Ancient Public Library Discovered In Germany (theguardian.com)

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of the oldest public library in Cologne, Germany, "a building erected almost two millennia ago that may have housed up to 20,000 scrolls," reports The Guardian. From the report: The walls were first uncovered in 2017, during an excavation on the grounds of a Protestant church in the centre of the city. Archaeologists knew they were of Roman origins, with Cologne being one of Germany's oldest cities, founded by the Romans in 50 AD under the name Colonia. But the discovery of niches in the walls, measuring approximately 80cm by 50cm, was, initially, mystifying.

"It took us some time to match up the parallels -- we could see the niches were too small to bear statues inside. But what they are are kind of cupboards for the scrolls," said Dr Dirk Schmitz from the Roman-Germanic Museum of Cologne. "They are very particular to libraries -- you can see the same ones in the library at Ephesus." It is not clear how many scrolls the library would have held, but it would have been "quite huge -- maybe 20,000," said Schmitz.

Comments

Unluckily, the scrolls are long gone...

[ffkom]

... probably had to be taken away due to copyright claims of some imperial Roman mega-corporations.

Re:Unluckily, the scrolls are long gone...

[Plumpaquatsch]

Theres so much ancient knowledge and history that we will never know about because the only copies were destroyed in the burning of Alexandria, the burning of books by the first Chinese emeror, the burning of Rome, the destruction of the Aztec civilization by the conquistadors and countless other deliberate destructions of ancient libraries. The absence of copyright might not have saved them but copyright certainly wouldve hindered there being more copies of the works contained in these libraries.

Back then there was no copyright - the problems were a) it was a lot of work copying a scroll, let alone thousands. and b) there weren't enough scrolls to write on anyway, so they had to wiped and overwrite used ones (palimpsest). Even moving type printing wasn't really enough, only after ways to mass produce cheap paper were invented, people realised that somebody else could just print the same book as you did at the same cost - but without the cost of creating/acquiring the content. That's when Copyright came into play.

Weak evidence for being public

[raymorris]

Ancient libraries were very often (nearly always?) private. They would either serve a particular institution, such as a government body, or some were only open to members who paid the high membership fees (compare a country club). For example, the vast majority of the holdings of Library of Congress aren't available of the public.

The article indicates they think it was a public library because it was located near the center of town, next.to a church, and there were public buildings nearby. Again, the Library of Congress is at the center of Washington, near public buildings, across the street from the capitol, the Supreme Court building, and a church. It's not a public library.

Re:Weak evidence for being public

[hey!]

There were definitely libraries in ancient Rome intended to serve the masses, although they mostly date from slightly later than this (e.g. the Library of Celsus, built in 139 CE in what is now Turkey).

One of the perqs of being a politician in Ancient Rome is that it afforded you a chance to amass a private fortune. But since you had to be rich to play that game to begin with, what did you spend that new money on? Buying popularity.

The ultimate examples of that were what we misleadingly call Roman "baths", which by the imperial era had become a combination bath, gym, beauty salon, mall, theater, restaurant, art gallery, and library. Basically they were crammed with every entertaining thing the politician could imagine. Now, granted, wealthy Romans had baths in their home and slaves to feed and groom them, but Romans were a sociable lot; it wasn't enough to be rich, you had to be seen being rich, and generous too.

Of course baths were so expensive in their engineering only the very richest politicians could afford to donate them to the public, which is why the great era of Roman bath-building was the imperial era. But earlier on politicians donated less grand (by Roman standards -- plenty grand by any other) public works, including public libraries. Gaius Asinius Pollio, patron of the poet Virgil and an accomplished writer himself, donated the first public library in Rome with money he looted from Iran. That was built around 39 BC.