Nor were these the only libraries supposed to have been in existence when the flood came, for the Egyptian priests told Solon of many libraries which were destroyed by it. One rather wonders at this too, for in those days of course they were apt to make their books fire and water proof (rather than the buildings as now) and the flood should not have hurt them, but if they were in fact destroyed it simply shows that they were made of papyrus, leather or unbaked clay!
These writers not only tell us in detail about many of the books which Noah must have had in his library, but even in some cases give us a list of the books themselves. We find thus e.g. that the library must have contained the following works at least by Adam (a) “De nominibus animantium”, (b) a census report of the Garden of Eden, which included all living things, (c) The 92d psalm, (d) A poem on the creation of Eve, and various other works, all, it is to be presumed, written after the fall; for the very same authentic chroniclers who ascribe these works to Adam declare that he was born at three o’clock, sinned at eleven, was “damnatus” at twelve of one day and driven out of Eden early next morning—which left little time for literary work on his part, one may suppose, while in Eden.
The library must have contained also, if our sources are correct, works by Eve (“conversation with the serpent”), Cain, Seth, Enos, Enoch, Methuselah and others, and various works by Noah himself, including his history of the world to his own time, written before the flood and published in two editions, one on wood and one on stone.
The surviving samples of these alleged works are not calculated to make one regret anything about the deluge so much as its failure to be more thorough. Take e.g. Adam’s poems on the creation of Eve. Imagine Noah’s sons, “In the Springtime, when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thought of love”, drawing out a tablet or two of this poem for inspiration and reading how calmly the new bride is invited by Adam to “shake hands and kiss him”!
The efforts to date the library of Adam have been various. A terminus ad quem is offered by Berosus, who asserts that the capital of the world before the Flood was named “The Library” or the “Book All”. He puts this at 250,000 years B.C., but this of course implies considerable development between Adam and the time when the world was populous enough to need a capital at all. There is, therefore, no necessary conflict between the veracious Berosus and the veracious modern historians of science, who place the terminus a quo at sixty million years ago. There is, however, considerable discrepancy between even the later of these two on the one hand and the very earliest of the one hundred and forty different dates between 3483 and 6984 B.C. actually assigned by more timid historians of the beginnings of Adamic civilization. As sober historians are bound to confess that at best the historical evidence for some 243,016 years on the one hand and 59,748,087 or so years on the other of Berosus’ date is not wholly continuous and 6984 B.C. may be regarded as about the earliest exact date known to have been ventured for Adamite libraries.
It hardly needs to be added that all these alleged patriarchal books and libraries are apocryphal although many of them have a respectable antiquity of more than two thousand years and most of them belong either to pre-Christian, early Christian or Mohammedan times. They have been by no means without their influence on human thought and on the actions of those who believed their statements to be historical truth. They are therefore not to be ignored in reckoning the influences which have shaped library development.
§ 10. Prehistoric and historic libraries
Leaving aside, however, all kinds of imaginary libraries, mythological, fabulous, legendary or apocryphal, we still have for real human libraries a very respectable historical and prehistorical antiquity.
This long period may be divided into prehistoric and historic or beginnings and later history—the prehistoric period or period of beginnings being understood to be the time before chronological record by years, or before the time of abundant and decipherable hand-written records.
On the whole, the term “beginnings”, is better for the early periods than the term “prehistoric period”. “Beginnings” in this point of view differs from “prehistoric period” simply in overlapping a very little the shifting and uncertain borderland between the old prehistoric and historic, carrying over just far enough onto the firm land of annual chronological history to insure a safe footing in the field where written records begin to abound.