LIBRARIES IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

LIBRARIES IN THE ANCIENT WORLD.

By Lionel Casson. Yale Univ. Press. 192 pp. $22.95

The royal librarian to Ashurbanipal, the monarch who ruled Assyria from 668 to 627 b.c., apparently had a theft problem. A clay tablet dug up in Nineveh in the 1800s bears this inscription: "Your lordship is without equal, Ashur, King of the Gods! Whoever removes [the tablet] . . . may Ashur and Ninlil, angered and grim, cast him down, erase his name, his seed, in the land."

Ashurbanipal maintained a library because he could read and write cuneiform, a rare skill among rulers of the ancient Near East. His collection has come down to us with such homely details of its bibliographic housekeeping still intact because it had the great good fortune of being engraved on clay tablets. These, as Casson points out in his short and elegant history of the early growth of libraries, are vastly more likely to survive than papyrus, because fire only makes them more durable: "When a conqueror set a Mesopotamian palace ablaze, he helped ensure the survival of any clay tablets in it."

This drama of preservation and destruction echoes through Casson’s account of the gradual development of modern library practices. A classics professor emeritus at New York University and the author of many accessible accounts of ancient culture, Casson tracks that development through references in contemporary accounts, artistic depictions of people reading, and other such hints. The collections themselves, of course, have mostly vanished.

But the outlines of the story are clear. Near Eastern libraries such as Ashurbanipal’s were the first to assign titles to their texts for easy reference and to create something we can recognize as a catalogue. Greece, where literacy was far more widespread, saw the first signs of an economy of book (that is to say, scroll) distribution, which allowed individuals such as Aristotle to amass private collections of high repute. Ancient Egypt probably had libraries—but with the contents on papyrus.

The great library at Alexandria, the first to be both truly comprehensive and open to a large scholarly public, was also the first to practice alphabetization and to have a complete shelf list, the famed Pinakes that listed and described every work of Greek literature. The Pinakes perished along with the rest of the library in the still mysterious catastrophe that ended its existence. (Weighing in on this longstanding conundrum, Casson says the library was probably burned not by Julius Caesar but by the forces of the Roman emperor Aurelian as they put down a rebellion around a.d. 270.)

Casson’s story continues through Rome, which contributed the innovation of nonscholarly public libraries for leisure reading, and up to the rise of Christianity, which helped spread use of the parchment codex (the ancient equivalent of a book)—probably because it was free of the scroll’s cultural and religious associations. Throughout, the tale is told in upbeat tones. But its feel is bittersweet, a story of progress in the preservation of human knowledge set against a backdrop of constant loss.

—Amy Schwartz