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

[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.