader definition of all work, all knowledge, all stories. He wrote to other cities and empires asking for copies of their books. He further took books as spoils of war, and strong-armed other leaders under his control, e.g. Babylon, into sending over their texts to become safely stored in his library. All these texts had many forms: literary compositions such as divination, religious, lexical, medical, mathematical and historical texts as well as epics and myths (which were a tiny fraction); legal documents; royal correspondence, and contracts or treaties between empires.

We can frown at his arm-twisting methods, but he redefined for the known region what a library was for. Because he collected histories, science, and epics, we now know a lot of about what happened in the region. And we also have the Epic of Gilgamesh. If you’re not familiar with old Gilgie, wait until letter P.

Other Storage of the Divine, the Scientific, and the Historic

Government correspondence is not the only thing you can store in a library. Moreover, rooms full of scrolls or tablets are not the only way you could have a library. Other cultures found other ways.

The Chinese, by the time of the Shang dynasy (~1500-1000 BCD) had created oracle bones, which they used extensively both for divination and for storage. An oracle bone, usually an ax shoulder or turtle bottom, would have a question inscribed on it. The bone would be heated, and the cracks would be “read.” The resulting prediction would be written on the bone.

Lest you immediately start rolling your eyes about mysticism and primitive behavior, I will remind you of the behavior of the stock market, and how traders “predict” future economics and market prices based on fundamentals, elves, the Fed, dead cat bounce, random walk, regression trends–need I go on? Twenty-first century humans still try to predict things, with about the same level of success–despite a great deal more knowledge and data–as the Shang dynasty. We might get as much use predicting the NASDAQ using oracle bones.

Meanwhile, these oracle bones played a remarkable role in historical terms. They had the date and other historical information inscribed on them along with the predictions. Thus, not only did they house thousands of unique Chinese characters, the evidence of early Chinese writing itself, but they housed Chinese history, too. You can interpret this as saying that knowledge was put into the hands of the divine, via prayer and priestly interpretation. But you can also argue that this made knowledge sacred itself, by linking important information to a spiritually based system.

Later Chinese historians claimed that these collected oracle bones–and the script on them–might have commenced thousands of years earlier, in one case “3000 years.” That would certainly make them the oldest library ever created, although stockpiles that old have never been found, so we can’t verify the claim. Yet what has been found is some 150,000 oracle bones with script, which have been instrumental both in describing early Chinese history and culture as well as the development of Chinese writing itself. While it may seem a stretch, these bones constitute a kind of library.

Consider also the Mayan version of library, the codex. These were written by scribes under the tutelage of Mayan priests–note the symbiosis between recording and religion in all of these cultures. The codices captured much key information about the Mayan culture that we know today. As with Egypt, Sumeria, and China, these recorded for the Mayans details about the calendar, the mathematical system, the history of their tribes and leaders, and key stories about their gods. In some cases, the “mythology” was integrated with the history, meaning this library also fused the religious with the literary with the scientific.

Destroying the Knowledge of Civilizations

Only a fraction of the Mayan codices have survived. The Spanish Catholics who overran the cultural remains and “conquered” in the name of European economic interests burned the vast majority of Mayan knowledge. We don’t really know what the Mayans knew because its library was destroyed. This reminded me of the destruction of a better known library, that of Alexandria.

The wondrous Library of Alexandria was established @290 BCE by the Ptolemys, the Greek leaders who took the territory over after Alexander the Great died,. Alexander, at least, had created a city for himself in which to house this institution.

The Ptolemys, like Ashurbanipal, craved texts, so much so that they set out to have a copy of every book in the world put into their library at Alexandria. In some cases, they acquired the only copy, and in many others, they arranged to have scribes make copies. It was like having a monument, but instead of building the pyramids or Versailles or Ptolemy statues, they amassed a giant storehouse of the world’s knowledge. Over the four centuries it existed, the Library collected many important ideas, from Aristotle and Plato, as well as innovations from Euclid (geometry), Ptolemy (astronomy), and Galen (medicine).

Several stories purport to describe how Alexandria was destroyed, but the truth seems to be a combination of factors. Julius Caesar did attack the city and in burning the port, burned part of the library in 48 BCE. As time passed, parts decayed and were rebuilt; some books were “borrowed” and never returned. By the time Christians were running the Roman Empire from Constantinople, pagan ideas were no longer desirable. In 391 CE, non-Christian temples across the Roman Empire were systematically destroyed, which included part of the library. Much of it was already gone by then anyway.

Keep in mind, too, that aside from the willful destruction of knowledge by others, books decay. Cuneiform lasted but papyrus did not. Books on papyrus, parchment, or in another other form had to be recopied every few centuries, or they would be lost. That’s true of books now.

Even if the books don’t decay and heretics don’t burn the place, there are other ways to harm libraries. The locals harass the librarians to remove individual books from view. Continuous attack, as with Caesar’s foray into Alexandria, is ever present. A significant chunk of the cuneiform tablets from Sumeria were once housed in Baghdad. Part of those were destroyed when Mongol and Christian forces overran the Islamic regime in 1258 CE. Another significant part were destroyed or looted when the Americans took Baghdad in 2003 CE. Libraries take a lot of collateral damage.

The word record means to remember or to call to mind. It can either mean to etch in memory or can be the place where things you want to remember forever are kept. The word comes from re + cord, which means heart because it was thought originally that memories were stored in the heart.

Like those superior beings that we are not, we need to store all the important things–great stories, important dates, scientific knowledge, crucial histories–in our hearts, or at least in the hearts outside our bodies. Those magnificent libraries.

But even libraries are not permanent.