First of the series Oct. 2010
BLASTS FROM THE PAST
An occasional series
In the 4,000 or so years of literate culture of humankind many of the things which we have now come to consider modern and commonplace actually had their origins deep in the past. A look back shows us many original connections to our ”modernity”. Thus among the things which turn up are recycling, form letters and templates, the original “palm pilot”, interesting ways to address the subject of overdues, and why we say “Shhh!” in the library.
How and when people began to “draw sounds” is unknown, but would have seemed the height of Magic. Being magical in turn meant that for a long time those adepts were kept a part of the priestly class. Scribes became protected by the Divine. In Ur it was The Great Lady of the Tablet, Nisaba. In Egypt it was the tag team Thoth and his wife-goddess Sheshat (“Female Scribe”). She invented writing and Thoth taught it to humankind. She is also credited with creation of mathematics, patronage of accountants and the architects of pyramids, and being the Archivist of the Destiny of the Pharaohs. The Hindu Elephant god Ganesh broke off the tip of a tusk for the first pen, and Mayan scribes were under the protection of the Howler Monkey God. As human progress made its way from a wandering hunter-gatherer species to agriculture to urban living, the complexity of human life in ever larger groupings made some sort of notation and communication system necessary. As state formation grew, less magical and more concrete uses of those drawn sounds made themselves apparent, as they now provided a means to track people and goods for the benefit of a ruler. The scribal class as “one per centers” (the number of people in those times who were literate) became a crucial, respected, and valued sector of society. Thus they nestled in the bosomy nexus of the Sacred and the Profane. Truly, not bad for government work.
In ancient times education started early at age 5 and was long and often harsh. Beatings were recommended frequently, as students’ “ears are in their backs”. This was when in loco parentis really meant something. Near Eastern scribal schools (starting c. -2500) were called the Eduba, or Tablet House, and those in Ur, Nippur and Nineveh have yielded many interesting finds. Writing for practice was done on either stray pottery shards or with the ubiquitous wax-covered wooden tablet used as reusable notebook and scratch pad. Temporary information would then be transferred for final draft using stylus upon moist clay pillows in cuneiform. Extreme examples of non-recommended use of tablets were as a murder weapon ( one student bonked another on the head), and as food (tablets were found with teeth marks from gnawing on them- no school lunch in those days). Scribes had up to 7,000 characters to comprehend. The eduba have been found with a variety of templates for students to practice with. These covered examples of every sort of written document; religious rites, government proclamations, monument inscriptions, wills, and lots of business contracts. The schools/libraries had a classification system early on, with specialties in theology, zoology, math, botany and linguistics. Also discovered there were recycling tubs for the clay tablets. Illegible and broken ones were tossed in water to soak for a while and then reused.
King Shulgi I of Sumer was an early example of a literate prince. Quite the organizer and braggart, he was known for creating a network of roads and motels, both for trade and for his own hobby, doing his Personal Best as a long distance runner. He also reorganized scribal education, taking a hand at writing himself. All of this was held up as merely another example of “the Awesomeness springing from my forehead”. Later in Babylon Hammurabi made his state and the Nippur Eduba the gold standard for literacy in the ancient world, with most of his neighbors and the first Foreign Exchange Students adopting Babylonian Akkadian as their written language. It was at that time cataloging got a start, with small tags called colophons attached to the clay pots that tablets were usually kept in. Others were stashed in pigeonholed bookcases, standing on end. This unfortunately was less than ideal, for although telling which scribe wrote it, it only provided the first few words of the first line as a clue as to what the piece was about. It was also there the first attempt at circulation management was made. An old Babylonian curse has been found vowing divine vengeance on book thieves, vandals and overdues. No one has gotten back to us on how that worked out.
Ashurbanipal of Assyria was the only literate member of his dynasty, having been trained (being a younger son) as a scribe . He used his smarts to spread Assyrian power to its greatest extent. He was the first to envision a Universal Library and took steps to bring it about. In Nineveh he essentially set up the first research institute where the most talented scribes got free run on the government dime - introducing the Perpetual Graduate Student. He sent a proclamation to All the Nations asking politely if his scribes could come and copy their collections. The smart folks said yes. Hold outs got a taste of Conquest Acquisitions. Their cities were sacked and burned, the collections taken to Nineveh, and their rulers lived the rest of their short lives in the Royal Kennel with a dog collar on their necks.
In Egyptian mythology Sheshat gave writing to the world on the leaves of the sacred Persea tree from Ethiopia. This relative of the avocado was named after the hero Perseus, who allegedly took early retirement in Africa after killing Medusa. However when saying “sacred” think “expensive”. Thus it was left to a mortal man to utilize the omnipresent papyrus reed of the Nile Delta. Hammering the fibers of the papyrus made a paper, and the reeds when split provided pens to write with as well. The man behind it was Imhotep (c.-2700), the smartest guy in the room. He was Chief of the Scribes, overhauled education, and organized the production of papyrus as a State monopoly. He is thought to have been first to use the Embargo of this product against enemies. It has even been suggested that clay and cuneiform were adopted in the Near East to get around this. He was also an engineer, creating the first pyramids, as well as general and advisor to Pharaoh. He was also the only non-Pharaoh to be deified after death, helping Thoth out as patron of Scribes. Most Egyptian rulers were content with form over substance - most were portrayed on monuments as holding pen and scroll whether they could write or not. Yet some recently have posited a broader basis of literacy, based upon a thriving popular literature which we would recognize as the novel - the Story of Sinuhe, The Shipwrecked Sailor(origin of Sinbad legend), the Eloquent Peasant, and even a little soft porn in Tale of the Oasisman. Egyptian scribes practiced a form of recycling as well, called palimpsest (“rubbed clean again”). This was the erasure of writing by a variety of means and re-using it. Modern spectrographs have shown a number of scrolls which have been overwritten, and the originals brought to light. Egyptian libraries as such were primarily held in temples in Thebes or Memphis, like the “Rameseseum” (Temple of Ramses II) where scrolls were placed on wide shelves called bibliotheka lining the inside walls . Scrolls were also kept in the House of Books and the House of the Dead, where the flagship of the Egyptian literature, the Book of the Dead, underwent numerous editions.
About the -5th c. the Greeks began to pull ahead in literary and philosophical pursuits. An early Greek play was called “The Alphabet Show”, whose conceit was to have the actors pantomime the letters of dirty words. On a higher plane, a number of differing schools of thought grew up, each headed by a Director, or Scholarch. These often became named after their hangouts. Epicurus and his buddies partied in his Garden. The Stoics lounged at the Painted Porch (stoa), while Aristotle’s group was forced to wander the colonnaded halls (peripatoi) down at the Lyceum Gym, becoming known as the Peripatetics (the Walk-and-Talk crowd).
Changing attitudes toward writing and its collections were shown by the reactions of the generational triple threat that was Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. It shows an evolution in regards to teaching and the importance of the written as well as the spoken word. Socrates (-469/399), statesman, soldier, and Philosopher King wanna-be, was at heart an oralist with deep misgivings about this newfangled thing called writing, which still had a lot of kinks to work out (punctuation and paragraphs were still centuries away, scribes were paid by the line, and the average scroll was 1,000 lines). Thus he never published any of his own work. He preferred the vocal medium of the Socratic dialogue. Proud of never taking a dime for his teaching (the satirist Aristophanes said that he taught his pupils mainly how to dodge their bills), he had great disgust for the traveling teachers called Sophists, or “Wise Men“. They went from town to town teaching rhetoric for money, mostly to young lawyers in sue-happy Athens and aspiring demagogues . Politics finally did him in, his enemies forcing him to drink poison. His student Plato (-429/347) also favored oratory, yet he and friends also wrote enormous amounts- mostly about Socrates. Trained in grammar, music and gymnastics (he was a wrestler), Plato was alleged to have come by his name by being broad in body, forehead and mind. He finally snagged a place to teach his own growing number of students outside of Athens; a large olive grove around a temple to the minor god Academus. Thus the terms “Academy” and “Grove of Academe” came into the parlance of education. Politics was also problematic for him, leading to slavery and imprisonment on different occasions. Finally came Aristotle (-384/322) who labored 20 years at the Academy with Plato before leaving to try and set up his own school. However, because he was an out-of- towner (his dad was physician to the King of Macedonia) he wasn’t allowed to buy land in Athens. Thus it was he was forced to use the Lyceum. After getting the Gym to give him some classroom space it became a popular idea which others copied. Thus did “Lyceum” and “Gymnasium” become identified with secondary education. Later he finally got a place of his own and was finally able to set up his own library for his encyclopedic accumulation of knowledge. Politics likewise nailed him because of his Macedonian ties. Made tutor to none other than Alexander the Great, he was run out of town when the Conqueror died. He went gladly, as he wasn’t going to let them do him like Socrates.
It was Aristotle’s pupil Alexander who took things to the next level. After making himself master of the known world he resurrected the idea of a Universal Library. He got plans for his Hall of the Muses (the Museion) set up in a new city of Alexandria (one of many-he was not shy) before he up and died (-323). This left the idea to be brought to fruition by his BFF and successor in Egypt, Ptolemy, who commenced having scads of little Ptolemies (I lost track at nine) and put the Museion in the royal quarters of the Brucheion by the harbor. This became known as the Mother library when a branch was set up at the Temple of Serapis (or Serapeion), which in turn became known as the Daughter. More like Ashurbanipal’s institute than a school (a Faculty dream job- no students and pure research), for centuries it provided a place for the best and brightest of Hellenic civilization, and soon outshone rivals in Athens, Pergamum, Rhodes, Antioch and Syracuse. It had 10 sections for various disciplines like Astronomy, Theater, Rhetoric, and so on, stored in alcoves in this “Sanatorium for the Mind”. Taking a leaf from Athens, they made sure to add the airy colonnaded walkways beloved by the Peripatetics, as well as Public Baths and a food court. Thus it was like a Spa Day or a trip to the Mall, a total experience. The Alexandrian collection topped out at half a million scrolls.
Soon a “Book Race” as real as any arms race took place. Once Royal book collectors found an item in Pergamum which they recognized as an pirated edition of one of theirs- but it was so much better than the real thing they actually bought a copy to take home. Another time the Alex library got its hands on a valuable Athenian original only after much to and fro, many promises, and a hefty deposit. This was blithely forfeited and the piece added it to the collection, as intended all along. They also tried to cripple the Pergamum library by embargoing its supply of papyrus. This ultimately bit them in the rear, as Pergamum made the switch to using treated animal skin to make parchment (your beloved diploma, or “sheepskin”). Under the trade name Pergamene it became the favored medium of Roman and post-Roman times. Papyrus remained desired for specialty orders, but the bulky scrolls could not compete with the new parchment codex, which could be written on both sides and bound together, saving shelf space as well, and became what we consider the modern “Book”.
The Ptolemies also embarked on another all-embracing acquisitions program. They sent missives to the world asking for loan or copies of their collections. Whenever that didn’t work they had what was called the “Ships Collection”. A standing law stated that all ships calling at Alex must declare and turn over all written materials to be copied. The Library would then keep the original and give back the copy, if you were lucky. Perhaps the greatest blow against this program was the Great Aristotle Fake-Out. Neleus of Scepsis was Aristotle’s last student and traveling companion. Feeling cheated out of the top job at the Academy, he got the Great Man’s library and took it to Alexandria with him, hoping to add it to the collection as the new director there. However, another Academy man beat him out and Neleus was stuck tutoring the Royal brats. Bitterly disappointed, he planned his get away, fully cognizant of the risks. In a brilliant move of misdirection, he had all the good stuff spirited out of town overland while making a great public display of leave-taking and donating his Aristotle collection willingly to the Library. Only later did Callimachus discover that Neleus had indeed given Aristotle’s library, but nothing of his own works. Things labeled Aristotle were other authors of the same name or forgeries. Neleus made it out clean, but soon found that the Pergamum library was just as anxious and unscrupulous in trying to snag it, even sending out a hit team. He finally stashed the originals in his family basement, where they moldered for 150 years or so until the collector Appelicon of Teos (who once got a death sentence for stealing from the Athenian archives) bought it. It was the gem of his collection until he was slaughtered at the door of his library by soldiers of the Roman general Sulla, who said “I didn’t come here to read ancient history”-but was willing to take some home in his knapsack.
The Museion relied initially for staff on the Academy and Lyceum. Zenodotus initially (-295) ran the library with Callimachus of Cyrene in Cataloging and ex-tyrant of Athens Demetrios of Phaleron in Acquisitions (he had connections). In the early centuries astounding strides were made in the sciences. Math teachers like Euclid tried to explain to balky student Ptolemies that “there is no Royal Road to Geometry”. Callimachus pioneered the fields of bibliography and bio-bibliography as he tackled the Alex collection - a lifelong work (to which he contributed 800 items ) that itself ran to 120 volumes. The engineer Hero made a truly astounding number of inventions utilizing a variety of sources of energy- solar, pneumatic, thermal, hydraulic - to make everything from robots to automatic door-openers and coin-operated vending machines. Librarian Aristophanes of Byzantium finally got around to creating punctuation, starting with the comma. Eratosthenes, who among other things gave us Geography and the Julian calendar that Caesar ripped off, set himself the goal of calculating the circumference of the Earth. He did this with the help of the Royal Pacer; the poor soul who with precisely measured step, a good memory, and hopefully a sun hat, trod the burning sands from Libya to Arabia until there was enough data for him to work with. Eratosthenes also died a true Librarian death: when faced with the impending loss of his sight and his ability to read, he chose to starve himself to death (-194).
Things began a downturn with a switch in emphasis from science to literary criticism . Soon a dearth of new authorship occurred as everyone wrote commentaries, abstracts, reviews etc for already established works rather than create new ones. It was all-Classics, all the Time. Periodic poetry slams were held where the judges were so expert that they could spot plagiarism a mile away. But after a certain point there was only so much you could do with Homer.
Faculty catfights were as comical and pathetic as they are now, but with sometimes lethal results. At least two directors of the library were executed; one for trying to defect to the Pergamum library, and the other on a murder rap (but everybody said it was really because he dissed Homer). For his part Satades the Obscene, (lover of porn and creator of the palindrome), got himself deep-sixed in a lead coffin for making naughty ones about the Queen. Critics abounded. One feud between Callimachus and Appolonius of Rhodes was so vicious as to be compared with “cannibals out to eat your liver”. Callimachus also publicly insulted a former student as a “dirty bird” (Ibis) during that student’s premiere reading of “Jason and the Argonauts”. Timon the Sceptic derided later generations of scholars as “bookish scribblers pecking away in their hen-house of the Muses”. Sostratus, architect of the 40-story tall Pharos lighthouse, was miffed when denied the satisfaction of placing his name on it. So he pulled a “slow one”. With an eye on posterity he inscribed his own name on the stone foundation, with the royal name in plaster above it, warm with the knowledge that eventually the plaster would fall away (hopefully after the king died - he was not famous for his sense of humor) and he’d finally get due credit.
However, looming unnoticed in the background were developments of great import. A brash and brutal young admirer and imitator of Greek culture, the Roman Republic burst upon the Mediterranean intellectual scene like a yokel at a garden party. They were simultaneously self-conscious of their rough edges and stubbornly proud of their roots The coming of Rome would radically alter the Library’s destiny and institute a chain of destruction none could foresee.
Next: The Book Road to Rome
