The emergence of libraries as repositories of written monuments dates back to the 3rd millennium BC. When excavating old cities of the states of the Ancient East - Assyria, Babylonia, Urartu - archaeologists find special rooms for storing books, and sometimes the books themselves. However, the written monuments of those times can be called “books” very conditionally: they were clay shards, scrolls of papyrus or parchment.
Libraries have served science, education and culture for many centuries. The first information about the existence of libraries dates back to the heyday of the culture of the peoples of Mesopotamia, located on the territory of modern Iraq, to the time of the existence of the state of Sumer. The oldest texts date back to approximately 3000 BC. The most ancient texts of Mesopotamia are written in Sumerian. The first libraries arose as collections of various kinds of state, economic and other documents. These institutions served as libraries and archives.
The next stage in the development of libraries is palace libraries or libraries of rulers. The most ancient Among those that have survived to this day, the library owned by the king is considered Hittite kingdom– Hattusilis III (1283 – 1260 BC). At the beginning of the 20th century, archaeologists discovered about 11 thousand cuneiform tablets here, indicating that this library contained official documents (royal messages and addresses), chronicles, and ritual texts. Unlike the Sumerian tablets, these “books” bear the name of the author, his address and title, and even the name of the scribe. There is reason to assert that there was also a catalog compiled by the names of the authors. A special feature of the Hittite tablets is the authorship of literary and scientific works. Hittite librarians and archivists created the science of storing books. Cuneiform texts of the Hittite library catalogs have been preserved, in which there were notes about lost documents. Labels for individual works were used. All this testifies to the order that librarians maintained in the repository of clay books.
The largest and most famous of the libraries of the Ancient World is library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal(668-631 BC). This cuneiform library, which included the richest collection of Babylonian literature, according to various estimates, contained from ten to thirty thousand clay books, each of which had a cuneiform stamp on it: “Palace of the King of Kings.” Ashurbanipal's library had a universal character. The fund contained lists of kings, royal messages, lists of countries, rivers, mountains, commercial materials, works on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, dictionaries and works on grammar. There were religious texts in a separate room.
There is information about the “disclosure” of the library’s collections. Special tiles indicated the title of the work (based on its first line), the room where it was located, and the shelf on which it was stored. Clay tablets were used for writing. “Books”-tablets were stored in special clay jars. On each shelf there was a clay “label”, the size of a little finger, with the name of a particular branch of knowledge.
Writing and books were highly revered in Egypt, and libraries were considered the center of wisdom. The Egyptians had a god of the moon and wisdom - Thoth, who also patronized the scribes; goddess Seshat - patroness of libraries; god of knowledge Sia. The profession of a scribe was very honorable; it was not for nothing that noble nobles and officials loved to be depicted in the pose of a writer, with a scroll in their hands. There is evidence that indirectly indicates that people performing the duties of librarians (although these were not professional librarians in the modern sense) were also surrounded by honor: on the banks of the Nile, the tombs of two librarians were discovered - father and son, who served under Pharaoh Ramses (about 1200 BC). This suggests that in ancient Egypt the position of librarian, like many other government positions, was hereditary.
From the second half of the 14th century BC. In ancient Egypt, there were libraries at the temples that served the priests. These libraries were called the “house of books” (or “God’s house of books”) and the “house of life.” The first concept, which was used until the beginning of the Ptolemaic era, related to temple libraries. The position of keeper of the library (“house of life”) was a state position and was inherited, since it could only be held by those admitted to possessing “higher knowledge.”
One of the most famous temple libraries was the library at the Ramesseum temple, founded around 1300 BC. Pharaoh Ramses II (c. 1290 – 1224 BC). At the entrance to Ramses's library there was an inscription - “Pharmacy for the soul.” On the door and walls of the library, gods were depicted as patrons of writing, knowledge, and libraries. The book depository contained religious works, prophecies, fairy tales, stories, medical treatises, didactic teachings, and works on mathematics.
In Egypt, papyrus was used for writing. Books from it were stored in boxes and tube-shaped vessels. Many papyri have survived to this day, but complete libraries have not survived, since papyrus is a less durable material than clay. With the advent of papyrus, there were more and more scribe-librarians. Thus, the libraries of the Ancient World performed the function of collecting and storing documents, and the librarians of that time were scribes, collectors, and keepers of documents. The archival principle is expressed in the fact that the documents were available only in a single copy. These documents were copied, as evidenced by the name of the copyist; the work was long and expensive. Documents were systematized, and catalogs also existed in libraries. In addition, the libraries of the Ancient World did not perform the function of providing access to library funds; they could be used by a very limited circle of “initiates”. In terms of service, the library of the Ancient World provided access to the funds of a very limited circle of users: in the Ancient East - the ruler himself and his entourage, in Ancient Egypt - priests and a narrow circle of initiates.
During the period of antiquity in Ancient Greece, the word “library” appears from the Greek words biblion (book) and theke (repository). The ancient library can be considered both as a public library (for readers of a certain circle) and as an institution serving science. The foundation of the first large library in Ancient Greece dates back to the 4th century BC. and is associated with the name of Aristotle (384 - 323 BC). He owned a unique library containing about 40 thousand scrolls. One of his most famous students, Alexander the Great, took part in the creation of this library.
The libraries of antiquity become, in a certain sense, accessible to the public, although only for certain segments of society. They also began to fulfill the role of scriptoria - institutions that not only made copies of documents, but also had an obligation to provide copies that guaranteed the authenticity of the texts. At the same time, libraries appeared, with a meaning close to the modern one.
The richest and most famous book collection of antiquity was the Alexandria Library of the Ptolemaic kings, founded at the beginning of the 3rd century BC. King of Egypt Ptolemy I Soter (323 – 283 BC). The Library of Alexandria was the richest and most complete library of its time. The main task of the library was to collect all Greek literature and translations of works of other peoples into Greek, ranging from the works of Greek tragedians to cookery books.
Imagine what kind of erudition (and physical endurance!) it was necessary to maintain the eighth wonder of the world - the Library of Alexandria, which consisted of more than 700,000 scrolls of handwritten books! But only a few people worked there. They had to be literally generalists, since in the Library of Alexandria, in addition to the book depository and reading rooms, there was also an observatory, zoological and medical museums - their maintenance was also the responsibility of the librarians.
The Library of Alexandria was headed by the greatest scientists: Erastosthenes, Zenodotus, Aristarchus of Samos and others. The Library of Alexandria developed rules for the classification and inventory of collections. One of the leaders of the library, Callimachus, compiled a huge bibliographic dictionary “Tables and descriptions of teachers (or poets) by century and from antiquity.” Although only small fragments of 120 volumes have reached us, frequent mentions of “Tables...” in ancient Greek documents allow us to judge the content and significance of the work done. Describing books, Callimachus cited the initial words of each work, and then provided all the information he knew about the author. The library had a staff of copyists who copied books. The library catalog compiled by Callimachus was regularly updated. The Library of Alexandria became the largest cultural and scientific center of the ancient world. Readers came to work with the scrolls and receive copies of works of interest from many parts of the Hellenic world.
The work of librarians was characterized by a clear specialization - they kept records of new acquisitions, worked with the fund, and ensured the safety of books (a unique system for ensuring the safety of the library fund was created in the Library of Alexandria; first of all, it was protected from dampness). Librarians had assistants whose duties included recording new manuscripts, parsing and reviewing manuscripts, and copying texts. There were people who kept order and protected manuscripts from moths and dampness.
In accordance with the classification system, scientific literature was divided into five sections: “History”, “Rhetoric”, “Philosophy”, “Medicine”, “Legislation”. A special section was also allocated - “Miscellaneous”. Within each section, the books were arranged by the names of the authors, accompanied by a short biography of the author and a list of his works. Next to the title of each work, the first few words of the text, the number of scrolls, and the number of lines in each scroll were indicated.
The work in the library was clearly organized: the servants kept a clear record of new arrivals, worked with the fund, and were involved in ensuring the safety of the fund, classification and inventory. The fund was divided into main and doublet; the doublets were stored in another building at the other end of the capital.
History of the book: Textbook for universities Govorov Alexander Alekseevich
5.2. BOOKS AND LIBRARIES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD AND ANTIQUE
The most ancient material for books was probably clay and its derivatives (shards, ceramics). Even the Sumerians and Ekkadians sculpted flat brick tablets and wrote on them with triangular sticks, squeezing out wedge-shaped signs. The tablets were dried in the sun or burned in a fire. Then the finished tablets of the same content were placed in a certain order in a wooden box - a clay cuneiform book was obtained. Its advantages were low cost, simplicity, and accessibility. A clay label with the title of the work, the names of the author, owner, and patron gods was attached to the box with tablets - a kind of title page. Catalogs were made from clay - cuneiform lists of stored books.
In the 19th century, European archaeologists excavated the capital of the Assyrian kings, Nineveh, on the banks of the Tigris River and discovered there an entire cuneiform library established by King Assurbanipal (7th century BC). More than twenty thousand clay books were kept there, each of which had a cuneiform stamp on it: “Palace of the King of Kings.” Since the Assyro-Babylonian language was the language of international communication, libraries of cuneiform books and entire archives of tablets were available in Egypt (Tel Amarna), and in Asia Minor, etc.
“Egypt is the gift of the Nile,” the historian Herodotus cites an ancient aphorism. The papyrus reed, which made it possible for the greatest civilization of the Ancient World to emerge and flourish, was entirely a gift from the great river.
The Egyptians peeled the stems of cut reeds from the bark and cut thin ribbons from the porous core. They were laid in layers, one across the other; papyrus juice had the properties of glue. Drying, he pressed the papyrus into a solid mass, elastic, fairly even and strong. Dried papyrus was polished with pumice and sea shells, tinted and whitened. This is how the naturalist Pliny the Elder describes the making of writing papyrus.
Papyrus, however, was fragile, and cutting sheets from it and binding them was impractical. Therefore, papyrus ribbons were glued or sewn into scrolls, which were rolled, tied, placed in special cases - caps or capsules, to which labels with the name of the book were attached, the result was a scroll - one of the first known forms of a book in world civilization.
The earliest papyrus scrolls that have reached us date back to the 3rd millennium BC. e. Initially, they were distributed only in Egypt, but after the Macedonian conquest, during the era of the Ptolemaic kings, Egypt became a supplier of this convenient and relatively cheap writing material to all Mediterranean countries. Papyrus scrolls of Greek, Roman, Persian, Jewish, Arabic, and Georgian origin are known. The age of the papyrus book ended only in the 10th–11th centuries AD. e., after the Muslim conquest of Egypt. The last document written on papyrus is the Papal Bull (1022).
Of the papyrus scrolls that have come down to us, the so-called Harris papyrus (named after its discoverer), now stored in the British Museum, is considered the largest. Its length exceeds 40 meters and its width is 43 centimeters. It is believed that it was rewritten in 1200 BC. e. in Thebes. The overwhelming majority of papyri were not so large in size.
Luxurious scrolls were also created. The so-called imperial papyrus was colored by the juice of shells extracted from the bottom of the sea. They wrote on it with gold and silver paints (“chrisoul”, “codex argenteus”, etc.). There were also ordinary varieties, even special wrapping papyrus. The papyrus manufacturer Fannius became famous in history. There were scrolls forged from precious metals and also glued from cloth.
The dominance of papyrus remained unchanged, although books were created from sheets of ivory or from cypress boards covered with wax. They were fastened together, the text was scratched out with a sharp stylus. This, by the way, is where the expression “good style” comes from. Such books were named according to the number of pages: two (diptych), three (triptych), many (polyptych). There were scrolls forged from precious metals and also glued from fabrics.
Almost all state and local administrations, colleges of priests, assemblies of citizens and wealthy people considered it prestigious to have a good library. Libraries were located at public baths, where wealthy slave owners spent time reading books. Specially trained slave-readers, called “lecturers” in Latin, and “deacons” in Greek, read aloud to everyone.
The richest book collection of antiquity was probably Library of Alexandria of the Ptolemaic kings, which is said to contain more than 700,000 papyrus scrolls. The Greek scientist Callimachus created a catalog of books, and the library became the largest cultural and scientific center of the ancient world.
Along with papyrus, material made from the skins of young animals - calves, goats, sheep, rabbits - became widespread. It was named parchment, after the name of the place where this method was invented. Pergamum is an Asia Minor Hellenistic state. For a long time, papyrus and parchment were used simultaneously, but from the 3rd to 4th centuries, due to the decline in papyrus production in Egypt, parchment began to take first place. To make parchment, the skin of a young animal was scraped with a knife, the remaining fat and wool were removed, then dried, polished, and dyed. The best varieties of parchment were made from skin taken from the nape or belly; cheap parchment was made from skin taken from the edges.
The heyday of the parchment book began with the advent of the Christian era. Parchment was more expensive than papyrus, but more versatile and durable. At first, scrolls were made from parchment, like papyrus. However, they soon noticed that, unlike papyrus, it can be easily written on both sides. Parchment was cut into rectangular sheets, which were sewn together. This is how the now dominant universal form of the book was born - code, or book block. Literally, "code" translated from Latin means "piece of wood." Perhaps this happened because the book was bound in wooden boards. The oldest parchment books-codices have reached us from the 2nd century AD. e.
Papyrus and parchment contributed to the widespread dissemination of learning and culture. The books were copied by numerous scribes and sold. The benefit of copying books was noticed by Cicero’s friend Pomponius Atticus back in the 1st century BC. e. He himself was the owner of a workshop where calligraphers copied books. The Roman poet Martial described a book copying workshop:
After all, you happened to come to Argillet,
Opposite Caesar's Forum there is a bookshop,
All the pillars are written on it this way and that,
So that you can quickly read the names of the poets.
Don't look for me there, but ask Atrekt
(This is the name to call the owner of the shop).
From the first or second he is there shelves
Cleaned with pumice and dressed in purple
For five denarii he will give you Martial...
As is clear from the works of ancient writers, books already had a title, colored illustrations, headpieces, capital letters-initials, “red lines” (headings) were written, marginalia were made - marks and notes in the margins. Parchment sheets were sometimes painted in different colors (purple, black) to make them more attractive. Both scrolls and codices were made in different formats, even miniature ones. Pliny testifies to a scroll with the text of the Iliad, which could fit, according to him, in a nutshell.
Together with the book-code, the art of bookbinding was born. The cut sheets of parchment were folded (folded) in a certain order. In Greek, a sheet of four folds “tetra” is called a notebook. From notebooks of sixteen and thirty-two pages, a volume was formed - a book block of any format.
An entrepreneur-slave owner who was engaged in the reproduction and sale of handwritten books was called in Greek “bibliopolos” - literally book distributor, and in Latin “librarian” - scribe.
The poet Martial, already familiar to us, advised everyone who wanted to read it on the road: “Give a large book in lari, buy one that fits in your hand...”. These lines indicate that there were already second-hand booksellers selling old books.
The authors of the books, if they were rich and noble, could themselves buy slave calligraphers, hire them for a while, or even send their slave to study in a book-writing workshop. The need for books in the countries of antiquity (Greece, Rome, Hellenistic states) grew rapidly, which led to the expansion of the book market.
Ancient writers left us a lot of evidence about how, in the era of imperial Rome, it was possible to reproduce 50–100 copies of a work at the same time through repeated copying. Book sellers sought to attract writers and bibliophiles to their shops; they specially hired readers to read aloud passages from the books they sold. Beginning with Julius Caesar, handwritten "Acta diurna", the so-called daily news - the ancestors of modern newspapers - were created in Rome. They also multiplied in bookstores.
The price of a book was determined mainly by the size of the scroll or codex, but depended on the design, demand, and the fame and popularity of the author of the book. Worn books were sold much cheaper, however, if they were rarities, that is, rare books, their price increased significantly. In the bookstore of Ancient Rome, you could rent a book for temporary use.
However, a significant part of the ancient reader’s needs for books was satisfied with the help of public libraries. They were called public. In Rome alone there were twenty-eight of them. There were also small private reading rooms in large cities. The flourishing of the book industry in ancient times was the lot of large cultural centers. On the periphery and in remote regions it developed poorly.
In ancient China, production was established bamboo books. Finely planed slabs of bamboo were held together with metal staples to form a modern sliding window shade. On such a book-curtain, as well as on the silk invented later, the Chinese painted their hieroglyphs with brushes, using ink for this.
The Chinese originally made paper from bamboo pulp. Obviously, this is why it acquired its name from the historical words “bombakka” and “bombitsinna”.
In European countries, the ancestors of the Germans and Slavs, if they happened to receive a Greco-Roman education, satisfied their need for books with manuscripts of the Greeks and Romans. Their numerous compatriots, as shown by the etymology of the words denoting a book ("biblio", "liber", "libro"), were satisfied with notes or serifs on wooden plates. The most accessible material for writing was birch bark. Methods for processing it have reached us: a thin layer of young tree bark was kept in boiling water, and a sheet was cut from it, which was not inferior in elasticity to modern paper. Books-scrolls and books-codices were made from it.
Birch bark books were most widespread among the ancient Slavs, as well as among the peoples of Northern India. To make writing material, the skin of the tree was peeled off and impregnated with a special composition. The glued sheets were wrapped in fabric for better preservation. The first birch bark books in India date back to the 9th century AD. e.
So, the Ancient World gave humanity writing, and with it all the wealth of spiritual culture. In the course of the development of the ancient civilizations of Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome, the most widespread form of the book - the codex - was born and developed. The book was subordinated to the purely utilitarian task of consolidating and transmitting information. With the advent of genre diversity in ancient literature, the book receives elements of decoration - drawings, ornaments, good-quality, beautiful bindings. As a result, ancient man created a book that is perceived as a single integral organism and which has served and continues to serve as a source of inspiration for more than one generation of book creators.
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Studying the cuneiform tables of Ashurbanipal's library, scientists found on one of them a mention of “secret Sumerian documents.” And one more thing: the king himself, the owner of the library, wrote: “It was a great joy for me to repeat the beautiful, but incomprehensible inscriptions of the Sumerians.”
What kind of country is this, what kind of people? Already Ashurbanipal considered the Sumerian language “incomprehensible”, and Herodotus - the father of history - knew nothing at all about this people. When excavations began in Mesopotamia, “the people who began history” (as the Sumerians are sometimes called now) began to tell stories.
Halfway between Babylon and the Persian Gulf in the parched desert, the Varka Hill has risen for a long time. Its excavations, which began before the First World War, resumed in 1927. They were led by the German scientist J. Jordan.
Hidden beneath the hill was the ancient city of Uruk, which existed for three millennia. Absolutely extraordinary things were hidden in Varka Hill. And above all, one of the most ancient clay tablets with writing. The documents found date back to the middle of the fourth millennium BC. Therefore, they are fifty-five centuries old!
Then other equally ancient cities were discovered. Archaeologists discovered ruins of temples and palaces, household items and tools. And - mountains of clay tablets, of various shapes and sizes, covered with cuneiform writing. From them we learn about the political and social life of ancient Sumer, its economy and government structure, agriculture, cattle breeding, shipping, shipbuilding (most of the cities of Sumer stood on the banks of the Euphrates), carpentry, pottery, blacksmithing and weaving.
Clay tablets have told us a lot about the life of the most ancient civilization on Earth. Back in the 4th millennium BC, the Sumerians created a network of irrigation canals. In the absence of stone, they learned to make sickles, pots, plates, and clay jugs. There was no tree on their land - they began to build huts and pens for livestock from reeds held together with clay.
Centuries passed. The Sumerians invented the potter's wheel, the wheel, the plow, the seeder, and the sailing boat - magnificent milestones on the path of man. We learned how to build arches and make castings from copper and bronze. Finally, they created writing, the famous cuneiform, which spread throughout Mesopotamia. The material for writing was the same clay!
Sumer was famous for its populous cities. In Ur, which at one time was the capital of Sumer, there were up to 200 thousand inhabitants. Dozens of ships - from Syria, Egypt, India - moored here. Clay tablets recovered during excavations of the cities of ancient Sumer told us about how they lived, worked, and what they ate in those distant times. Several thousand tablets have been found in the religious center of Sumer - Nippur. They were housed in sixty-two rooms!
Another cult center was Ur, which was studied by archaeologist L. Woolley for many years. There were a great many cuneiform tables here too. For almost four thousand years, more than 20 thousand tablets lay in the soil of the city of L. Agasha. They were systematized and divided into parts according to content; it was already a real library.
The “production” in ancient Shuruppak also turned out to be impressive.
There, near the modern village of Fara, around which vast swamps extend, ancient texts of Sumerian cuneiform were found. A real treasure, which is rightfully considered a library. This treasure made it possible to publish the “List of Archaic Cuneiform Signs.”
How documents of this kind were kept can be judged from finds in Uruk. Here the tablets were placed in willow baskets. Each basket was tied, a form and a label with inscriptions were attached to it. Here are some of them: “Documents relating to the garden”, “Dispatching of workers”, “Reed basket with documents relating to the weaver’s workshop”. To characterize the documents, we present two texts. One reads: “Bronze vessels were received from Dadagi, Ur-Shara weighed them.” Another: “Forty-five slaves were sent for one day to carry reeds to repair the ship and to bring beams for the palace.”
These are documents of the royal-temple households. But the Sumerians also left works on mathematics, history, literary works, and works on agriculture (a farmer’s calendar and a classification of plants were found). Ancient maps have also reached us. On one there is a plan of the city of Nippur: the exact dimensions of the city are given, the location of the walls, gates, and most important buildings is noted.
Mathematicians knew how to prove theorems. One of the tablets, for example, sets out the proof of the similarity of triangles, and the other - a theorem known in science as Euclid's theorem. Already in the 2nd millennium BC, Mesopotamian scientists also proved the Pythagorean theorem.
And the famous Code of Hammurabi, which later influenced the Roman Code of Justinian, began in Sumer.
In Nippur, among many others, a tablet was found with a list of recipes. It is quite large: 9.5 by 16 centimeters, 145 lines of text fit on it. To compose medicines, the Sumerian doctor used products of plant, animal and mineral origin. Most medicines are of plant origin: they were made from mustard, willow, fir, and pine. Medicines were diluted with beer, wine, and vegetable oil. A curious detail is that the document completely lacks any magical spells.
Many ancient Sumerian tablets containing records of myths, proverbs and sayings have now been deciphered. It turned out, for example, that Sumerian collections of proverbs and sayings are several centuries older than the Egyptian ones known to us - they were written down more than three and a half thousand years ago. Here are some examples of folk wisdom:
A well-dressed person is welcome everywhere;
Dodged a wild bull
Came across a wild cow;
If a country is poorly armed,
The enemy will always be at the gate.
Sumerian fables about animals are also of venerable age. In any case, they were compiled and written down more than a thousand years earlier than Aesop’s. But it was Aesop that the Greeks and Romans considered the founder of this genre.
From the cuneiform tablets that have been preserved in ancient libraries, we can judge that already in that distant time people glorified their land, their fields: “O Sumer, the great land among all the lands of the universe, flooded with unfading light. Your heart is deep and unknown. May your stables be numerous, may your cows be multiplied, may your sheepfolds be numerous, may your sheep be countless.”
The Sumerians composed both the first hymn to labor and the first love elegy in the history of mankind: “Husband, dear to my heart, your beauty is great, sweet like honey. Leo, dear to my heart. Your beauty is great, sweet like honey.”
The most ancient funeral song belongs to them: “Let your life’s path not disappear from memory, let your name be called in the days to come.”
But the greatest thing that Sumerian culture created was the poem about Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, oppresses his people, but then, having formed a friendship with the wild man Enkidu, accomplishes unprecedented feats. After Enkidu's death, Gilgamesh strives in vain for immortality. The poem is a true hymn to man, his aspirations and aspirations. It clearly expresses interest in the heroic personality, and the hero himself boldly enters into the fight against the unjust order established by God. The first songs of the poem originated and were recorded in Sumer. Here are its first lines (translation by Soviet Assyrologist V.K. Shileiko):
About him who has seen everything to the end of the world,
About the one who penetrated everything, who comprehended everything.
He read all the scriptures together,
The depth of wisdom of all book readers.
I saw the hidden, knew the secret,
And he brought news of the days before the flood.
He walked a long way, but got tired and returned.
And he wrote down all his work on stone.
This means that even then there were a lot of books, even then “book readers” possessed wisdom, and there were people who could read “all the scriptures.”
Discoveries followed one after another. And each of them is the result of enormous work, the result of ingenuity and skill. The fact that some texts have reached us in later (Babylonian) copies, the fact that they are poorly preserved, is not the worst thing. Many works turned out to be disconnected. For example, great skill was required to restore the literary monument “House of Fishes” from many fragments of cuneiform tablets. Parts of the poem ended up in three museums around the world: the beginning in Istanbul, the middle in London, and the ending in Philadelphia. And yet the text of this poem was restored, translated and commented on. It gives a description - and a very poetic one - of many fish.
Here's what they say about the stingray. This fish has:
The head is a hoe, the teeth are a comb,
Her bones are fir branches,
Her thin tail is the scourge of the fisherman.
All kinds of teachings, disputes and debates were widespread in Sumer. Scientists of our time managed to reconstruct from the available tablets and fragments a teaching conventionally called “The Farmer’s Calendar.” The first line of the “Calendar” reads: “During this time, the farmer taught his son.” Further There are tips on how to get good harvests. They cover all types of field work: from irrigating the soil to harvesting. The entire teaching consists of 107 lines.
To farm, you need to know exactly when to start sowing. And the priests of Sumer developed one of the most ancient calendars - the lunar calendar. Gradually, the lunar calendar began to turn into a lunisolar calendar: months were counted by the moon, and the year by the sun.
Of the surviving texts of many disputes, we mention “The Dispute between the Hoe and the Plow,” which describes in detail what the Plow and the Hoe are doing. The text ends with these words: “In a dispute between a Hoe and a Plow, the Hoe wins.”
Of course, the libraries contained religious and liturgical literature: hymns to the gods and legends about them, prayers, spells, penitential psalms, fortune telling, and predictions. The most interesting literary psalms are the penitential psalms, which reflect human sorrows and suffering with genuine lyricism.
The German musicologist K. Sachs became interested in a clay tablet, which dates back to the 3rd millennium BC. In addition to the text of the Sumerian legend “On the Creation of Man,” cuneiform signs were found on it, which are considered a musical recording. According to the scientist, a harp melody was recorded here, which was played to accompany the reading of the legend.
Without Sumerian libraries, we would know much less about the life, production, and beliefs of the ancient peoples who inhabited
Mesopotamia. “All these books of that time,” notes the scientist S. Kramer, “had to be somehow stored, grouped and kept in proper order. Obviously, teachers and scribes adhered to some kind of system in this “library” business. It can be assumed in advance that to facilitate this work, lists of literary works, grouped according to certain characteristics, were already compiled at that time.” This may seem surprising, but the catalogs were also found and decrypted.
The researcher holds a clay tablet in his hands. At one time, it was discovered during excavations in one of the cities of Sumer and sent to the museum of the University of Pennsylvania. It is small in size (six and a half centimeters in length and about three and a half in width) and fits easily in the palm of your hand. Cuneiform characters fill both sides of the tablet. Each of them is divided into two columns. In addition, every ten lines of text are separated by a horizontal line.
“Some kind of unknown poem,” the scientist thought, although he was very confused by the short lines and these horizontal lines. He reread the lines again and again, but no coherent text emerged. Reading and rereading the phrases, he was more and more amazed at their similarity to the first lines of works known to him. Then a guess flashed through, which upon careful checking was confirmed: it was a catalogue! The ancient scribe, in the smallest handwriting, wrote on the tablet the names (and they, as is known, were given according to the first line of the text) of sixty-two literary works. Twenty-four of them have reached us. Soon the second catalog was deciphered at the Louvre.
Both lists preserved for us the names of 87 literary works. Among them: the myth “The Creation of the Hoe”, the teaching “In time it is a tiller”, individual songs from the poem about Gilgamesh, the poem “Man, the perfection of the gods”.
The exact purpose of these two directories is still unknown. Perhaps the scribe made a list before hiding the tablets with texts in storage, or perhaps, on the contrary, placing them on the shelves in the “House of Tablets”. It is unclear what caused the sequence of works in the list, etc.
So far we know very little about the libraries of Sumer, but not all the tablets have been read. New researchers of the culture of this ancient civilization will perhaps discover new catalogs and new information about the book depositories of that time.
The cuneiform script invented by the Sumerians spread widely throughout the countries of the Middle East and Asia Minor. Collections of clay tablets have been found in many cities, which give an idea of the nature of the books, the methods of their storage, and the increase in the collection of the oldest libraries in the world.
There is no need to list all these book depositories; we will dwell only on two more, perhaps the most remarkable.
The library of the king of Assyria, Ashurbanipal, is rightfully considered a true pearl of the ancient era, who wrote about himself: “I, Ashurbanipal, comprehended the wisdom of Nabu, all the art of scribes, acquired the knowledge of all the masters, how many of them there are, learned to shoot a bow, ride a horse and chariot , hold the reins... And I studied the craft of the wise Adapa, comprehended the hidden secrets of the art of writing, I read about heavenly and earthly buildings and reflected on them. I attended census meetings. I solved complex problems involving multiplication and division that were not immediately clear.”
These words were actually inscribed by the hand of Ashurbanipal on two clay tablets. This king two and a half thousand years ago collected a large library in his capital Nineveh. He collected it in the literal sense of the word: he sent his representatives, experienced scribes, to different cities of Mesopotamia, who looked for ancient books and made copies of them. Many of them had a note that confirmed the accuracy of the copy: “Copied and verified according to the ancient original.” Some tablets were very ancient, with erased signs, then the scribe left a note: “erased,” “I don’t know.”
The fate of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, is known. It fell under the onslaught of the united troops of Babylonia and Media. The city was completely destroyed: “The cavalry is rushing, swords are flashing, spears are shining; many killed. Nineveh was plundered, devastated and devastated,” wrote the ancient historian. The fire, which raged for many days after this, completed the destruction, and the desert sands covered the remaining ruins.
In the middle of the last century, Nineveh was excavated by the English archaeologist O. Layard. Majestic palaces, huge temples, well-thought-out layout - everything spoke of the high culture of the people. Archaeologists delved into the ruins of a burnt palace. Here are two small rooms. Their floor is covered with a thick layer (half a meter!) of broken brick. The scientist picks up a rectangular tile - wedge-shaped writing is visible on it. The second, third, fourth - all tiles are filled with even small lines.
However, Layard opened only part of the library; most of the books were stored elsewhere. The excavations of Nineveh were continued by Layard's former assistant, O. Rassam, who discovered another luxurious palace with the Lion Hall. It was called that way because its walls were decorated with sculptural scenes of the royal lion hunt. Here, in the Lion Hall, most of the library was located. The fire partially damaged the book collection - the tablets fell into the basement and lay there for 25 centuries.
Despite the formidable warning inscribed on one of the tablets: “Whoever dares to carry away these tables... let Ashur and Belit punish with his wrath, and his name and his heirs will forever be consigned to oblivion in this country,” the clay tablets were carefully packed in boxes and sent to London.
Processing this book treasure required a lot of work. After all, all the tablets were mixed up, many were broken into several pieces; I had to read it all, decipher it, identify surnames and place names. Gigantic work! And it was done by scientists from different countries.
It turned out that a wide variety of literature was kept here in several languages (including Sumerian). The results of astronomical observations and medical treatises, grammatical reference books and chronicles of the Assyrian kings, books of religious content and myths. The high development of the literature of this people is evidenced by the “plaintive song to calm the heart.” It conveys the feeling of deep sorrow of a person who has experienced great grief and is aware of his loneliness.
The significance of the library of Ashurbanipal is that it is, in essence, a genuine treasury of the cultural achievements of the peoples of the Ancient East. Suffice it to say that Assyrian librarians rewrote and preserved for us the most outstanding work of literature of Mesopotamia, one of the greatest epics of world literature - the tale of Gilgamesh.
The very discovery of the epic, or rather, a small part of it, just one tablet, caused a sensation in the scientific world. The honor of the discovery belongs to J. Smith, an employee of the British Museum, a former engraver.
He excitedly studied the cuneiform tablets brought from Nineveh. Here he is reading an important document - the history of the reign of Ashurbanipal. From it it became known how he collected his library.
And here is another sign, not whole, part of it has been broken off. The scientist reads lines about the global flood: “Listen, wall, listen! You, man from Shuruppak, build yourself a ship, abandon your property and save your life! Take a pair of each living creature with you to the ship.” It was subsequently revealed that this was the eleventh tablet (out of twelve) from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The library at Nineveh was kept in exemplary order, and the book storage system certainly helped to restore and read scattered works.
Each book had a “library stamp”: “The palace of Ashurbanipal, king of kings, king of the country of Ashur, to whom the god Nabu and the goddess Gaslista bestowed sensitive ears and keen eyes to search for the works of the writers of my kingdom.”
There was a catalog in the library. The tile indicated the title of the work (based on its first line), as well as the room and shelf on which it was stored. And a label - the size of a little finger - was attached to the shelf with the name of the branch of knowledge.
The tablets of one book were kept in a separate wooden box. To prevent the pages from getting mixed up, a serial number was placed on them, and the initial words of the work were repeated at the top of each tablet. The book about the creation of the world began with the words: “Before, that which is above was not yet called heaven.” On each of the tablets in this book is written: “First is what is above.” The Epic of Gilgamesh began with the line “He who has seen everything.” And this line was repeated at the top of each of the 12 tablets.
Thus, through the efforts of many scientists, one of the most remarkable libraries of antiquity was recovered from the depths of centuries. And not only extracted, but also read, translated and commented on. The catalog of this library was published in five volumes in the last century in London.
It just so happened that history has not preserved information about the great power, which at one time was a formidable rival of Egypt itself. Greek and Roman historians had already forgotten about it. And when, at the end of the last century, Oxford professor A. Says gave a lecture about this power, he was simply called a dreamer and an inventor. And he, on the basis of some inscriptions and notes from travelers, argued that in the territory of what is now Turkey and northern Syria lived a great and powerful people - the Hittites. In 1903, his book “The Hittites, or the History of a Forgotten People” was published. And soon the scientist’s discovery was irrefutably proven.
The history of the Hittite state was helped to reveal cuneiform tablets from a library discovered by the German scientist G. Winkler. It was he who in 1907 found more than 10 thousand clay tablets during excavations in Boğazköy (145 kilometers from Ankara). A careful study of these tablets, written in the Babylonian language, gave rise to confidence - the expedition is located on the land of the ancient capital of the “rulers of Hetti.” Particular excitement was caused by a tablet with a letter from Pharaoh Ramesses II to the king of the Hittites. It talked about a treaty between the Egyptians and the Hittites.
Entire baskets of signs were brought to Winkler. Without straightening himself, from morning to evening, he read documents about the life of the Hittites, their history, way of life, and their kings and wars, cities.
One of the participants in the excavations of that time writes that he saw “in the eleventh compartment of the large temple, neatly folded rows of well-preserved clay tablets located obliquely. Their position when found can only be explained by the assumption that they were stored in the archive, originally located directly above this basement warehouse, and slipped down during the fire.” And even then it became clear that this was the biggest find after the library of Ashurbanipal. But that was not all: a quarter of a century later, over 6 thousand more cuneiform documents were recovered from the ruins.
Two and a half thousand years have passed since the Hittites ceased to exist. However, thanks to cultural monuments, the Hittites came to life for modern humanity. The world learned about the existence and culture of the Hittite state - a powerful state equal to Egypt and Babylon. It occupied all of Asia Minor to Syria and existed for seven centuries. At one time, the Hittites conquered Babylon and razed it (to intimidate other nations!) to the ground, broke the power of Mittani, and subjugated Ugarit, a large trading center on the Mediterranean Sea. The country waged successful wars with Egypt.
But not all the signs spoke. The scientist was able to read only those of them that were written in Babylonian.
The language of other cuneiforms was unfamiliar to him. The deciphering of the Hittite language began with the Czech scientist B. Grozny. It was not an easy task. Grozny himself said: “I read and reread the inscription maybe two or three hundred times, trying to find that Achilles heel, that Archimedes’ point, which, no matter how weak it may be, could serve me.”
Deciphering the Hittite script made it possible to read the second part of the library. The bulk of cuneiform tablets contain religious texts - rituals, hymns, prayers, notes of the gods, descriptions of religious holidays, texts of oracles. By their nature, astrological monuments are also adjacent to them.
From the Babylonians, the Hittites borrowed a rich literature on mathematics (and the “Chaldean sages” already had formulas for calculating the areas of a triangle, rectangle, circle, for determining the volume of a cube, cone, etc. They knew how to raise to a power and left tablets with square and cubic roots ).
The Hittites had many works by right; The code they created was provided with numerous commentaries, a kind of manual for judges.
From historical literature, the Annals of Mursilis are instructive. The author of the annals, King Mursilis, proved himself to be an outstanding writer. Events in the annals are strictly divided by year, and the presentation follows a certain pattern. Another king, Hattusilis, left a document that can be called an autobiography. This is one of the first autobiographies in world literature.
The vividness of the presentation is distinguished by the prayer of one of the kings (Mursilis II), written in the form of a letter to the gods during the plague. Of particular interest is the story of Mursilis about how he was left speechless. This is the first story in cultural history about a speech disorder. In general, the Hittites reached a high poetic level in their prayers.
Naturally, the question arises: “If kings wrote like this, then how did poets write?” Almost all poetic works, as a rule, were written down on wooden tablets, which, alas, burned down in a fire. But what has survived is perfect. For example, here is an ancient poem in honor of the Sun God:
Solar god of heaven, shepherd of humanity.
You emerge from the sea, from the sea - the son of heaven, and rush upward to heaven.
Solar god of heaven, my lord!
To the born people and the wild beast in the mountains, to the dog, and the pig, and the insect in the field - you grant to all what is given to them by right!
From day to day...
A fragment from a great epic about the struggle of the gods for power has reached us. We also know the name of the author - Killas, he lived half a millennium before Homer.
The Hittites had a unique genre - short stories, called “records of oversights and nonsense.” These are the first critical works. They contain laconic portrait sketches of dishonest officials and bureaucratic judges. There is also a story about a commander who cares only about drawing up victory reports to the king, and not about the real victory.
The Bogazgey collection of cuneiform tablets also contained fragments of the epic of Gilgamesh.
This essay was not intended to tell in detail about the contents of the clay books of the library, books that reflected: law and justice, religion and medicine, the deeds of kings and the customs of the people, ritual texts and myths.
Here I would like to emphasize one interesting detail: many books of the Hittites have authors. Along with the names of the compilers of mythological, ritual, and magical texts, we also know the name of the author of a large textbook on horse care - Kikkuli from the country of Mittani. This ancient "horse breeding manual" contains 1000 lines of text. It is over 3400 years old.
Hittite librarians and archivists created the science of storing books. The cuneiform texts of the catalogs of the library, which was also an archive, have been preserved. The catalog also contained indications of lost documents. Labels for individual works were used. All this speaks about the order that was maintained in the storage of clay books.
Hattusas - the name of the capital of the Hittites - was completely destroyed by fire in the 13th century BC. Fireproof clay tablets have been preserved, but most of the archive, consisting of wooden tablets, has been lost forever...
Sumer, Assyria, Hittites. Clay tablet. Cuneiform icons. Antiquity. Thanks to clay books, we became aware of the wisdom of the ancient peoples who lived at the dawn of civilization.
The first books in the libraries of Assyria were clay tablets - a legacy of the Sumerian civilization. The most ancient of them, dating back to before 3500 BC, were found in the settlements of the cities of Kish and Ur. Many official documents from the 25th century. BC were written in the Sumerian language, the meaning of the words never became known to science.
The sources of writing for Assyria consisted of about 100 thousand book-tablets found in the area of the oldest city of Ur. Their texts described farming, cattle breeding, cooking various dishes, and crafts. The most outstanding were books describing the principles of public administration and the science of jurisprudence. Among them were their own laws and judges.
Merchants, poets, historians and philosophers kept trade records on tablets and immortalized their works on clay. It remains interesting that the foundations of publishing originated in Assyria. The king's orders were engraved on a clay board and then copied by applying them to raw clay tablets.
The materials for writing the Assyrian script were not only clay, but also leather, wood, or papyrus imported from Ancient Egypt. Drawings were also applied to metal objects, vases and bowls.
Libraries of Assyria and Mesopotamia
Borsa Theater, AssyriaSpeaking about the treasuries of writing in Assyria, it is difficult not to mention the culture of early Mesopotamia, in particular the gallery of books of King Ashurbanipal (about 669 - 633 BC). It collected more than 30 thousand clay sources of knowledge about ancient civilization. We can say that this ruler became the founder of library science. All the tablets in his collection, housed in the Palace of Nineveh, were numbered and arranged chronologically. A shortcut was placed on each for easy quick searching. The king's library was replenished with books - copies of tablets from temples and Assyria.
The topics of the books were important historical events, works of art, religious themes, medical recipes, and scientific achievements of the peoples of the Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians.
The works on the structure of the solar system, on the movement of the planet Earth along its axis around the Sun, on the constellations and twelve zodiac signs became outstanding. It is noteworthy that they describe the origin of the Earth as a result of a universal explosion, when a huge celestial body invaded our Galaxy at great speed.
Scientists confidently claim that the biblical story was based on written sources from Ancient Sumeria and Babylon. And the Ten Commandments exactly repeat the laws of the King of Babylonia Hamurappi of the 18th century BC.
Thanks to the discovery of deciphering writing, knowledge about healing and medicine became known. However, many texts have remained unread to this day due to the difficulties of translating the Sumerian language. How many more secrets do they hold, and what new things could we learn from their contents? Perhaps the ancient Sumerians knew where humanity came from and why we came to this world.
Libraries of antiquity Completed by students of class 2 “B” “Books are compressed time” Marietta Shaginyan
Introduction In ancient history, there are many large libraries known that were collected by the rulers of the great ancient states in order to preserve the most valuable information from the knowledge accumulated by previous civilizations for the benefit of future generations. However, the vast majority of books from these archives are now considered irretrievably lost.
What is a library? A library is a cultural, educational and scientific auxiliary institution that organizes the public use of printed works. Libraries systematically collect, store, promote and issue printed works to readers, as well as information and bibliographic work.
The library of Pharaoh Ramses 11 is considered one of the most ancient. It was above its entrance, trimmed in gold, that the inscription “Pharmacy for the Soul” was carved. Founded around 1300 BC. near the city of Thebes, she kept papyrus books in boxes, clay jars, and later in wall niches. They were used by pharaohs, priests, scribes, and officials. They were inaccessible to the common population.
The first libraries appeared in the first millennium BC in the ancient East. According to history, the very first library is considered to be a collection of clay tablets dating back to approximately 2500 BC. BC, discovered in the temple of the Babylonian city of Nippur (present-day Iraq). This collection of books was located in 70 huge rooms and consisted of up to 60 thousand clay tablets, on which texts containing information about religious events (for example, the tale of the Great Flood), lyrics to deities, legends and myths about the emergence of civilization, were recognized. various fables, sayings and proverbs. Each of the books had labels with inscriptions about the content: “Healing”, “History”, “Statistics”, “Cultivation of plants”, “Description of the area” and others.
Library found during excavations in the city of Nippur
Nineveh Fireproof Library The city of Nineveh was still known from the Bible, and was discovered only in 1846 by G. Layard, an English lawyer who accidentally found several tablets from the Nineveh Library. Visitors were greeted by the inscription: “The palace of Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria, to whom the great gods gave ears to hear, and open eyes to see, which represents the essence of government. This wedge-shaped letter I wrote on the tiles, I numbered them, I put them in order, I placed them in my palace for the instruction of my subjects."
The library of Nineveh contained on the clay pages of its books everything that was rich in the cultures of Sumer and Akkad. The Books of Clay told the world that the wise mathematicians of Babylon did not limit themselves to four arithmetic operations. They calculated percentages, knew how to measure the area of various geometric shapes, they had their own multiplication table, they knew squaring and extracting square roots. The modern seven-day week was also born in Mesopotamia, where the foundation of modern astronomy concepts about the structure and development of celestial bodies was laid. The books were kept in strict order. At the bottom of each plate was the full title of the book, and next to it was the page number. The library also had a catalog in which the title, number of lines, and the branch of knowledge to which the book belonged were recorded. Finding the right book was not difficult: a small clay tag with the name of the department was attached to each shelf - just like in modern libraries.
Library of Nineveh
In ancient Greece, the first public library was founded in Heraclea by the tyrant Clearchus (IV century BC).
The largest and most famous library of antiquity, the Alexandrian library, was founded in the 111th century BC.
Libraries of Ancient Rus' The first library in Rus' was founded in the city of Kyiv in 1037 by the Kyiv prince Yaroslav the Wise. Books for the library were also bought from other countries. The prince placed some of these books in the Church of St. Sophia, founding the first library. The first library in Rus', created in this way in the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, grew and was enriched with book treasures in subsequent years.
Library of the Church of St. Pieters (Netherlands)
Library of the monastery in Waldsassen (Germany)
British Museum Library (London)
Conclusion Libraries began to be created by the kings of the ancient kingdoms. Legends tell of stunning libraries of the Ancient World, such as the library of the Assyrian Kingdom, the Babylonian Kingdom, the Library of Thebes in Ancient Egypt, the Ancient Greek and Roman Libraries, and the famous Library of Alexandria. Every city has its own library and every country has its own State National Library. And no matter in what form books exist - on papyri or CD-roms - their repositories - libraries - have always been, are and will be needed by humanity!