Antiquity Libraries Completed by students of class 2 "B" "Books are compressed time" Marietta Shahinyan

Introduction In ancient history, there are many large libraries 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 to be irretrievably lost.

What is a library? The library is a cultural, educational and scientific support institution that organizes the public use of printed works. Libraries are systematically engaged in the collection, storage, propaganda and issuance of 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 with gold, that the inscription "Pharmacy for the soul" was carved. Founded around 1300 BC near the city of Thebes, she kept papyri books in boxes, earthen jugs, and later in niches in the walls. Pharaohs, priests, scribes, officials used them. 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 a collection of clay tablets dating from about 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 numbered up to 60 thousand clay tablets, on which were recognized texts containing information about religious events (for example, the legend of the Great Flood), lyrics to deities, legends and myths about the emergence of civilization, various fables, sayings and proverbs. Each of the books had labels with inscriptions about the content: "Medicine", "History", "Statistics", "Growing plants", "Description of the area" and others.

Library found during the excavation of the city of Nippur

Fireproof Library of Nineveh 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: “Palace of Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria, to whom the great gods gave ears to hear, and open eyes to see what the essence of government represents. I wrote this wedge-shaped letter on the tiles, I numbered them, I put them in order, I placed them in my palace for the edification 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 Clay Books 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 \u200b\u200bvarious geometric shapes, they had their own multiplication table, they knew squaring and square root extraction. The modern seven-day week was also born in Mesopotamia, where the foundation of modern concepts of astronomy about the structure and development of celestial bodies was laid. The books were kept in strict order. At the bottom of each tablet was the full title of the book, and next to it was the page number. There was also a catalog in the library, in which the title, the number of lines, the branch of knowledge to which the book belonged was 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 (4th century BC).

The largest and most famous library of antiquity, the Alexandrian Library, was founded in the 111th century BC.

Libraries of Ancient Russia The first library in Russia was founded in the city of Kiev in 1037 by the Kiev prince Yaroslav the Wise. Books for the library were bought in other countries as well. The prince put some of these books in the church of St. Sophia, founding the first library. The first library in Russia created in this way in the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev in subsequent years grew and was enriched with book treasures.

Sint Pieters Church Library (Netherlands)

Library of the monastery in Waldsassen (Germany)

British Museum Library (London)

Conclusion The kings of ancient kingdoms began to create libraries. Legends tell of the stunning libraries of the Ancient World, such as the Assyrian Kingdom, the Babylonian Kingdom, the Thebes Library in Ancient Egypt, the Ancient Greek and Roman Libraries, the famous Library of Alexandria. Each city has its own library and each country has its own State National Library. And in whatever form books may exist - on papyri or CD-roms - their repositories - libraries - have always been, are and will be needed by mankind!

“Rome, Florence, all sultry Italy are between the four walls of his library. In his books - all the ruins of the ancient world, all the splendor and glory of the new! "
G. Longfellow

The ancient world, through the lips of great scientists, poets, statesmen, declared the enormous power and importance of libraries. From time immemorial, libraries were created by rulers, major dignitaries, priests and clergy, scientists and educators.
Libraries of ancient civilizations and states - custodians of scientific and cultural achievements of peoples contributed to the mutual enrichment of cultures of different countries, continuity in the development of sciences and literature. And in our time, the preserved information about the libraries of antiquity, their funds often serve as the basis for new scientific discoveries.

Libraries first appeared in the ancient East. Commonly referred to as the first library is a collection of clay tablets, circa 2500 BC. BC, found in the temple of the Babylonian city of Nippur.
In one of the tombs near the Egyptian Thebes, a box with papyri from the time of the II transitional period (XVIII-XVII centuries BC) was discovered. During the era of the New Kingdom, Ramses II collected about 20,000 papyri.
The most famous ancient oriental library is a collection of cuneiform tablets (mostly of a legal nature) from the palace of the Assyrian king of the 7th century BC. e. Ashurbanipal in Nineveh.
In ancient Greece, the first public library was founded by the tyrant Clearchus (4th century BC).

Alexandria became the largest center of ancient books. library. It was created in the 3rd century BC. e. Ptolemy I and was the center of education for the entire Hellenistic world. The Library of Alexandria was part of the mouseĩon (museum) complex. The complex included living rooms, dining rooms, reading rooms, botanical and zoological gardens, an observatory and a library. Later, medical and astronomical instruments, stuffed animals, statues and busts were added to it, which were used for teaching. The museum included 200,000 papyri in the Temple (almost all the libraries of antiquity were attached to temples) and 700,000 documents in the School. The museum and most of the Alexandria Library were destroyed around 270 AD.

In the Middle Ages, the centers of bookishness were monastic libraries, under which scriptoria functioned. There, not only the Holy Scriptures and the writings of the Church Fathers were copied, but also the works of ancient authors. During the Renaissance, Renaissance figures literally hunted for the Greek and Latin texts preserved in the monasteries. Because of the enormous cost of manuscripts and the laboriousness of their manufacture, books were chained to library shelves.

The advent of book printing brought about tremendous changes in the appearance and activity of libraries, which were now more and more different from archives. Library stocks are starting to grow rapidly. With the spread of literacy in modern times, the number of library visitors also grows.

The most famous libraries of antiquity:

Ashurbanipal Library in Nineveh
Library of Alexandria Hellenistic Era
The Pergamon Library is its main competitor in antiquity
Otrar library in Otrar
Library of al-Hakam II in Cordoba

Edition: A. Glukhov. "From time immemorial"

In the foggy distance of centuries, this civilization originates, about the existence of which even 60-70 years ago even the largest specialists had a very vague idea.

Studying the cuneiform tables of the Ashurbanipal 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, did not know anything about this people at all. When excavations began in Mesopotamia, "the people who began history" (as the Sumerians are sometimes called now) began to tell.

Halfway between Babylon and the Persian Gulf, the Warka Hill has stood in the dry desert for a long time. Its excavations, begun before the First World War, were resumed in 1927. They were led by the German scientist J. Jordan.

Hidden under the hill was the ancient city of Uruk, which had existed for three millennia. Quite extraordinary things were hidden in the Varca Hill. And above all - one of the most ancient clay tablets with inscriptions. The documents found belonged to the middle of the fourth millennium BC. Therefore, they are fifty-five centuries old!

Then other equally ancient cities were discovered. The ruins of temples and palaces, household items and tools arose before archaeologists. And - mountains of clay tablets, of various shapes and sizes, dotted with cuneiform. From them we learn about the political and social life of ancient Sumer, its economy and state structure, about 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 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. For lack of stone, they learned how to make sickles, pots, plates, jugs from clay. There was no tree on their land - they began to build huts and cattle pens from reeds, held together by clay.

Centuries passed. The Sumerians invented the potter's wheel, wheel, plow, seeder, sailboat - magnificent milestones on the path of man. We learned how to build arches, make castings from copper and bronze. Finally, they created a writing system, the famous cuneiform script, which spread throughout Mesopotamia. The same clay served as the writing material!

Sumer was famous for its populous cities. Ur, which at one time was the capital of Sumer, had up to 200 thousand inhabitants. Dozens of ships - from Syria, Egypt, India - moored here. Clay tablets, extracted during excavations of the cities of ancient Sumer, told us about how they lived, worked, what people ate in those distant times. Several thousand tables 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 the archaeologist L. Woolley for many years. There were also a great many cuneiform tables here. For almost four millennia, more than 20 thousand tablets have lain in the land of the city of L.agash. They were systematized and divided into parts by content; it was already a real library.

The "booty" in the ancient Shuruppak was also impressive.

There, near the modern village of Fara, around which vast swamps stretch, 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 such documents were kept can be judged from the finds in Uruk. Here the tablets were folded into willow baskets. Each basket was tied, a form and a label with inscriptions were attached to it. Some of them are: "Documents Concerning the Garden", "Sending the Workers", "Reed Basket with Documents Concerning the Weavers' Workshop". To characterize the documents, we present two texts. One reads: "Bronze vessels were received from Dadaga, Ur-Shara weighed them." Another: "Forty-five female slaves are sent for one day to carry reeds to repair the ship and to deliver the beams for the palace."

These are the documents of the royal temple households. But the Sumerians also left works on mathematics, history, literary works, works on agriculture (the calendar of the farmer and the classification of plants were found). Ancient maps have also come down to us. On one - the plan of the city of Nippur: the size of the city is precisely given, the location of the walls, gates, and the most important buildings is marked.

Mathematicians knew how to prove theorems. On one of the tablets, for example, a proof of the similarity of triangles is stated, on the other - a theorem, known in science as Euclid's theorem. Already in the II millennium BC, the scientists of Mesopotamia 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 plate with a list of recipes was found. 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 of the medicines are of herbal origin: they were made from mustard, willow, fir, pine. Medicines were diluted with beer, wine, vegetable oil. An interesting detail - there are no magic spells in the document at all.

Now many tablets of the ancient Sumerians have been deciphered, containing records of myths, proverbs and sayings. It turned out, for example, that the Sumerian collections of proverbs and sayings are several centuries older than the Egyptian ones we know - they were written down more than three and a half millennia ago. Here are some examples of popular wisdom:

Well-dressed people are welcome everywhere;

Dodged a wild bull

Bumped into a wild cow;

If the 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 folded and recorded more than a thousand years earlier than the 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 at that distant time people glorified their land, their fields: “O Sumer, great land among all the lands of the universe, flooded with unfading light. Your heart is deep and unknown. May your sheds be numerous, may your cows multiply, may your sheepfolds be numerous, may your sheep be innumerable. "

The Sumerians composed both the first hymn to labor and the first love elegy in the history of mankind: “Spouse, dear to my heart, great is your beauty, sweet as honey. A lion, dear to my heart. Great is your beauty, sweet as honey. "

They also own the most ancient funeral song: "May your life path not disappear from memory, may your name be called in the days to come."

But the greatest thing that Sumerian culture has created is the poem about Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, oppresses his people, but then, having concluded friendship with the wild man Enkidu, performs unprecedented feats. After Enkidu's death, Gilgamesh vainly seeks immortality. The poem is a true hymn to a person, his aspirations and daring. In it, interest in the heroic personality is clearly expressed, and the hero himself boldly enters into the struggle against the unjust order established by God. The first songs of the poem originated and were recorded in Sumer. Here are its first lines (translated by the Soviet assyrologist V.K.Shileiko):

About the one who saw everything to the end of the world,

About the one who permeated everything, who comprehended everything.

He read all the scriptures together,

The depth of the wisdom of all book readers.

I saw the secret, I knew the secret,

And he brought the news of the days before the flood.

He walked a long way, but he got tired and returned.

And he wrote all his work on stone.

This means that even then there were quite a few books, even then the "book readers" possessed wisdom - there were also people who could read "all the writings."

Discoveries followed one another. And each of them is the result of tremendous work, the result of ingenuity and skill. The fact that some texts have come down to us in later (Babylonian) copies, the fact that they have been poorly preserved, is not the worst thing. Many works were disconnected. Great art, for example, was required to restore the literary monument "House of Fish" from the multitude of 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 contains a description - and very poetic - of many fish.

Here's what they say about the stingray. This fish has:

Head is a hoe, teeth are a comb

Her bones are fir branches,

Its thin tail is the scourge of the fisherman.

All sorts of teachings, disputes and disputes were widespread in "Sumer. Scientists of our time managed to restore from the available tablets and fragments the teaching, conventionally called" The Farmer's Calendar. " there are tips on how to get good yields. They cover all types of field work, from irrigating the soil to harvesting. The entire lesson consists of 107 lines.

To farm, you need to know exactly when to start sowing. And the priests of Sumer developed one of the oldest calendars - the lunar. Gradually, the lunar calendar began to turn into a lunisolar calendar: the months were counted according to the moon, and the year according to the sun.

Of the surviving texts of many disputes, we mention the "Dispute between Hoe and Plow", which describes in detail what Plow and Hoe are doing. The text ends with the following words: "In the dispute between the Hoe and the Plow, the Hoe wins."

Of course, the libraries kept cult-liturgical literature: hymns to the gods and legends about them, prayers, spells, penitential psalms, fortune-telling, predictions. The most interesting in the literary sense are the penitential psalms, reflecting human sorrow and suffering with genuine lyricism.

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 record. According to the scientist, a melody for the harp was recorded here, the playing of which was accompanied by the reading of the legend.

Without Sumerian libraries, we would know much less about the life, production, 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 were already compiled, grouped according to certain criteria. " It may seem surprising, but the directories were also found and decrypted.

The researcher holds a clay tablet in his hands. At one time it was discovered during excavations of one of the cities of Sumer and was sent to the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. It is small in size (six and a half centimeters long and about three and a half centimeters wide) and fits freely 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 bar.

"Some unknown poem," thought the scientist, although the short lines and these horizontal lines were very embarrassing. He re-read the lines over and over again, but there was no coherent text. Reading and re-reading the phrases, he was more and more amazed at their similarity with the first lines of the works he knew. Then a guess flashed through, which, upon careful checking, was confirmed: it was a directory! The ancient scribe in the smallest handwriting put on the tablet the names (and they, as you know, were given on the first line of the text) of sixty-two literary works. Twenty-four of them have come down to us. Soon the second catalog was deciphered in the Louvre.

Both lists have retained the titles of 87 literary works for us. Among them: the myth "The Creation of the Hoe", the lesson "During the 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. Maybe the scribe made a list before hiding the tablets with the texts in the store, or maybe, on the contrary, placing them on the shelves in the "House of tablets". It is not clear what caused the sequence of works in the list, etc.

So far we know very little about the libraries of Sumer, but after all, not all tablets have been read. New researchers of the culture of this ancient civilization, perhaps, will open both new catalogs and new information about the book depositories of that time.

The cuneiform invented by the Sumerians spread widely throughout the Middle East and Asia Minor. In many cities, collections of clay tablets have been found, which give an idea of \u200b\u200bthe nature of the books, and of the ways of keeping them, and of 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, who wrote about himself: “I, Ashurbanipal, comprehended the wisdom of Naboo, all the art of scribes, learned the knowledge of all the masters, how many there are, learned to shoot from a bow, ride a horse and a chariot , to hold the reins ... And he studied the craft of the wise Adap, comprehended the hidden secrets of the art of writing, I read about heavenly and earthly buildings and pondered over them. I attended the meetings of the scribes. I was solving complex problems with multiplication and division, which are not immediately clear. "

These words are indeed 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 searched for ancient books and made copies of them. Many of them had a postscript, which confirmed the accuracy of the copy: "According to the ancient original, written off and verified." Some tablets were very old, with erased signs, then the scribe left a note: "erased", "I do not know."

The fate of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, is well known. It fell under the onslaught of the combined forces of Babylonia and Media. The city was completely destroyed: “The cavalry rushes, swords flash, spears glisten; many killed. Nineveh was plundered, devastated and devastated, ”the ancient historian wrote. The fire that raged after that for many days completed the destruction, and the sands of the desert 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 planning - everything spoke of the high culture of the people. Archaeologists delved into the ruins of the burnt palace. Here are two small rooms. Their floor is covered with a thick layer (half a meter!) Of broken bricks. The scientist lifts a rectangular tile - wedge-shaped letters are visible on it. Second, third, fourth - all tiles are filled with even small lines.

However, Layard only opened 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's Hall. So it was called because its walls were decorated with sculptural scenes of the royal hunt for lions. This is where most of the library was located in the Lion Room. The fire partially damaged the book collection - the tablets collapsed into the basement and lay there for 25 centuries.

Despite the formidable warning inscribed on one of the tablets: "He who dares to take these tables ... let him punish Ashur and Belit with his anger, and the name of his and his heirs will forever be consigned to oblivion in this country", the clay tablets were carefully packed in boxes and sent to London.

The processing of this book treasure demanded a great deal of work. After all, all the tablets were mixed, many were broken into several pieces; it was necessary to read all this, decipher, establish surnames and geographical names. A gigantic job! And it was done by scientists from different countries.

It turned out that a wide variety of literature in several languages \u200b\u200b(including Sumerian) was kept here. The results of astronomical observations and medical treatises, grammar reference books and annals of the Assyrian kings, books of religious content and myths. The high development of the literature of this people is evidenced by the "mournful song to calm the heart." It conveys the feeling of deep sorrow of a person who has experienced great grief, who is aware of his loneliness.

The significance of the Ashurbanipal library is that it is, in essence, a true treasury of cultural achievements of the peoples of the Ancient East. Suffice it to say that Assyrian librarians have copied and preserved for us the most outstanding work of Mesopotamia literature, one of the greatest epics of world literature - the legend 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, a minister of the British Museum, formerly an engraver.

With excitement he 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 plate, not one-piece, part of it is beaten off. The scientist reads the lines about the worldwide flood: “Listen, wall, listen! You, a man from Shuruppak, build yourself a ship, leave your property and save your life! Take a couple of all living beings with you on the ship. " Later it turned out that it was the eleventh tablet (out of twelve) from the epic of Gilgamesh.

The library in Nineveh was maintained in exemplary order, and the book storage system certainly helped to restore and read the scattered works.

Each book had a "library stamp": "The palace of Ashurbanipal, king of kings, king of the country Ashur, to whom the god Nabu and the goddess Gaslist bestowed sensitive ears and keen eyes to search for the creations of the writers of my kingdom."

There was a catalog in the library. The tile indicated the name of the work (by its first line), as well as the room and shelf on which it was stored. And a little finger-sized label 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. So that the pages did not get confused, they put a serial number on them, and at the top of each plate the initial words of the work were repeated. The book about the creation of the world began with the words: "Before that, what is above was not yet called heaven." Each of the tablets in this book reads "First is that which is above." The epic about Gilgamesh began with the line "He who saw everything." And this line was repeated at the top of each of the 12 tablets.

So, through the efforts of many scientists from the depths of the centuries, one of the most remarkable libraries of antiquity was extracted. And not only extracted, but also read, translated and commented. 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 have already forgotten about it. And when at the end of the last century the 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 of travelers, argued that a great and powerful people - the Hittites - lived on the territory of present-day Turkey and northern Syria. In 1903, his book was published - "The Hittites, or the History of a Forgotten People." And soon the scientist's discovery was irrefutably proven.

The history of the Hittite state was helped to uncover cuneiform tablets from a library discovered by the German scientist G. Winkler. This he in 1907 found during excavations in Bogazkei (145 kilometers from Ankara) more than 10 thousand clay tablets. Careful study of these tablets, drawn up in Babylonian language, gave rise to confidence - the expedition is on the land of the ancient capital of the "rulers of the Hetty." Particular excitement was caused by a tablet with a letter from Pharaoh Ramses II to the king of the Hittites. It dealt with a treaty between the Egyptians and the Hittites.

Plates were brought to Winkler in whole baskets. Without unbending, from morning to evening, he read documents about the life of the Hittites, their history, 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 a large temple, neatly folded rows of obliquely well-preserved clay tablets. Their position when found can only be explained by the assumption that they were kept in the archive, originally located directly above this basement warehouse, and during the fire they slipped down. " And even then it became clear that this is the biggest find after the Ashurbanipal library. But that was not all: a quarter of a century later, more than 6,000 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 mankind. The world learned about the existence and culture of the Hittite state - a powerful state equal to Egypt and Babylon. It occupied the whole of Asia Minor up to Syria and existed for seven centuries. At one time, the Hittites conquered Babylon and razed it (to intimidate other peoples!) To the ground, broke the power of Mittani, subjugated Ugarit, a large trade center on the Mediterranean. The country waged successful wars with Egypt.

But not all of the tablets spoke. The scientist was able to read only those that were written in the Babylonian language.

The language of other cuneiforms was unfamiliar to him. Deciphering of the Hittite language was initiated by the Czech scientist B. Grozny. It was no easy task. Grozny himself said: "I read and re-read the inscription maybe two or three hundred times, trying to find that Achilles' heel, that point of Archimedes, which, no matter how weak it is, could serve me."

The decoding of the Hittite letter made it possible to read the second part of the library. The bulk of the cuneiform tablets contain religious texts - rituals, hymns, prayers, descriptions of gods, descriptions of religious holidays, texts of oracles. Astrological monuments are also adjacent to them by their nature.

The Hittites borrowed from the Babylonians 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, a cone, etc. They knew how to raise to a power and left tablets with square and cube roots ).

The Hittites had many legal works; the code they created was provided with numerous commentaries, a kind of aids for judges.

From the 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 is built according to a certain scheme. Another king - Hattusilis - left a document that can be called an autobiography. This is one of the first autobiographies in world literature.

The prayer of one of the kings (Mursilis II), written in the form of a letter to the gods during the plague, is distinguished by the brilliance of the presentation. Of particular interest is the story of Mursilis about how he became speechless. This is the first story in the history of culture about a speech disorder. In general, the Hittites reached a high poetic level in their prayers.

Naturally, the question arises: "If the tsars wrote this way, then how did the poets write?" Almost all poetry, as a rule, was written on wooden tablets, which, alas, burned down in a fire. But what has survived is perfect. For example, we will give an ancient poem in honor of the sun god:

The sun god of heaven, the shepherd of mankind.

You come out of the sea, out of the sea - the son of heaven, and rush up to heaven.

Sun god of heaven, my lord!

Born people and a wild beast in the mountains, a dog, and a pig, and an insect in the field - you give everyone 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 come down to us. We also know the author's name - Killas, he lived half a millennium before Homer.

The Hittites had a peculiar genre - short stories, called "records of oversights and stupidity." These are the first critical works. They contain laconic portrait sketches of dishonest officials, bureaucratic judges. There is also a story about a commander who cares only about drawing up victorious reports to the king, and not about a real victory.

Fragments of the epic about Gilgamesh were also found in the Bogazgei collection of cuneiform tablets.

This essay was not intended to tell in detail about the contents of the library's clay books, books that reflected: law and law, religion and medicine, the deeds of kings and the customs of the people, ritual texts and myths.

Here I would like to emphasize one curious detail: many Hittite books 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 oldest "horse breeding guide" contains 1000 lines of text. It is over 3400 years old.

Hittite librarians and archivists created the science of book storage. The cuneiform texts of the catalogs of the library, which was also an archive, have been preserved. The catalog also contained indications of the lost documents. Used labels for individual works. All this speaks of the order that was maintained in the storage of clay books.

Hattusas - the so-called capital of the Hittites - in the XIII century BC was completely destroyed by fire. Fire-resistant clay tablets have survived, but most of the archive, which consisted of wooden tablets, has been lost forever ...

Sumer, Assyria, Hittites. Clay tablet. Cuneiform icons. Antiquity. Thanks to the clay books, the wisdom of the ancient peoples who lived at the dawn of civilization became known to us.

Kovalik I.V., teacher-librarian

MOU gymnasium "Mariinsky", Taganrog.

Libraries of the Ancient World.

Library lesson for 5th grade.

Lesson objectives :

To expand knowledge about the history of the creation of the main sources of information in the past (clay tablets, papyrus, parchment).

To give an idea of \u200b\u200bthe libraries of the ancient world, their significance for humanity.

Equipment : Projector, screen, computer, multimedia presentation.

"There is only one truly inexhaustible

the treasure is a great library. "

Pierre Bouast

LIBRARIES are called the "pillars of civilization." They have always played a key role in the development of science and culture. And the German poet Goethe called them the memory of mankind.

What libraries can be ranked among the “pillars of civilization”? To answer the first question, let's go deep into history and visit the oldest libraries in the world. History has not preserved detailed information about the ancient libraries, but from those small passages that modern scholars have at their disposal, one can get an idea of \u200b\u200bthe most ancient book collections.

Our time travel will cover a huge period of human history from the 4th millennium BC to the 4th century AD.

Libraries of Ancient Egypt

It is known that for the first time works of writing began to be collected in Ancient Egypt, where a repository of papyri existed over 3500 years ago. The heyday of libraries was in the 2nd millennium BC. They were located throughout the country, in palaces, temples, and also in the original centers of the spiritual life of the Egyptians - "houses of life." Papyrus was used for writing, books from it were kept in boxes, earthen jugs or in special cases. Several catalogs carved on the walls of book depositories have survived to this day. Here are religious writings, texts on mathematics, navigation, irrigation, astronomy, astrology. Usually at the temple, along with the library, there were schools of scribes and workshops for the correspondence of books.

Libraries were considered to be the focus of wisdom. Above the entrance to the famous library of the Ramesseum temple, which was built by Pharaoh Ramses II, the inscription "Pharmacy for the soul" was carved. Temple libraries were often schools at the same time; the best classical texts served as teaching materials, and many of them became known to us precisely because they were copied by students in a notebook. The position of the guardian was state and was inherited, since it could only be occupied by those who possessed "higher knowledge".

Libraries of Ancient Mesopotamia

During excavations on the site of the ancient cities of Mesopotamia, cuneiform tablets were found, which contained information about the state structure of Sumer, its economy and social life, business records, lists of words for memorization, school texts and essays, reporting documents of scribes and works of fiction.

Uruk was located in Mesopotamia, in the lower reaches of the Euphrates, on the border between the steppe and the desert (now it is the territory of Iraq). Long before Rome and Athens, even long before Babylon, it was a flourishing city. During excavations in Uruk, several personal libraries were found. In one of the private houses, part of which was adapted for school activities, several hundred tablets with religious and historical texts, multiplication tables were found.

A large library was found during the excavations of the city of Nippur (the territory of modern Iraq) - the oldest religious center of the Sumerians. The temple library was located in 62 rooms, where more than one hundred thousand clay tablets were found. Long work on deciphering the records allowed scientists to get an idea not only about the "funds" and storage conditions of the tablets, but also to replenish knowledge about the history of the people who once lived in this territory. Were found texts containing information about religious myths and texts of hymns to deities, legends about the emergence of agriculture and civilization, collections of fables, sayings and proverbs.

The temple library contained collections of laws, geographical, historical, botanical, philological, astronomical and other treatises of the ancient Sumerians. Some of the tablets found in Sumerian libraries were kept in closed boxes or baskets. Each of them had labels with inscriptions about the nature of the materials they contained: "Medicine", "History", "Statistics", "Documents relating to the garden", "Sending workers" and others.

In the Babylonian kingdom, libraries were created at temples, in the palaces of rulers, at schools. In no country of the Ancient East have archaeologists found so many legal documents as on the territory of the cities of this kingdom. A special place among the finds is occupied by the collection of laws of King Hammurabi, who built a library in Borsippa.

Persepolis is an ancient Persian city founded by Darius I the Great (ruled 522–486 BC), where he moved the capital of the Achaemenids from Pasargadae, the capital of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian state. Inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings and thousands of clay tablets with texts in the Elamite language, containing data on the construction of the city and the economy of the area, were found at the excavation site.

A startling discovery was made in 1906-1907. in Bogazkoy, a small Turkish village, when the German professor Hugo Winkler unearthed the archives of the Hittite kings - thousands of clay tablets with cuneiform texts. The ancient city near Bogazkoy, it turns out, was the capital of the Hittites and was called Hattusas. The tablets helped scientists to penetrate the history of the ancient Hittites, learn about the life and life of this people.

King Ashurbanipal was the owner of the largest and richest library of Ancient Mesopotamia. This king two and a half thousand years ago collected a large library in his capital Nineveh. It contains hundreds of clay books. They consisted of many "sheets" - plates of the same size. There were so many books that Ashurbanipal kept some of them in the palace of his grandfather, and most of them in the Lion Hall, so named because scenes of the royal hunt for lions were depicted on its walls.

A stamp was squeezed out on the books - "Palace of Ashurbanipal, king of the universe, king of Assyria" - just like in our libraries they put the seal of the library on books, and they compiled a catalog of books.

At the entrance to the library there was an inscription: "Whoever dares to take these tables, let Ashur and Bellit punish with their anger, and let the name of him and his heirs be consigned to oblivion in this country" - such a warning should have plunged everyone into a state of fear, who would only think of stealing a book from the royal library in Nineveh. The fact that this royal property was indicated by another inscription: “The palace of Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria, to whom the god Nabu and the goddess Tamzita gave ears to hear, and open eyes to see what the essence of government represents. I wrote this wedge-shaped letter on the tiles, I numbered them, I put them in order, I placed them in my palace for the instruction of my subjects. "

This library, the largest for its time, collected books summarizing the scientific achievements of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians.
Thanks to the ancient library, we are well aware of the legends, myths and traditions of the peoples of Mesopotamia. Particularly interesting are 12 clay tablets, which contain a wonderful work in verse - the epic of Gilgamesh. Plates with the texts of the poem were found during excavations of libraries in Uruk, but the most accurate copy belonged to Ashurbanipal.

The first Sumerian-Babylonian, Sumerian-Babylonian-Hittite dictionaries were compiled in the library. Modern scholars have been able to translate ancient texts with the help of these dictionaries.

The reader could easily navigate the library of King Ashurbanipal thanks to a well-developed system. At the bottom of each clay book there was a name, number, the first words of the work. If the book consisted of several tablet pages, then the last line of the clay "page" was placed at the beginning of the next tablet. Usually such a "multi-page" book was contained entirely in a special wooden box, had such a peculiar binding.

Books were kept on shelves by department. A clay label was attached to the rack with the name of the branch of knowledge to which this group of books belongs. The Ashurbanipal library has preserved for us a lot of other valuable information about the language, history, science, life, customs and laws of the ancient peoples. And it was all written on clay tablets!

But the breadth of information and the vast number of documents allowed the Ashurbanipal library to earn, according to one study, the reputation of "the greatest library of the ancient world."

Libraries of Ancient China

At the courts of Chinese rulers, more than 3 thousand years ago, there were special officials whose duties were to collect and store literary works and an archive. But when Emperor Qin Shi Huang in 221 BC. united China, he announced that only books on the history of the Qin dynasty, as well as on agriculture, medical and fortune-telling, have the right to exist - the rest he ordered to be burned. And for more than half a century, the emperors of the next, Han, dynasty still prohibited the creation of libraries. Then the ban was canceled. And a few more decades later, Emperor Wu, who introduced the system of state examinations to fill administrative posts, established a state library. Under him, people also appeared who were engaged in correspondence and search for previously lost books. In 26 BC. Emperor Chen-di issued a decree to search for previously hidden books. Designated people searched for books all over the country - and the result was the first catalog in Chinese history, which is one of the oldest catalogs in the world.

Libraries of Ancient Greece

The word "library" itself is of Greek origin. “Byblos” means “book” (hence “Bible”), “teke” means “warehouse, storage” (the same root in the words “pharmacy”, “card index”, “music library”, “disco”). The earliest data on antique libraries date back to the 2nd millennium BC. In the VI-IV centuries. BC. libraries were among the rulers, philosophers and scientists, for example, Pythagoras. The Athenian library was located in the Acropolis - together with government services, the treasury, and an art gallery. The Greek scientist-mathematician Demophilos created the work "On books worthy of purchase" - a kind of recommendatory bibliographic index.
The Aristotle library in Lyceum (the area of \u200b\u200bAthens where the great ancient philosopher read his lectures) numbered tens of thousands of scrolls. Alexander the Great, a pupil of Aristotle, also took part in its creation. After the death of Aristotle (321 BC), the library became part of a special, in modern language, complex - Museion (temple of the Muses), created by Theophrastus, a disciple and follower of the philosopher. There were also rooms for conversations and lectures, living quarters for teachers, a garden for walking.

The Library of Ancient Greece becomes an institution that can not only make a copy of the document in its collection, but also guarantee the authenticity of the text in this copy. This is how the original texts of the great Greek playwrights - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and scientific texts were spread; it was the library that ensured the vitality of the education system.

The most famous library of antiquity was founded at the Alexandria musiyon (temple or sanctuary). Precise data on the number of books in the library have not been preserved, their number, according to various sources, ranges from 40,000 to 700,000. The library consisted of two departments: the main one (under Museion) and a branch (under the Temple of Serapis).

Its librarians strove to collect manuscripts of most of the known texts from all over the oecumene, or inhabited land. It is believed that it was in Alexandria that approximately 70 scholars translated the first part of the Holy Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek. It was later called the Septuagint and was widely used by the early Christians. The library was located in several rooms: in some of them scrolls rested on shelves, in others they read manuscripts, there were special rooms for the correspondence of manuscripts and the analysis of new acquisitions.

The head (curator) of the library, usually a recognized scholar or poet, whose post was often combined with that of educator of the royal heir, was responsible for acquiring books. He also led the Alexandrian Museion as a high-ranking priest. Educated "envoys" on the staff of the library bought scroll books in all parts of the Mediterranean and Asia Minor. If the scroll could not be bought, they would order copies from it. There were slaves for ancillary work. There were copyist-scribes in the library, and translators were hired to translate foreign works.

The owners of the library The Egyptian kings Ptolemies acquired all the literary works that only existed. To replenish the library, the Ptolemies often resorted to very specific methods.

So, every ship that came to Alexandria was subjected to a thorough search, and if there was any book on it, then it was taken to the library, where a copy was made from it, paying some financial compensation to the owner. The Ptolemies were also eager to get hold of the originals.

In particular, Ptolemy III sent his representatives to Athens for the manuscripts of the playwright poets - Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. He issued 15 talents of silver as a guarantee for the safety of these manuscripts. However, he donated such a huge amount and returned copies to Athens, leaving the originals for himself. How true this information is is a moot point, but in any case, such evidence confirms that in Alexandria all forces were thrown into the acquisition of the necessary books, while, along with the purchase and correspondence, they did not stop at illegal means.

The first ever written catalog of books was created at the Library of Alexandria. Its author was the chief curator Callimachus. He compiled the so-called "Tables" on 120 scrolls (the full title is "Tables of those who showed themselves in all types of literature, and what they wrote"), which became the first collection of all Greek literature. For this work, Callimachus is called the father of bibliography.

Over the years, the library's curators were:

Eratosthenes (III century BC) is considered one of the outstanding scientists and writers of the Hellenistic world. Since 235, Eratosthenes has been the head of the Library of Alexandria and has remained them for over 40 years, while simultaneously studying sciences - philology, chronology, mathematics, astronomy. He was also the tutor of the heir to the throne.

Claudius Ptolemy In the II century. AD for many years he was the librarian of the Library of Alexandria. This is the scientist who created the system of the world, which existed almost unchanged for about 13 centuries.

The fate of the Library of Alexandria is tragic. In 48 BC, part of it died in the fire. The library was damaged during the Egyptian civil war in the 3rd century. The remains were destroyed in the 7th century AD. troops of the Turkish Sultan. When the Sultan was informed about the existence of this library, he said: "If these books repeat the Koran, then they are not needed, if not, then they are harmful." And the priceless collection was destroyed.

Large libraries existed in a number of other Greek cities - in Antioch, Ephesus, as well as in Pergamum, where there was a library, which, in terms of the number and value of the books stored in it, was slightly inferior to the Alexandrian one.

The Pergamon Library was founded in the 2nd century BC by King Eumenes II. Archaeologists have found the place where the library and part of the building were located - a round, 45-meter-high storage of manuscripts and a large reading room.
It is interesting to note that the library building was facing east. According to the prominent architect of antiquity Vitruvius, this protected books from mold, which easily appeared in humid southerly and westerly winds, and also improved the natural lighting of the reading room in the morning, when readers were usually in the library. The library in the city of Ephesus was also facing the east, from which not only a two-storey building was preserved, but also a wide marble staircase leading to the book depository, decorated with statues and bas-reliefs.

Mass production of parchment began in Pergamon specifically for the needs of the Pergamon Library. The invention of parchment was the result of a rivalry in the collection of books between the king of Egypt, Ptolemy, and the king of Pergamon, Eumenes II. Ptolemy forbade the export of papyrus from Egypt. The ruler of Pergamum had to urgently look for other material for the manufacture and rewriting of books.

With the advent of parchment, manuscripts began to resemble a modern book. In the beginning, scrolls were prepared from parchment, as from papyrus. However, it was soon noticed that, unlike papyrus, it was easily written on both sides. The parchment was cut into rectangular sheets, which were sewn together. Thus was born the now dominant universal form of the book - the code, or the book block. In the literal sense, "code" in translation from the Latin language means "piece of wood". Perhaps this happened because the book was bound into wooden boards. The oldest parchment books-codes have come down to us from the 2nd century AD. e.It is curious that the covers of the books were rubbed with cedar oil to protect them from damage by insects; library cabinets were also preferred to be made of cedar.

The library had a repository of manuscripts, a large and a small reading room. Niches lined with cedar are arranged in the marble walls. There were a wide variety of books, but most of all - medical. At the library there were scribes, translators, people who monitored the safety of manuscripts.

The history of the Pergamon Library ended in 43 BC, when Pergamum was already a province of Rome. Mark Antony donated most of the library to the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and the scrolls ended up in the Library of Alexandria. Today Pergamum (Peregamon) is located in Turkey and the ruins of the library are among the tourist sites.

Libraries of Ancient Rome

Rome played an equally important role in the history of libraries, the development of the culture of which was greatly influenced by the Greeks. It was the Greeks who instilled in the Romans a love of books and taught them to value them more than gold.

All educated Romans knew Greek and read Aristotle in the original. It was in Rome that the book became widespread, and the publishing business appeared - large workshops for the correspondence of books. Bookstores appear.

However, during the first five hundred years of its history, Rome had no libraries. The first collections of books among the Romans were nothing but trophies of the Roman generals. Gaius Julius Caesar hatched a plan to create a public library in Rome, but his murder prevented it from being realized.

The first public library in Rome was only opened in 39 BC. It is located in the lobby of the Temple of Liberty in the Atrium and was created with funds received from military booty. Public readings of new works were held in the library. The library building was decorated with statues of the great writers of the past.

Later, other Roman emperors founded public libraries, thus seeking to perpetuate their names. Emperor Augustus founded two libraries in the temple of Apollo Palatins: the Latin and the Greek. Vespasian in honor of one of the military victories opened the "Library of the world".

But the most significant, the largest in ancient Rome, was the library founded by Emperor Trajan. It was located on a forum bearing his name. Trajan's Forum with all its structures was built under the guidance of the outstanding architect Apollodorus of Damascus. This largest and most luxurious of the imperial forums was built in six years (107 - 113). The entrance was a triumphal arch, behind it was a large courtyard with porticoes. The courtyard was closed by the Ulpia Basilica. It was followed by a small rounded square with library buildings - Latin and Greek. Together they were called the Ulpia library (Ulpius is one of the names of the Emperor Trajan). Its honeycomb-like marble walls were drilled with thousands of deep square niches. They contained scrolls of papyrus and parchment. Niches were separated from one another, columns stood in front of them, and the entire library was decorated with busts of those "who served the empire with their pen ...". The famous Trajan's Column has survived to this day.

A hundred years later, the books from this library, by order of the Emperor Caracalla, were transferred to the terms (baths). The area of \u200b\u200bthe baths was 12 hectares, and this grandiose structure was opened in 216. In the huge main building there are halls with a swimming pool, warm, cold and hot baths, lounges. The main building was surrounded by a park, in the depth of which two buildings were symmetrically located - libraries. The colonnades around them were a place of philosophical debate and scholarly conversation.
Reading the works of Roman authors at the end of the period of the republic and the first two centuries of the empire, one is convinced that at that time libraries were already firmly established in Roman life, and the Romans could not imagine their existence without them. By the end of the 3rd century AD, there were already 28 public libraries in Rome alone.
The management of the libraries was entrusted to the so-called "procurators", who, as a rule, were famous scientists and poets. The rest of the library staff were freedmen and slaves, called "librarians" ("scribes"). They monitored the safety of books, pasted and even rewrote dilapidated manuscripts, kept order in the library premises. It is curious that in 1935, during excavations at the site where the library used to be, a marble slab was discovered. On it were engraved in Greek letters: “No book should be taken away. We swore an oath to it. "

Books were made, as in Greece, from papyrus. The rewritten scroll was glued to a stick and wrapped around it; reading, it was gradually unrolled. The ends of the stick were usually decorated with balls of metal or ivory - umbilics. Often the entire volume was placed in a parchment case - a membrane. The title of the book was written on a case or on a special tablet attached to the umbilicus.

We know what libraries were like in Ancient Rome from the works of ancient authors. Works on collecting books and organizing libraries have survived. To this day, the works of Telephos from Pergamum "Three books on the meaning of books, which indicate which books are worthy of acquisition" and Herenius Philo of Byblos "On the acquisition and selection of books" have survived.

Archaeological excavations also help us learn about the history of books and libraries in Ancient Rome.

In August 79 A.D. the eruption of Vesuvius killed three cities at its foot: Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabius. During excavations of Herculaneum, lying under a layer of mud streams, in 1752, at a depth of 27 meters, a room was discovered, from which 1,750 charred scrolls were removed. The house where they were found was named "The Villa of the Scrolls". All the books were in the same order as on the day of the disaster - in a small room, on shelves-niches. Among them are the works of scientists and writers of Greece and Rome, many of which were unknown until that time.

All ancient Roman libraries had a number of common features. In all libraries, as a rule, there were two departments: one for Greek books and the other for Latin. Each library has a reading room and a book depository. The large libraries had several rooms for public reading. Written on papyrus and parchment, works in book depositories were placed either in niches or in cupboards. In the bookcases, books were subdivided according to branches of science: geography, medicine, history, philosophy. A special place was given to poetry. The floor in the reading room was paved with slabs of dark marble, and the ceilings were devoid of gilding so that the bright colors would not irritate the reader. Comfortable armchairs, statues of muses and busts of famous writers - all this created the atmosphere of a true temple of sciences and contributed to a special uplifting of thought. Therefore, readers of Roman libraries preferred to study the manuscripts in the reading room of the library, despite the possibility of receiving books at home.

Library of Celsius in Ephesus.

She kept 12 thousand ancient scrolls and served as a grave for the great Celsius. The library is a rather unusual site for a tomb - burial here was a special honor for Celsius. It is the second largest library in the Ancient World after the library in Alexandria. The building is known as one of the few surviving examples of the ancient Roman library and proves that public libraries were built not only in Rome itself, but throughout the Roman Empire.

The library was built during the reign for Tiberius Julius Celsius by his son, Tiberius Julius Aquila. The library was built from 114 to 135. Aquila bequeathed a large amount of funds for the acquisition and the contents of the library. In the 2nd half centuries during the invasion of the Goths, the interior of the building was completely destroyed who however spared building.

At that time, books were not handed over to hands, so the reading room occupied most of the Ephesian library. The scrolls lay there, neatly folded in niches; in the middle of the huge room were tables with benches, the readers were served by specially trained slaves, many of whom were very well versed in science and literature.

Unfortunately, the library could not withstand the blows of time and died during the attack by the Goths.

Libraries were damaged not only by the barbarians, but also by the Roman Caesars. They, like the Chinese emperors, used books to fight dissent. The mass burning of books was first practiced by Octavian Augustus. The books of the disgraced Ovid were removed from all the libraries of the empire, and the poet destroyed the Metamorphoses himself. Nero, having sentenced Fabrice Veyenton to exile, ordered the "Testament" written by him to be burned. Emperor Domitian ordered to destroy all the compositions he did not like.

With the weakening of the Roman Empire, the influence and importance of libraries in society weakened, they fell into decay and desolation, were plundered, perished by fires and destroyed by barbarians. According to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, they gradually turned into "tightly closed tombs."

With the fall of the Roman Empire, these "tombs" also perished - libraries were plundered, destroyed, burned.

The era of the Middle Ages began. But that's a completely different story.

List of references:

Berger A.K. Library of Alexandria // From the history of human society: Children's encyclopedia. T.8. –M .: Pedagogy, 1975.- p. 81-82

A.A. Glukhov From time immemorial: Essays on the ancient libraries of the world.- Moscow: Kniga, 1971 .- 112 p.

Dantalova M.A. Library of King Ashurbanipal // From the history of human society: Children's encyclopedia. T.8. –M .: Pedagogy, 1975.- p. 36-38

History of the book / under. ed. A.A. Govorova, T.G. Kupriyanova, Moscow: Svetoton, 2001, 400 p.

Malov V.I. Book.- M .: Slovo, 2002.- 48 p. - (What is what)

Pavlov I.P. About your book. - M .: Education, 1991. - 113 p. - (Know and be able to)

Rathke I. History of writing. Issue 4.- Rostov-on-Don: Phoenix, 1995.- 20 p.

Rubinstein R.I. What the monuments of the Ancient East tell about: A book for reading.- Moscow: Enlightenment, 1965.- 184 p.

History of the book: Textbook for universities Govorov Alexander Alekseevich

5.2. BOOKS AND LIBRARIES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD AND ANTIQUITY

The most ancient material for books was probably clay and its derivatives (shards, ceramics). Even the Sumerians and Ekkadians sculpted flat bricks-tablets and wrote on them with three-edged sticks, squeezing out wedge-shaped signs. The tablets were dried in the sun or burned in a fire. Then the ready-made tablets of the same content were placed in a certain order in a wooden box - a clay cuneiform book was obtained. Its advantages were cheapness, simplicity, and affordability. A clay label with the name of the work, the names of the author, owner, patron gods was attached to the box with the tablets - a kind of title page. From clay, catalogs were made - cuneiform lists of stored books.

In the 19th century, European archaeologists unearthed 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). There were kept more than twenty thousand clay books, each of which bore a cuneiform stamp: "The Palace of the King of Kings." Since the Assyro-Babylonian language was the language of international communication, there were libraries of cuneiform books and whole archives of tablets in Egypt (Tel-Amarna), and in Asia Minor, etc.

"Egypt is the gift of the Nile" - the historian Herodotus quotes an ancient aphorism. The reed-papyrus is entirely a gift of the great river, which made it possible for the greatest civilization of the Ancient World to emerge and flourish.

The Egyptians peeled the bark of the cut reeds 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 up, he pressed the papyrus into a solid mass, elastic, fairly even and strong. Dried papyrus was polished with pumice and sea shells, tinted and whitewashed. This is how the naturalist Pliny the Elder describes the making of writing papyrus.

Papyrus, however, was fragile, and it was impractical to cut sheets from it and bind them. Therefore, papyrus ribbons were glued or stitched into scrolls, which were twisted, tied, put into special cases - capsules or capsules, to which labels with the name of the book were attached, resulting in a scroll - one of the first known forms of a book in world civilization.

The earliest surviving papyrus scrolls 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 the supplier of this convenient and relatively cheap writing material to all countries of the Mediterranean. There are known papyrus scrolls of Greek, Roman, Persian, Jewish, Arabian, Georgian origin. The age of the papyrus book ended only in the X? XI centuries A.D. 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 largest is the so-called Harris papyrus (named after its discoverer), now kept in the British Museum. It is over 40 meters long and 43 centimeters wide. It is believed to have been rewritten in 1200 BC. e. in Thebes. The overwhelming majority of the papyri were not so large.

Luxurious scrolls were also created. The so-called imperial papyrus was stained with the juice of shells extracted from the bottom of the sea. They wrote on it in gold and silver paints ("chrysoul", "codex argenteus", etc.). There were also ordinary varieties, even a special wrapping papyrus. Fannius, the papyrus manufacturer, has become famous in history. There were scrolls forged from precious metals, as well as glued from cloth.

The dominance of papyrus remained unchanged, although books were created from ivory or from cypress boards covered with wax. They were fastened together, the text was scratched out with a sharp style. By the way, this is where the expression "good style" comes from. Such books were named according to the number of sheets: two (diptych), three (triptych), many (polyptych). There were scrolls forged from precious metals, as well as glued from fabrics.

Almost all state and local governments, colleges of priests, assemblies of citizens and wealthy people considered it prestigious to have a good library. Libraries were set up at public baths, where wealthy slave owners spent their time reading books. Specially trained slave-readers, in Latin they were called "lecturers", and in Greek "deacons", read aloud to everyone.

The richest book collection of antiquity was probably Alexandria library 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 - also became widespread. It was named parchment, after the name of the place where this method was invented. Pergamum is a Hellenistic state of Asia Minor. For a long time, papyrus and parchment were used simultaneously, but from the 3rd-4th centuries, due to the decline in the production of papyrus in Egypt, parchment began to come to the fore. To make parchment, the removed skin of a young animal was scraped out with a knife, the residues of fat and wool were removed, then dried, polished, and dyed. The best varieties of parchment were made from leather taken from the back of the neck or abdomen; cheap parchment was made from leather taken from the rim.

The flourishing of the parchment book begins with the onset of the Christian era. Parchment was more expensive than papyrus, but more versatile and durable. In the beginning, scrolls were prepared from parchment, as from papyrus. However, it was soon noticed that, unlike papyrus, it was easily written on both sides. The parchment was cut into rectangular sheets, which were sewn together. Thus was born the now dominant universal form of the book - code, or a book block. In the literal sense, "code" in translation from the Latin language means "piece of wood". Perhaps this happened because the book was bound into wooden boards. The oldest parchment books-codes have come down to us from the 2nd century AD. e.

Papyrus and parchment contributed to the widespread dissemination of scholarship and culture. The books were copied by numerous scribes and sold. Cicero's friend Pomponius Atticus noticed the profitability of book correspondence in the 1st century BC. e. He himself was the owner of a workshop where calligraphers rewrote books. The book correspondence workshop was described by the Roman poet Martial:

After all, it happened to you to come to Argilet,

There is a bookstore opposite Caesar's forum,

All the pillars are written in it this way and that,

So that you can read the names of the poets sooner.

Don't find me there, but ask Atrect

(This is the name of the owner of the shop).

From the first or from the second he is there on the shelf

With a pumice stone peeled and dressed in purple

For five denarii he will give you Martial ...

As it is clear from the works of ancient writers, the books already had a title, colored illustrations, headpieces, capital letters-initials, red lines (headings) were written, marginals were made - notes and notes in the margins. For greater attractiveness, parchment sheets were sometimes painted in different colors (purple, black). Both scrolls and codices were made in different formats, up to 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 additions "tetra" is called a notebook. From notebooks of sixteen and thirty-two pages, a volume was formed - a book block of any format.

The entrepreneur-slave-owner, engaged in the reproduction and sale of handwritten books, was called in Greek "bibliopola" - literally a book distributor, and in Latin "librarian" - a scribe.

The poet Marcial, already familiar to us, advised everyone who wanted to read it on the way: "Hand over 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 calligrapher slaves, hire them for a while, or even send their slave to study in a book-writing workshop. The demand for books in the countries of antiquity (Greece, Rome, the Hellenistic states) grew rapidly, which led to the expansion of the book market.

Ancient writers have left us a lot of evidence of how in the era of imperial Rome it was possible to reproduce 50-100 copies of a work at a time by repeated correspondence. Booksellers sought to attract writers and bibliophiles to their shops, hiring readers to read aloud excerpts from books sold. Starting with Julius Caesar, handwritten "Acta diurna", the so-called daily news, the ancestors of modern newspapers, were created in Rome. They also bred in bookstores.

The price of a book was determined mainly by the size of a scroll or a codex, but it also depended on the design, demand, fame and popularity of the author of the book. Shabby books sold much cheaper, however, if they were rarities, that is, rare books, their price increased significantly. In the bookstore of Ancient Rome, one could rent a book for temporary use.

However, a significant part of the ancient reader's needs for a book was met with the help of public libraries. They were called public. In Rome alone, there were twenty-eight. There were also small private reading rooms in large cities. The flourishing of the book business in ancient times was the lot of major cultural centers. On the periphery and in remote regions, it developed poorly.

In ancient China, the manufacture of bamboo books... Finely planed bamboo plates were held together with metal staples to form a modern sliding window shade. On such a curtain book, as well as on the silk invented later, the Chinese painted their hieroglyphs with brushes, using ink for this.

Originally, the Chinese also made paper from bamboo mass. Obviously, therefore, it acquired its name from the historical words "bombacca" and "bombicinna".

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 the manuscripts of the Greeks and Romans. Their numerous compatriots, as the etymology of the words denoting a book ("biblio", "liber", "libro") shows, were satisfied with notes or serifs on wooden plates. The most accessible material for writing was birch bark. Methods of its processing have come down to us: a thin layer of bark of young trees was kept in boiling water, a sheet was cut from it, which was not inferior in elasticity to modern paper. It was used to make books-scrolls and books-codes.

Birch bark books were most widespread among the ancient Slavs, as well as among the peoples of North India. For the manufacture of writing material, the skin of the tree was peeled off and impregnated with a special compound. 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 a written language, and with it all the wealth of spiritual culture. In the course of the development of the most ancient civilizations of Egypt, China, Greece, 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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