CHAPTER V
Ancient and Mediæval Libraries
Books involved libraries. The book is written to preserve a record and this involves the preservation of the book itself. Consequently almost all of the centers of the world’s civilization were at the same time the homes of great collections of books, or libraries. The ancient Egyptians had many such although we have the record of but one. Rameses the Great, who has been generally, though probably erroneously, identified as the Pharaoh of the Exodus, but who probably lived within about a century of that time, housed a great library in his palace at Thebes. Such a library, of course, would have consisted of papyrus rolls and must have been rich in that learning of the Egyptians which the old chronicle tells us was familiar to Moses. What would we not give if we could only find those precious rolls in some of the corners which the archæologists are so busily exploring and which are constantly yielding new stores of information about that ancient civilization?
Some centuries later two of the Assyrian kings, Sennacherib and Assurbanipal, collected a great library which has been in large part recovered. Such a library, as we have seen, consisted of clay tablets and these tablets were kept in large earthenware jars. The contents of the library were partly contemporary but more of it consisted of copies of ancient works. Many thousands of these texts have been recovered from the ruins of Babylon and are now being translated. They cover the whole field of literary activity, religion, law, history, grammar, science, magic, and romance.
One of the old Israelitish cities, near Hebron, is called Kirjath-sepher, or city of books. Both the city and the name, however, antedate the Jewish occupation of Palestine and are probably memorials of a time when this city was a center of that Assyrian culture which covered the entire region later known as Palestine.
The classic civilization, with its great development of literary activity, of course involved the formation of libraries in all the more important cities, as such places were the natural centers of culture. We know something of the libraries of Athens, Antioch, Ephesus, Pergamus, Rome, Alexandria and Constantinople. The most famous of these was the great collection, or rather collections, of books at Alexandria. Collectively these rivalled in size some of the great modern libraries, a very remarkable fact when we consider the conditions under which books were made at that time. Undoubtedly practically the entire literary output of the classic civilization was contained in these collections. Unfortunately no traces of them remain. Accident and conquest caused their entire destruction. The earlier historians told a pitiful tale of the wanton destruction of the library by the Mohammedan conquerors who in their fanaticism destroyed as useless or harmful all works not devoted to the dissemination of their own doctrines. While it is probably true that the Mohammedans were responsible for a wholesale destruction, it is probable that the library had already suffered sadly by the destruction by fire of one or more of its separate collections and that what was destroyed in their time was only the remains of the former splendid collection. The library of Constantinople, being later than the others in its formation, probably had more direct effect on the culture of mediæval and modern times than any of the preceding ones.
In addition to these great public or semi-public libraries, there were of course great numbers of private libraries. Wealthy and cultivated men throughout the Roman empire and beyond had their private collections, as wealthy and cultivated men do to-day. While the illiterate classes were proportionally much more numerous than they are in modern communities, and the use of books was limited to a comparatively small portion of the population, the small educated class was highly cultivated and keenly interested in the reading and ownership of books.
None of these early collections survives even in any existing fragments. The devastating wars of the first Christian centuries destroyed all such perishable things. The Assyrian records not being on perishable material survived the destruction of the buildings in which they were contained and remained buried until brought to light by recent excavations. The Egyptian records have survived partly because they were so largely in the nature of inscriptions on the walls of the great temples and the carefully constructed tombs, and partly because so many of them were sheltered in the resting places of the dead. Not only were the mummies wrapped in cloth and papyrus inscribed with the Book of the Dead and other Egyptian texts, but many documents and papers were buried with the bodies. It was the custom of the Egyptians to bury with the dead all their personal papers including unopened letters and papers belonging to other persons which happened to be in the possession of the deceased at the time of his death. Many a letter has thus been read for the first time by some modern archæologist 3000 years or more after the death of both sender and receiver.
We undoubtedly owe to the Christian church, and especially to the institution of Monasticism, the preservation of so much of the ancient literature as we now possess, as well as the preservation of the spirit of learning and that impulse to create literature out of which grew the literatures of mediæval and modern times. As has already been stated, the monasteries became the centers of literary activity. The studying, copying, and creation of books was a recognized part of the duty of the monks. In society as constituted after the fall of the empire and far into the mediæval ages the monks were the only educated people in the community. The nobles were rough unlettered soldiers. Even kings were unable to read and write. The business of the state was largely in the hands of churchmen who filled the offices of civil administration, conducted the legal business of the community, served as its physicians and, in short, discharged nearly all those functions which required education and literary training. The mercantile class knew only enough to keep track of their business by the help of mechanical contrivances and the rudest methods of accounting. The great mass of mechanics and agricultural laborers were entirely illiterate. King and peasant alike depended upon the clergy for their knowledge of past transactions, national records, and the teachings of religion.