List of libraries in the ancient world
The great libraries of the ancient world served as archives for empires, sanctuaries for sacred writings, and depositories of literature and chronicles.
Syria, Iraq, Iran
- The archives and texts at Ebla, ca. 2500 to the destruction of the city ca. 2250 BC, constitute the oldest organized library yet discovered: see Ebla tablets.
- The libraries of Ugarit (in modern Syria), c. 1200 BC, include diplomatic archives, literary works and the earliest privately-owned libraries yet recovered.
- The Library of Ashurbanipal (established 668-627 BC) , in Nineveh (near modern Mosul, Iraq), long considered to be the first systematically collected library, was rediscovered in the 19th century. While the library had been destroyed, many fragments of the ancient cuneiform tablets survived, and have been reconstructed. Large portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh were among the many finds.[1][2][3]
- The Academy of Gundishapur in western Iran, established during the Persian Sassanid Empire in the 3rd through 6th centuries AD.
- The House of Wisdom, an Abbasid-era library and Arabic translation institute in Baghdad, Iraq. 8th century AD–1258.
Indian subcontinent
Africa
- The Library of Alexandria, Egypt, fl. 3rd century BC (c. 295 BC). The date of its destruction is uncertain, but it supposedly housed one of the largest collections in the classical world.[5]
Greece and Rome
- The Library of Pergamum at Pergamum (in what is now Turkey), also in the 3rd century BC, the Attalid kings formed the second best Hellenistic library after Alexandria, founded in emulation of the Ptolemies. When the Ptolemies stopped exporting papyrus, partly because of competitors and partly because of shortages, the Pergamenes invented a new substance to use in codices, called pergamum or parchment after the city. This was made of fine calfskin, a predecessor of vellum and paper.
- Libraries of the Forum, consisted of separate libraries founded in the time of Augustus near the Roman Forum that contained both Greek and Latin texts, separately housed, as was the conventional practice. There were libraries in the Porticus Octaviae near the Theatre of Marcellus, in the temple of Apollo Palatinus, and in the Bibliotheca Ulpiana in the Forum of Trajan.
- Private libraries of Ancient Rome were also considerable: Roman aristocracy saw the library as a point of prestige and many of these were transferred to the monasteries of the medieval years.
- The Villa of the Papyri, in Herculaneum, Italy is the only library known to have survived from classical antiquity. This villa's large private collection may have once belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus in the 1st century BC. Buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed the town in 79 AD, it was rediscovered in 1752, around 1800 carbonized scrolls were found in the villa's top story. Using modern techniques such as multi-spectral imaging, previously illegible or invisible sections on scrolls that have been unrolled are now being deciphered. It is possible that more scrolls remain to be found in the lower, unexcavated levels of the villa.
- The Theological Library of Caesarea Maritima, a late 3rd century AD establishment located in present-day Israel, was a great early Christian library. Through Origen of Alexandria and the scholarly priest Pamphilus of Caesarea, the school won a reputation for having the most extensive ecclesiastical library of the time, containing more than 30,000 manuscripts: Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil the Great, Jerome and others came to study there.
- The Imperial Library of Constantinople, founded in 330 AD, was largely destroyed or burned by crusaders during the Fourth Crusade.
- Library of Celsus was a library of antiquity located in the ancient city of Ephesus, western Anatolia.
References
- ^ Polastron, Lucien X.: Books On Fire: the Tumultuous Story of the World's Great Libraries 2007, page 3, Thames & Hudson Ltd, London
- ^ Menant, Joachim: "La bibliothèque du palais de Ninive" 1880, page 33, Paris: E. Leroux, "Quels sont maintenant ces Livres qui étaient recueillis et consérves avec tant de soin par les rois d'Assyrie dans ce précieux dépôt ? Nous y trouvons des livres sur l'histoire, la religion, les sciences naturelles, les mathématiques, l'astronomie, la grammaire, les lois et les coutumes; ..."
- ^ "Artwork From Ancient Assyrian Palaces on Exhibit". Assyrian International News Agency. http://www.aina.org/ata/20080803191515.htm. Retrieved 2010-01-04. "The king asserted that he could read the wedge-shaped cuneiform script, and his desire to preserve in one place all of the world's important works of literature and science has been called visionary. Some of the works collected by Ashurbanipal were 1,000 years old at the time. Included in the king's library were fragments from a copy of the Epic of Creation (7th century BC) as well as from The Epic of Gilgamesh (7th century BC), considered the most important work of Mesopotamian literature. In the 19th and 20th century, more than 20,000 cuneiform tablets were discovered by the British Museum."
- ^ "Really Old School," Garten, Jeffrey E. New York Times, 9 December 2006.
- ^ Polastron, Lucien X.: Books On Fire: the tumultuous story of the world's great libraries 2007, pages 10-23, Thames & Hudson Ltd, London
See also