As you may know, if you have read earlier articles on this website, we are not a supporter of the idea that the ancient world was illiterate. Dr. Wm. Dever is a big proponent of that concept and he stated as much in his 8 lecture series How Archaeology Illuminates the Bible.
We may have been one of those supporters if not for two things we read many years ago. The first was the book Libraries in the Ancient World by Lionel Cassel. This work only covered a few of the many ancient libraries and discussed their purpose and what eventually happened to them.
The second thing that helped us to avoid this trap about the ancient world was a quote by a scholar who said, ‘with all the inscriptions and monuments containing writing that littered the ancient world, who were they writing to if the people were illiterate?’
We do not remember who said it but as we looked at this topic over the years and with God’s influence, we found that despite what scholars and archaeologists claim, there is too much physical evidence to support the illiterate idea.
While we will list only a few ancient libraries here, among other excerpts, we feel that there may have been more ancient libraries scattered throughout the ancient world. We also do not believe that they were limited to just scholars, scribes and the elites:
Libraries were a feature of larger cities across the ancient world with famous examples being those at Alexandria, Athens, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Nineveh. Rarely ever lending libraries, they were typically designed for visiting scholars to study and copy whatever they were most interested in. Not until the Roman period did genuinely public libraries allow all comers to come and read as they wished (source)
That quoted concept seems too far-fetched as the number of scholars who would be interested in going to the library would not be that huge. If it was, there had to be a top-heavy society with more scholars than common folk.
Of course, it would be very difficult to verify the claim that the libraries of old had restrictions on who could use the library. It seems that these ancient libraries operated much the same way as modern libraries do:
Books were acquired through purchase, copying, and donations but were also one of the items taken away from cities by their conquerors; such was the value put on knowledge in antiquity.(Ibid)
The reason we liked or agreed with the quoted statement we made earlier about who the ancient kings and elites wrote to, is the sheer number of manuscripts, inscriptions, monuments with writings, law codes, and more that have been found in both the major cities and out in the rural areas.
Mr. Cassel documented in his book that the Library at Alexander had up to 1,000,000 ‘books’, etc., within its walls. Who wrote them and who did they write them for? Then in just 2 languages, we get over 500,000 inscriptions over a 1000-year period:
Currently, such a large-scale study has been beyond the reach of any individual researcher because of the gargantuan efforts of aggregating and streamlining the thousands of inscriptions to make analysis feasible ( Altschul, Kintigh, Klein, et al. 2018 ; Kintigh, Spielmann, Brin, et al. 2018 ). Even the exact number of ancient inscriptions, dating between 800 BC and 800 AD, currently estimated at 600,000 surviving Latin and Greek ones, remains elusive due to its fragmentation to multiple sources ( Bodel 2001 , 4; Beltrán Lloris 2015 , 135). (source)
But these are not the only two languages that people wrote in during ancient times. There was a very large library discovered at modern Ebla:
A newly discovered ancient library which scholars say will rival the famous collections from Mari, Nuzi and Amarna has been found in northern Syria at the site of Tell Mardikh (modern Ebla).
More than 15,000 clay tablets written about 4500 years ago in cuneiform characters were excavated in two small rooms which apparently served as the King’s palace library.
The texts include reports from ambassadors, administrative documents, grammars, vocabularies, exercises to teach writing to young members of the royal family and even true encyclopedias. (1976). BAR, 2(2).
Then it is said that the ruler of Egypt had his people gather, buy, and obtain as many books as possible from visiting seamen and around the Mediterranean
These halls were connected to other university buildings by marble colonnades. Scholars were extended royal appointments with stipends to live and work in this university community.
At the same time, task forces commissioned to acquire books were scouring the Mediterranean. Books were even confiscated from ships moored in Alexandria’s harbor, copied and then restored to their owners.
The scriptorium where the copies were made also served as a bookstore, creating a lucrative enterprise with an international clientele. (2004). Bible Review, 13(1).
If the ancient world was illiterate, why would seamen have books to be confiscated? Not every ship that came to Alexandria carried scholars and their books. Or why would the Egyptians need a bookstore if the ancient world was illiterate?
Yes, many people in the ancient world traveled extensively, but not enough to support a bookstore and have it called a lucrative enterprise. Even with all of this physical evidence supporting a literate ancient world, many people still side with Dr. Dever and claim it was illiterate.
Libraries were inconceivable until writing was invented between 5,500 and 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Other scripts were invented by the Minoans on Crete 5,000 years ago, the Hittites in Anatolia (modern Turkey) about 4,000 years ago, and in China about 3,500 years ago. (source)
We do not know that for sure as one, no one knows when writing was invented. For us, writing has been around since Adam & Eve’s day and came to the post-flood world through Noah and his family.
Two, with archaeologists and other researchers claiming every building they uncover is a palace or a temple, we really do not know how many libraries there were in the ancient civilizations.
Little is known about the earliest libraries, and few have survived in any form. Some of the written works they contained deteriorated because they had been recorded on perishable surfaces, some libraries were destroyed by conquerors, and others fell into disuse when no one was left who could read the material.
The first and largest library of which there are tangible remains was in Nineveh, the capital of Assyria (an empire in what is now northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey), which existed from about 5000 to 612 b.c. (Ibid)
The fault for that lies not only with archaeologists but with the myriad of invasions, natural disasters, and erosion to name a few sources. we mention archaeologists as many operate under the assumption that the ancient world only ate, slept, and went to the temple.
They assume the ancient people did not know how to read or write in spite of all the potsherds etc., they have uncovered over the years.
Many libraries in the Near East and Egypt were attached to sacred temple sites or were part of an administrative or royal archive, while in the Greek and Roman worlds these types continued but private collections became much more common, too.(source)
While this may be so, their presence does not mean that other smaller libraries did not exist in the villages or smaller cities. The presence of the Library of Congress does not mean that schools, universities, or towns across America did not have a library.
Archimedes is thought to have studied at the Alexandria Museum around 260 b.c., although he did most of his later work in his hometown of Syracuse on the island of Sicily. Archimedes discovered basic laws of hydrostatics (the study of fluids), engineering, and mathematics and invented many devices that continued in use for years, including the Archimedian screw used to raise water. (source)
This example provides proof that there may have been all sorts of libraries scattered around. Archimedes was not the only brilliant person in the ancient world. he is just the one that got the press.
To meet the needs of other brilliant thinkers, parents, friends, or even town officials could easily obtain books and house them in a building somewhere in their city or village. It is still done today, and since nothing is new under the sun, it was done n the ancient world as well.
If the following estimates are true, those manuscripts, books, codexes, and other inscriptions had to be housed somewhere:
Similarly to archaeologists who are never sure they have all the pots, epigraphers will never have access to all the inscriptions ever created. Duncan-Jones ( Duncan-Jones 1982 , 360-362) has estimated a rate of preservation for one type of honorific inscription in the cities of Northern Africa at 5 %, but some consider his figure too high and only relevant to the local area ( Noreña 2011 , 181). Should the 5 % survival rate apply and be uniform throughout the Mediterranean, then the 500,000 surviving Latin inscriptions would be a sample of 10 million original inscriptions. Should the rate be 1 %, then we are missing some 50 million inscriptions. These remain guesstimates as the factors influencing the survival of inscriptions, such the availability of durable material, the completeness of archaeological monument surveys, or even the level of plundering or secondary use of inscriptions have not been uniform throughout the Mediterranean ( Mann 1985 , 204-206; Keppie 1991 , 34). (source)
Again, that is just one language and when you look at those numbers, you have to ask again, who were those authors writing to back then? There were not enough elites, scribes, or scholars alive to warrant the production of a massive amount of written words.
We do not think that the ancient world was illiterate and we also do not think the libraries of the ancient world were limited to just a few main branches. Many libraries existed because there was a need for written material, a need for learning, and a need to house those written works.
Unfortunately, they are lost to time and destruction.
What follows is a list of 8 libraries and a few words describing them. They all come from this resource 8 Legendary Ancient Libraries and click on that title to read more information about them.
#1. The Library of Ashurbanipal
The world’s oldest known library was founded sometime in the 7th century B.C. for the “royal contemplation” of the Assyrian ruler Ashurbanipal. Located in Nineveh in modern day Iraq, the site included a trove of some 30,000 cuneiform tablets organized according to subject matter. Most of its titles were archival documents, religious incantations and scholarly texts, but it also housed several works of literature including the 4,000-year-old “Epic of Gilgamesh.” The book-loving Ashurbanipal compiled much of his library by looting works from Babylonia and the other territories he conquered. Archaeologists later stumbled upon its ruins in the mid-19th century, and the majority of its contents are now kept in the British Museum in London.
#2. The Library of Alexandria
Following Alexander the Great’s death in 323 B.C., control of Egypt fell to his former general Ptolemy I Soter, who sought to establish a center of learning in the city of Alexandria. The result was the Library of Alexandria, which eventually became the intellectual jewel of the ancient world. Little is known about the site’s physical layout, but at its peak it may have included over 500,000 papyrus scrolls containing works of literature and texts on history, law, mathematics and science. The library and its associated research institute attracted scholars from around the Mediterranean, many of whom lived on site and drew government stipends while they conducted research and copied its contents. At different times, the likes of Strabo, Euclid and Archimedes were among the academics on site.
#3. The Library of Pergamum
Constructed in the third century B.C. by members of the Attalid dynasty, the Library of Pergamum, located in what is now Turkey, was once home to a treasure-trove of some 200,000 scrolls. It was housed in a temple complex devoted to Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, and is believed to have comprised four rooms—three for the library’s contents and another that served as a meeting space for banquets and academic conferences. According to the ancient chronicler Pliny the Elder, the Library of Pergamum eventually became so famous that it was considered to be in “keen competition” with the Library of Alexandria.
#4. The Villa of the Papyri
While it wasn’t largest library of antiquity, the so-called “Villa of the Papyri” is the only one whose collection has survived to the present day. Its roughly 1,800 scrolls were located in the Roman city of Herculaneum in a villa that was most likely built by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. When nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., the library was buried—and exquisitely preserved—under a 90-foot layer of volcanic material. Its blackened, carbonized scrolls weren’t rediscovered until the 18th century, and modern researchers have since used everything from multispectral imaging to x-rays to try to read them. Much of the catalogue has yet to be deciphered, but studies have already revealed that the library contains several texts by an Epicurean philosopher and poet named Philodemus.
#5. The Libraries of Trajan’s Forum
Sometime around 112 A.D., the Emperor Trajan completed construction on a sprawling, multi-use building complex in the heart of the city of Rome. This Forum boasted plazas, markets and religious temples, but it also included one of the Roman Empire’s most famous libraries. The site was technically two separate structures—one for works in Latin, and one for works in Greek. The rooms sat on opposite sides of a portico that housed Trajan’s Column, a large monument built to honor the Emperor’s military successes. Both sections were elegantly crafted from concrete, marble and granite, and they included large central reading chambers and two levels of bookshelf-lined alcoves containing an estimated 20,000 scrolls.
#6. The Library of Celsus
There were over two-dozen major libraries in the city of Rome during the imperial era, but the capital wasn’t the only place that housed dazzling collections of literature. Sometime around 120 A.D., the son of the Roman consul Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus completed a memorial library to his father in the city of Ephesus (modern day Turkey). The building’s ornate façade still stands today and features a marble stairway and columns as well as four statues representing Wisdom, Virtue, Intelligence and Knowledge. (italics ours)
#7. The Imperial Library of Constantinople
Long after the Western Roman Empire had gone into decline, classical Greek and Roman thought continued to flourish in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. The city’s Imperial Library first came into existence in the fourth century A.D. under Constantine the Great, but it remained relatively small until the fifth century, when its collection grew to a staggering 120,000 scrolls and codices. The size of the Imperial Library continued to wax and wane for the next several centuries due to neglect and frequent fires, and it later suffered a devastating blow after a Crusader army sacked Constantinople in 1204.
#8. The House of Wisdom
The Iraqi city of Baghdad was once one of the world’s centers of learning and culture, and perhaps no institution was more integral to its development that the House of Wisdom. First established in the early ninth century A.D. during the reign of the Abbasids, the site was centered around an enormous library stocked with Persian, Indian and Greek manuscripts on mathematics, astronomy, science, medicine and philosophy. The books served as a natural draw for the Middle East’s top scholars, who flocked to the House of Wisdom to study its texts and translate them into Arabic. Their ranks included the mathematician al-Khawarizmi, one of the fathers of algebra, as well as the polymath thinker al-Kindi, often called “the Philosopher of the Arabs.” The House of Wisdom stood as the Islamic world’s intellectual nerve center for several hundred years, but it later met a grisly end in 1258, when the Mongols sacked Baghdad.
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