Question for the Day: Oldest Library

[james_davis_nicoll]

Would anyone out there know offhand which is the first library to have been established?

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

yours. duh.

[eyemage.livejournal.com]

could you narrow down the specifics of your question?

Public library? Private collection?

One still in use or the first one to be called library by name?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Either public or private and I'd expect whatever it was to have been destroyed ages ago. I'm curious when the habit of gathering knowledge together in one repository began.

[eyemage.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library#History

records have been kept in archives since writing began...
but the first real library as a place that deserves the term in my opinion
was in alexandria.

[nwhyte]

Ah well, in that case it would be pretty automatic after the invention of writing, wouldn't it?

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

c.3000BC, at a guess - pretty much as soon as anyone started hanging onto the record tablets, though you'd be more likely to call those an archive - it was strictly information. More general writing turned up fairly soon.

The first direct evidence we have (per Casson's Libraries in the Ancient World for "literature" being held in any form of collection is what is believed to be the archive of the palace at Ebla; the city was destroyed by fire around 2300-2250 BC, conditions which were pretty good for preserving clay tablets, and they were found together in one room.

The tablets themselves were mostly archive material, but one colocated group from a single shelf had sixty tablets of wordlists, twenty-eight more 'bilingual' ones, a dozen incantations, and two duplicates of a Sumerian myth. The hypothesis - quite a reasonable one - is that this section was the working library of the scribes; dictionaries and a couple of standard reference texts.

By ~2000 BC, in Nippur, we find two surviving tablets listing the "catalogue" of works in the library - a fair collection of literature by this stage, a good sixty-odd items.

By ~1300BC, we have evidence of "proper" cataloguing - annotated records, etc - the concept of systematically recording and organising what knowledge you held was here.

In ~1100BC we have the first definite record of the deliberate founding of a library - by Tiglath-Pileser I of Assyria - and in ~650 BC we come to Ashurbanipal's library, which we have sizable archaeological (and, from that, bibliographic) evidence for. This is certainly the first recorded "real library", in terms of what we know about how it ran - organised, maintained and continually growing, actively and extensively used by the king and by a professional class.

So any of those, I guess, could be considered.

[drcuriosity]

The Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, perhaps..?

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

I should think whatever the Chinese court called its library four thousand years ago or so. The "grass writing" on turtle bones and shells is some of the oldest written text in the world.

That's a perfect question for Project Wombat, btw.

[cyperus-papyrus.livejournal.com]

Not sure anyone knows what the first library was. The library of Alexandria was supposedly established in the 3rd century BC, according to Wikipedia.

[timill]

The oldest extant library is the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum.

(reposted with tag inserted properly...)

[nwhyte]

It's a difficult question to answer, as many libraries have shifted ownership and management, often in the days before documentation. This page claims that it's the Czech National Library, if you are only counting official "national libraries", and if you make generous allowance for changes of management. The monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai has been functioning since 500 and presumably has had books on hand all that time; would that count?

[editrx.livejournal.com]

I do know the first publicly funded library was in Peterborough, NH (also the supposed origin town of "Our Town"). The little library in our village of Auburn, NH, is still called the Griffin Free Public Library as it was a typical "private" library (funded by the Griffin family, not the town), and then was turned over to the town in the 1960s to be publicly funded. (I was a library trustee in the village -- an interesting time indeed. We still had an outhouse out back of the library then: no joke.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I wonder how recently the outhouse was displaced by the indoor toilet in North America?

[editrx.livejournal.com]

I can only speak of my own farmhouse (c. 1790s), which had an outhouse, per the owner before us, until "sometime in the mid 1950s." The building itself still stands way in the back of the property (my god, what a hike in winter!), though the hole is filled in now.

We did dig up the original indoor outhouse (in this neck of the woods you have the typical farmhouse termed "big house, little house, barn" -- which is the farmhouse, a connecting smaller building, and then the barn. The middle "little house" of this farm had a two-holer indoor outhouse -- it was a reasonably wealthy cattle farm of its time and for this area. The little house fell down in the 1930s and the foundation filled in with rubble and dirt, and it became the drainage for one of the two well pumps on the property (a "dry well" drainage area). When the place was plumbed in the 1950s, the dry well was used to drain the washing machine. When we rejoined the two buildings with another "little house" three years ago, the outhouse holes still existed, barely, and had ... interesting fill of rubble, garbage (broken pottery, etc.). We had a grand old excavation process. We even found a giant black basalt boulder that had TNH squeeing in delight when she visited, and we happily broke off shards of basalt with a hammer and chisel and gloated over them that evening.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Completely displaced? Probably at least a century in the future.

I last used an outhouse in Sweden, 1965.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Let's pick the moment when more than 50% of houses had indoor toilets.

In the United States?

[(Anonymous)]

Sometime during the first Roosevelt administration.

According to the US Census, in 1940 55% of US households had indoor toilets. Unfortunately, earlier censuses didn't ask the question, but it's reasonable to assume that the 50% mark was hit sometime around the middle of the 1930s.

BTW, much of what we'd consider... not modern... but simply /basic/ in a house emerged in the interwar years. An ordinary middle-class house built before 1920 would be considered uninhabitable today. -- Yes, there are a lot of very nice older houses still around today. But without exception they either (1) belonged to the rich, or (2) have undergone massive renovation -- usually to the point where the original owners wouldn't recognize anything but the floor plan, and often not even that.

Some of the changes were technological -- the spread of central heating, for instance -- but many were organizational. The modern middle-class kitchen, for instance, with overhead cabinets, lots of counter space, and everything built around the triangle of sink - oven/stove - icebox? It was invented in Germany in the 1920s.

Anyway. Indoor toilets, c. 1935, give or take a couple of years. Another reason to hate Roosevelt!


Doug M.

Outhouses

[laetitia-apis.livejournal.com]

My family installed electric-pump plumbing when we moved back to the farm after WWII. Outhouses for summer cottages remained normal well into the sixties.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I was using a publicly funded library in the 1950s, and that dated back to the 1930s or earlier!

[editrx.livejournal.com]

The Peterborough library dates to the 1800s.

It's simply my little village of Auburn, NH, that I was speaking of about the 1960s.

They also don't replace lightbulbs in town hall because "the old light bulb was better."

/joke

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

We've got a Carnegie library in my city (Dunedin, New Zealand) which means it was founded between 1883 and 1929.

[casaubon.livejournal.com]

The Norwich Public Library was opened in 1608. It was maintained by the municipality, so I guess it was publicly funded.
Though widespread public libraries in the UK didn't happen until after the 1850 Public Library Act.

[tanac.livejournal.com]

The library of Ashurbanipal was the first collection of written materials to use a cataloging system (as far as is known now), which makes a fair case for being able to call it the first library as such; however, the library at Alexandria is widely considered to be the first place that materials were gathered simply for the purpose of having one of everything all in one place. So it rather depends upon your definition of 'library', as one commenter above noted. (Much less is known about the collections of the Chinese; yes, they had a system of writing pretty far back, but as far as organizing and making available these collections, not much information survives since many of the Chinese emperors made a habit of destroying information that didn't suit them).

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Good points. James, do you have specific requirements as to how you define, "oldest library"? Must it have a cataloging system and an index? Must it still exist? Must it have written text, or could oral collections count as well (in which case, good luck identifying it!)?

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

The Chinese imperial habit of destroying all prior records (well, trying to), was typically so that "History Will Start With Me" -- alas for the plans of these megalomaniacs, some Bureaucrats had magnificent memories, and could recite great chunks of the destroyed library, after Son Of Heaven guy went to the big pagoda in the sky. [Citation Neededª]

ª:I am feeling even more lethargic than usual this evening.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

According to K.C.Wu's The Chinese Heritage the Shang kept oracle bones and made obsessive records on them so that they could fine-tune the oracle system. Not idea if that qualifies as a library for you, but the dates are 3000-3500 years ago.

Citation that was needed, provided [?]

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

I was thinking, when I wrote the above, particularly of this specific Son Of Heaven guy (http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_aboutchina/2003-09/24/content_22854.htm). (Scroll down to see the 'graph about him burning all the records, and then killing scholars to prevent them reconstructing the records.)

However, I noticed, searching for a decent citation that wasn't Hoaglandesque "Atlantis Shall Rise" drivel, that there are annoyingly over-many variant spellings of his name [(Xi, Hsi, Shi) X (Huang, Huangti, Huangde) X (Qin, Chin, Ch'in)] <--- form Cartesian product and then permute. So, I am sure a better citation is out there; I just can't find it.

[Incidentally, a variant on this theme, is Genghis Khan's deathbed order for the genocidal destruction of the entire Xi Xia people, and the total obliteration of all their records of whatever sort, so as to wipe out all trace and memory of them, because of their rebelliousness.]

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia (which I don't consider autoritative, but which is useful for survey questions like this) identifies the oldest known "great library" as the libraries of Ugarit in modern-day Syria, circa 1200 BC. Then they list Ashurbanipal, then Alexandria and Pergamum.

My fave is Pergamum, in modern-day Turkey. The library was so good that the Egyptians stopped selling papyrus to Pergamum, prompting the creation of parchment (called "pergamum" after the city). Mark Antony is said to have given Cleopatra all of the volumes of Pergamum as a wedding gift, looting the library and emptying its shelves.

I saw the facade of the Celsus Library at Ephesus (Turkey) last May; it was opened sometime in the 100s AD. It paled by comparison with its neighbor Pergamum, but even the 2000-year-old ruin was stunning. (The library was immediately across the main avenue from the most notorious bordello of the city...a juxtaposition that had us giggling the rest of the way through the marble ruins. "Just going down to the library to...study...dear. Back in a couple of hours!")

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

This page has a lot of historical information, including that the publicly-funded and freely-accessed library is considered to be an American invention.

[ambitious-wench.livejournal.com]

The 4th oldest publicly accessible library in the US is the Athenaeum in Providence, Rhode Island. It was never a "free and public" library, it was and is maintained by paid memberships. It is still in operation, and has one of the most extensive collections of first edition books in the US.

http://www.providenceathenaeum.org/

It has one of the most delicious aromas EVAR, IMO.

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

The Charleston Library Society is the 3rd oldest library in the US. Established 1748. A wonderful building. Mmm, the aroma, as you say.