Ancient books and their storage
First came oral libraries, then collections of physical books. The roots of the words “library” and “book” derive from different languages—liber is from Latin, while bece, buc, and boc are from the cluster of Germanic languages that includes Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Old English. Both roots, though, have similar meanings: liber is bark, bece beech wood. Both etymologies relate to forest materials for book-making. The meaning of these roots is important. As soon as people began writing things down, the properties and availability of book-making materials became intertwined with the history of books and libraries.
Around 1200 B.C., Rameses II assembled a great library of books that included all the principal book materials available in the Nile Valley. More than ten types of book were represented, among them volumes made from papyrus, palm leaves, bone, bark, ivory, linen, and stone. A single snapshot in 5,000 years of bookish experimentation, Rameses’s collection could only ever tell part of the story. In other lands and other times, books would also be made from silk, gems, plastic, silicon, bamboo, hemp, rags, glass, grass, wood, wax, rubber, enamel, iron, copper, silver, gold, turtle shell, antlers, hair, rawhide, and the intestines of elephants.
In the making of books, local availability long dictated what materials would be used, and to what extent; local abundance enabled abundant use. The banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates were heavy with clay, so Mesopotamian scribes naturally used it to make their books. In the Nile Valley, however, clay was scarce—the very first Egyptian tablets were made from bone and ivory. Later Egyptian books, in scroll format, used the plentiful pith of the Nile papyrus. In China, long before Europe, paper was made in large quantities from the abundant bamboo and the by-products of everyday life.
The ancient city of Pergamum, in what is now Turkey, lay at the center of a region of cattle, sheep, and goat grazing. Animal skins for making parchment were therefore plentiful. Experimentally at first, parchment was used to supply Pergamum’s large library. At that time, there was already a long history of people using animal parts to keep written records; animals had given much in the history of the book, and they would give much more still. Parchment is made by washing and stretching a split skin and rubbing it smooth. A single flawless sheep yields one folio sheet. As Lewis Buzbee noted in The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, twenty skins might be needed to make a small book, “but you could eat the leftovers. And yes, that’s why a diploma is called a sheepskin.” In the year 1000 C.E., an average-sized book consumed the skins of dozens, even hundreds of animals. A 1,000-page Bible, for example, needed 250 sheep. In Curiosities of Literature, Isaac D’Israeli marveled that the volumes written by Zoroaster, entitled The Similitude, were said to have taken up the space of 1,260 cattle hides. The largest surviving medieval manuscript, the Codex Gigas or Devil’s Bible, is thought to have been made from the skins of 160 donkeys.
Quality issues always loom large when using animal hides, especially those of wild animals. Kangaroo skins, for example, have been used for bookbinding, but their quality is notoriously variable. Male kangaroos have long, scraping claws. Raw roo leather often arrives scratched and scored with what are known in the leather trade as “mating marks.” In the Middle Ages, scribes sometimes had to work with parchment that was similarly holed by wounds or insects. Some blemishes were repaired with silk thread, others incorporated into the illuminator’s design. At Durham there is a delightful gospel book, dating from the seventh or eighth century, in which the improvising scribe has carefully decorated the edges of several insect bites.
Vellum, the most deluxe and tragic form of parchment—made from the skin of bovine fetuses—is smooth, white, and highly workable. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, the illustrious nineteenth-century bibliographer and book kisser, regarded vellum-bound books as the pinnacle of bookish treasure. He called them “membranaceous bijoux.” Vellum is also highly durable. When Tim Munby was librarian at Cambridge University’s King’s College, he co-owned a 1925 type 40 Bugatti, “which was regularly taken to pieces by the roadside.” On one trip, when one of the car’s gaskets kept blowing, Munby had a few of his own rare manuscripts to hand. After a process of experimentation, the gasket turned out to respond to vellum. An old antiphonal that had been ruined by water was cut up and put to use,
and this, when enthusiasts asked the Bugatti’s age, enabled one to indulge in a little piece of lifemanship and reply nonchalantly, “Parts of it date back to the fifteenth century.”
Scholars have noticed a relationship between the availability of writing materials, the vibrancy of literary activity, and the growth of libraries. According to Herodotus, by 500 B.C. papyrus was the preferred writing material on the Grecian peninsula. When Athens imported large quantities of Egyptian papyrus, a flood of Athenian literary work followed and the city’s libraries prospered. Those libraries, such as the great research collection formed by Aristotle for the Lyceum (c. 335 B.C.), were the location for two important beginnings: the inception of Western scholarship, and the creation of architectural features—spaces for reading, writing, and conversing—that distinguish all subsequent academic, monastic, and public libraries through the classical era to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond.
Five centuries after the Athenian library boom, the same sequence was repeated in Rome: plentiful papyrus led to a flourishing of Roman book-making and library formation. (Conversely, a second-century Ptolemaic embargo on Egyptian papyrus exports caused difficulties for writers and readers throughout the classical world.) The pattern would continue. In early Christian times, increased supplies of parchment—favored as a more reliable alternative to papyrus—made possible the monastic output of codices. Along with printing, the greater use of paper in the sixteenth century underwrote the spectacular literary output of Elizabethan England.
The library of Rameses II contained books made from papyrus but not from true paper; book-makers would not use that material until much later. But the library did contain clay tablets, which had been imported from the Fertile Crescent to the northeast. Dating from before 3100 B.C., the very first libraries of physical books are thought to have appeared in that region. The libraries were modest storerooms, containing tens of thousands of square and rectangular clay tablets, each one about half the length of a tjurunga stone, each one covered with markings. The tablets were carefully organized on shelves and in trays. Tablet rooms at Ebla, Mari, and Uruk are examples of these simple libraries. Throughout Mesopotamia, scribes used a complex script, known as “cuneiform,” to write Akkadian, Elamite, Hattic, Hittite, Urartian—a total of fifteen languages from the nursery of civilization, the area of modern-day Syria, Iraq, and western Iran.
To write cuneiform, Mesopotamian scribes used chevron-shaped styli to impress precise signs (representing sounds) into wet clay. Thomas Hyde, Regius Professor of Hebrew and Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford University, gave cuneiform its name; the signs brought to mind for him cuneus, the Latin word for “wedge.” The script was so complex that some of the first modern archaeologists denied it was a script at all. In Hyde’s 1700 book on Persia, for example, the double professor confessed he regretted the survival of the cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis because they were a triviality, “likely to waste a lot of people’s time.” The inscriptions, he said, proved cuneiform could not be writing: the characters in the inscriptions were never repeated; they must just have been a playful experiment, an attempt to see how many different combinations the artist could create from a single element—a set of signs, in other words, as unhelpful as the mysterious Voynich manuscript or the nonsense books in Borges’s infinite library.
The doubters, however, were wrong. Today, not only can we understand the writing, we can even pronounce the words, more or less as they were spoken thousands of years ago. Apart from official records, the cuneiform tablets captured epic poems and stories—such as the tale of Utnapishtim and Gilgamesh—that had first been composed long before the arrival of writing. In the twentieth century, the earliest Albatross and Penguin paperbacks were color-coded by genre. In contrast, the first clay tablets were shape-coded: square for financial accounts, round for farming records, and so on. Some featured both text and images, making them the first illustrated books.
Tablets of special importance received special protection. Each one of a group of Assyrian tablets, now in the British Museum, was encased in a clay shell. Readers could only access the tablets by breaking the shells—the very first book covers—like walnuts. Just as the Mesopotamians did, the first Egyptian scribes made tablets, but they used different materials and a different script, namely hieroglyphics. That iconic, pictorial script was first used at around the same time as cuneiform, and seems to have been influenced by it, though the relationship between the two scripts is not at all clear. Cuneiform’s precedence over hieroglyphics was for many years a settled question in academia. Recent discoveries, though, have thrown the order of invention into contention. The debate is lively, and paleographers have begun taking sides.
Both camps can point to early stories about the invention of writing. A Sumerian legend gives that invention to Enmerkar, lord of Kulaba. He is said to have sent an emissary to another lord to ask for materials with which to rebuild the residence of the goddess Inanna. The emissary ferried back and forth between the two lords, passing on their messages, until he lost track—Enmerkar’s instructions became too difficult to memorize. According to this story, the lord of Kulaba invented writing so he could be sure his messages were getting through. The myth on the Egyptian side contains some familiar characters. According to Plato, Socrates told Phaedrus that the Egyptian god Theuth invented writing, and demonstrated it to the god Thamous (Amon) as a means to “increase the intelligence of the people of Egypt and improve their memories.” Neither story is very helpful to the debate: Enmerkar existed too late—more than four centuries after the first Mesopotamian tablet books—and Theuth probably never existed at all.
Papyrus is well suited to scrolls. The libraries of the ancient world—patrician, official, scholarly, domestic—stored their scrolls in chests, niches, and hatbox-like containers known as capsae. One of these is shown in a beautiful fresco at Herculaneum, near Pompeii. Herculaneum’s Villa of the Papyri is an example of the scroll libraries that were common in ancient Rome. Eighteen hundred scrolls were unearthed there in the eighteenth century—the most well-preserved library from antiquity.
Much is known about how scrolls were produced, and about who did what in the production process. The librarii copied the author’s manuscript; the librarioli ornamented the copies and supplied titles and other ancillary matter; and the bibliopegi bound the copies by evening up the margins, squaring the ends, polishing the blank sides with pumice, and attaching wooden rods (taller than the scroll was wide) to each end—these aided rolling and reading, and helped protect the scroll from damage. The rods could also be slotted into a desk to keep the scroll open.
The greatest scroll library in all history was assembled downstream from the main source of papyrus. A port city in northern Egypt, Alexandria was a key capital in the Hellenic empire established by Alexander the Great and his generals. Around 300 B.C., the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic dynasty founded the Great Library of Alexandria inside the fortified walls of the royal palace, on a spit of land between an intertidal lake and the man-made port at Pharos. The library’s bibliothekai or bookshelves were probably set in recesses along a wide covered passageway. The precise layout of the collections is uncertain, but the Italian classicist and historian Luciano Canfora surmised, “Every niche or recess must have been dedicated to a certain class of authors, each marked with an appropriate heading.” Above the bibliothekai was an inscription: “The place of the cure of the soul.’
The library adopted an admirably inclusive and international ambition: to assemble books from all the known countries and in all the languages. During the third century B.C., Ptolemy III sent messages to kings, lords, and rajas asking for books to copy. While in reality most of the texts obtained by the library were Greek, it did succeed in gathering substantial numbers of books from India, the Near and Middle East, and elsewhere in the Alexandrine world—books that represented a multitude of philosophies and creeds.
The library was also the venue for important translations, such as rendering the Torah from Biblical Hebrew into Greek—the famous Septuagint. Ptolemy II Philadelphus was behind this project. He asked seventy-two Jewish scholars to undertake the translation. According to the Tractate Megillah of the Babylonian Talmud, a miracle of congruency followed.
King Ptolemy once gathered seventy-two Elders. He placed them in seventy-two chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one’s room and said: “Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher.” God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.
Philo of Alexandria suggested that the number of scholars was determined by selecting six scholars from each of the twelve tribes of Israel.
The internationalism of Alexandria’s acquisitions policy had a Sumerian antecedent. Discovered in 1849 by the amateur archaeologist and adventurer Henry Layard, the royal library at Nineveh was an attempt by King Ashurbanipal to collect all available knowledge in one place. The Ptolemies picked up where Ashurbanipal left off. At its peak, Alexandria’s library held hundreds of thousands of scrolls. Some accounts have put the number at half a million, others 1 million, plus another 40,000 in a building attached to the Temple of Serapis, in the old Egyptian quarter of Rhakotis.
Despite the labels on the outside of Alexandria’s scrolls, readers struggled to find specific volumes—there were just too many books. A solution, though, was at hand. The famous poet and teacher Callimachus of Cyrene would help keep the books in order, and help scholars navigate through the collections. In other words, he would be a librarian.
From ancient writers such as Strabo, Athenaeus, Epiphanius, and the Byzantine authorities Suidas and Tzetzes, we know much about the operations of Alexandria’s library. The so-called Oxyrhynchus fragment no. 1241 is especially informative. That damaged fragment is from a group of papyri discovered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at a site near the modern Egyptian town of el-Bahnasa. The site was an ancient rubbish dump. Like other landfill found there, the manuscripts span the first six centuries A.D. They include thousands of Greek and Latin books and documents. Dating from the second century and written in a careful uncial script, the anonymously authored fragment 1241 is “a characteristic product of the Alexandrian erudition which exercised itself in antiquarian research and tabulation.” Along with military and mythological information, and short catalogues of famous sculptors and painters and grammarians, the document contains a priceless chronological list of the head librarians at Alexandria.
Thanks to this and other sources, we know not only the names of the first half-dozen librarians—such as Zenodotus of Ephesus and Aristophanes of Byzantium—but also their duties and achieve-ments—Callimachus was responsible for the library’s catalogue, for example. We also know that, under the Ptolemies, the office of Alexandrian librarian was a high one, suitable for royal tutors and superannuated military men.
To expand the great library’s famous collections, the authorities at Alexandria adopted a famous policy. Whenever a ship arrived at the city’s port with scrolls on board, the scrolls were taken to the library for copying. When the copying was finished, the new facsimiles were returned to the ship, and the originals stayed in the library. Books obtained in this way were identified in the catalogue as “from the ships.” Alexandria’s assertive collections policy seems to have been applied in other ways, too. When the library borrowed the works of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus from Athens in order to make copies, the copies rather than the originals were sent back to Greece. Once Alexandria became notorious as a book moocher, other cities and libraries refused to lend their books unless the Ptolemies staked large security deposits. According to Galen, the great library could only keep the Athenian books by forfeiting an enormous bond of fifteen talents (450 kilograms) of gold or silver.
Alexandria’s acquisitions policy was a precursor to a law passed by the King of France more than a thousand years later. Established in 1537 by the Ordonnance de Montpellier, “legal deposit” prevented printers and publishers from selling a book unless a copy was given to the royal library at the Château de Blois. The law covered all new books, regardless of their size, cost, genre, or language. (After reestablishing this right of legal deposit, the post-revolutionary Bibliothèque Nationale would also assume the power to preemptively purchase books at auction sales.) In this and other respects, Alexandria is an important waypoint in a continuum that links the collections, policies, and practices of the world’s ancient and modern libraries.
Through a private agreement with the Stationers’ Company, Sir Thomas Bodley established England’s first legal deposit scheme in 1610. The company agreed to send to the Bodleian Library “a copy of every book entered in their Register on condition that the books thus given might be borrowed if needed for reprinting, and that the books given to the Library by others might be examined, collated and copied by the Company.” Unlike the Egyptians and the French, Bodley seems to have intended the scheme to be selective rather than comprehensive. Tellingly, he reprimanded the University Librarian, Thomas James, for cataloguing many “idle bookes and riffe raffes” unworthy of the Bodleian. In 1662 the scheme was extended to the Royal Library and the Cambridge University Library, and these collections too obtained much “riffe raffe.”
With such a concentration of books and scholarship, Alexandria was naturally home to spectacular achievements in medicine, astronomy, and geometry. Eratosthenes worked out ninety-nine percent of the circumference of the Earth. Archimedes worked out 99.9 percent of pi. In the history of Western thought, the library came to rival Athens as an intellectual powerhouse. Alexandria’s collection was specifically a scholars’ library; the Ptolemies regarded men like Archimedes, Eratosthenes, and Euclid as the ideal users. A whole other class of user, though, also had a stake in the library.
Not far from Alexandria’s perilous red-light district, the city’s merchant quarter hosted a boisterous array of booksellers. “Disreputable” and “unscrupulous” were the words most often used to describe them. They survived on several rackets, one of which was to bribe the librarians to remove scrolls from the collections; the scrolls were then copied, and the booksellers sold the piratical versions locally and abroad.
The Ptolemies’ appetite for the classics was voracious. Apart from mandating the copying of texts, the king sent his agents far and wide to borrow and buy more and more books. This appetite created another opening for book-world entrepreneurs. A class of para-literary workers on the fringes of the library produced forgeries, then collaborated with the booksellers to distribute them, and, often, to sell them to the library. Apocryphal Aristotelian treatises were a favorite, and were produced to a convincingly high standard. Only after centuries of subsequent research were they proven to be bogus.
Even legitimate-seeming scholars produced fraudulent works for sale to the library. Posing as an Athenian contemporary and confidant of Thucydides, the scholar Cratippus wrote Everything Thucydides Left Unsaid, “in which he made happy use of bombast and anachronism.” The book found its way into the collection, where it was treated as a legitimate text. Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch both took the manuscript seriously. This style of work, parasitically piggy-backing on the reputation of a valued author, would become a staple of fraudulent publishing in the early-modern era and well into the Enlightenment. Names as famous as Shakespeare, Johnson, and Swift would appear on books cobbled together by opportunistic and anonymous authors.
Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé is a lurid retelling of the shadowy history of Alexandria’s library. Herr Doktor Peter Kien, the novel’s main protagonist, is a middle-aged Sinologist and voracious book-buyer. In Kien’s childhood he had stowed away in a bookshop overnight—just so he could be, like Salmasius, with the books. Now in adulthood, he assembles in his apartment a personal collection of 25,000 volumes, the most important private library in Vienna. He surrounds himself with so many books that he must wall up his windows to accommodate more shelves. Kien’s world is full of dangers, especially those of social interaction and bacteriological infection. One dread, though, stands out above all others. Kien’s insatiable appetite for books is matched by a fear that they will be lost in fire.
Conned by everyone around him, Kien marries his housekeeper Therese—“a sturdy peasant type,” who has “her eye on the main chance”—with the idea that she will dust his books and help keep them safe. Within days of the marriage she begins to take charge. Kien must give up three-quarters of his library as a living space for his new wife. Then he is forced out of his apartment altogether. Homeless, he enters a nightmarish underworld of seedy bars, bungling police, apparitions, molesters, cutthroats, and con-artists.
Descending into madness, Kien employs Fischerle, an unscrupulous, chess-playing, hump-backed dwarf, to catalogue the library that exists in the bibliophile’s head. At the local pawnshop, Kien appoints himself principal book-rescuer. Whenever customers arrive with books to pawn, Kien pays for them and sends the would-be hocker away with a lecture on the proper care of books. This gives Fischerle an idea. He and his gang assemble fake parcels of worthless volumes, then take them to the pawnshop. Again Kien pays for them, and the gang members share the proceeds.
While Kien is thus engaged, Therese searches the flat for her husband’s bank book, and for a dead body or some other clue to his cumulative mania. Things come to a head when she appears at the pawnbrokers to sell a pile of his books. At the novel’s climax, Kien returns to his book-filled apartment, sets it alight, climbs to the sixth rung of a ladder, and waits, laughing. The book ends in fire and madness, with Kien’s library destroyed. The Great Library of Alexandria flourished for three centuries, or perhaps as many as nine—from around 300 B.C. to 642 A.D.—no one knows for sure. But it, too, ended in mass destruction.
Many different stories have been told about how the library came to an end. Perhaps an accidental blaze destroyed it in 47 B.C. Perhaps it was a casualty of a first-century pagan revolt against Alexandria’s Christianization. Or perhaps Roman Emperor Aurelian’s troops destroyed it in 273 A.D. when they set fire to Alexandria’s royal quarter. According to the most colorful story, the seventh-century Caliph Omar ordered the library’s books to be distributed among the city’s bathhouses, where they were burned to heat the waters. It took six months, so the story goes, to burn them all. An altogether different school of thought is that, long before Omar, the manuscripts had simply worn out. Papyrus is a terrible material for preserving texts. Without a large and unwavering commitment to conservation and copying, a library of papyrus scrolls will readily and unceremoniously disintegrate—especially in the damp conditions of a river delta. Alexandria’s library might have just faded away.
Whatever the cause, virtually every scroll in the library was destroyed. In Greek drama alone, the losses were devastating: 83 of Aeschylus’s 90 plays were lost, along with 62 of Euripides’s 80, and 113 of Sophocles’s 120. Some books, though, including those backstreet bootleg copies, found their way into collections in Greece, the Levant, and especially Constantinople. Today, the editions pirated by booksellers account for a high proportion of the surviving texts from Alexandria.
For however many centuries, Alexandria had preserved and promoted the Greek literary heritage. In turn, that tradition passed to the great libraries of Constantinople—the Imperial, Patriarcha, and University libraries—which maintained it for another thousand years. Though scholars at those libraries produced little that was new or creative, they edited, annotated, and elucidated the standard classical texts, thereby guarding them for the future.
In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. Many of the Greek scholars who’d established schools on the shores of the Bosphorus left for Italy. Italians at the same time rushed to those shores to acquire books. The Sicilian humanist, Hellenist, and manuscript collector Giovanni Aurispa went to great lengths to obtain manuscripts there: “I remember having given up my clothes to the Greeks in Constantinople in order to get codices—something for which I feel neither shame nor regret.’
By sea and by land, along trade routes and pilgrim routes, the books and texts from Constantinople fed Eastern and Western monasteries and other public and private collections such as the papal library, the Ambrosian, and the Laurentian. The collapse of the Byzantine Empire elevated Rome, Milan, and Florence as centers of classical learning. It also helped make Venice a center for trade in Greek manuscripts. Impacts were felt further afield, too, at emerging and later libraries such as the Bodleian, Königsberg, and Wolfenbüttel. Ultimately, books and texts from Constantinople nourished the world. The histories of humankind’s libraries are intricately interwoven. Occurring over millennial time frames, the interlibrary movement of books and ideas marked out nonlinear trails of study, editing, translation, exchange, innovation, and appropriation—tracks that are just as arcane and marvelous as the sacred songlines of ancient Australia.
THE LIBRARY A CATALOGUE OF WONDERS
STUART KELLS
