THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA
The story begins before Alexandria itself. Among the Greeks, it is
said, Peisistratus, tyrant of Athens, was the first to found a library –
subsequently taken by Xerxes to Persia, an act which set a fashion for
sovereigns and sovereign cities, to seek out the books of all peoples,
especially those of alien and conquered lands; and by the act of trans[1]lating, render them, their languages, and their peoples members of
the dominant culture. I According to Arrian, when Alexander the
Great, Aristotle’s most famous pupil, halted during one of his journeys
at the western end of the Nile Delta between Lake Mareotis and the
sea, he noted that ‘the site was the very best in which to found a city,
and that the city would prosper’. Looking to a place remote from the
shrines of Olympus, he commanded that there should be dedicated to
the Muses a ‘library’ in the new city, the most important to bear his
name.2 Flushed with imperial ambition, Alexander’s successors in
Egypt, the first three Macedonian kings, obeyed his instructions, and
created an institution whose history and influence would reach outward
in space and endure in time, bequeathing a vast legacy to the Euro[1]pean intellectual tradition. 3 This legacy survives in the restoration of
the Bibliotheca Alexandrina at the close of the present century.4
The story of the Great Library at Alexandria is part history, part myth.
Ten years ago, Luciano Canfora published a literary account – perhaps
THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA
‘non-fiction novel’ is a better description – that scanned the cultural
milieu of Hellenic Egypt at a time when the Alexandrian rulers chose to
project power and influence through the encouragement and control of
scholarly research. 5 That project focused upon a community of people,
objects and texts within the palace at the Brucheion, the Greek section of
the city.t’ For the next two thousand years – for linguists, archaeologists,
historians, and scholars of religion, culture, and the book – that commu[1]nity became a place within a place, a constellation of identities, a
heterotopia, in the language of Foucault, where text elides into subtext,
and myth endures long after masonry disappears.
Library of Alexendria
Uruk IV and III tablets, but we shall not be far
off in assigning them a broad time range of c. 3400 to 3000 BC. 10 In
spite of much investigation elsewhere, it still seems true to say that
writing was invented, not broadly in southern Mesopotamia, but very
specifically at the site of Uruk, prompting one Sumerologist to speak of
‘an’ inventor, literatus Sumericus Urukeus, rather than a vague cohort of
anonymous early scribes. 11 As many scholars have emphasized in
recent years, 12 with an estimated size of over 200 ha. by the late fourth
millennium BC, Uruk surpassed all other early urban centres in the
region in areal extent and most probably population concentration,
and it was here that the pre-conditions for the emergence of writing
were most clearly in evidence. The fiction that all land belonged to the
gods; that men and women should work that land on the deity’s behalf;
and that the deity’s ‘house’, in our terms, his temple, but more
realistically his oikos or household, should be managed by his servants –
i.e., a priesthood – created not only social stratification but also generated a massive agricultural sector and a redistributive economy. It was
here, in the nexus between production and redistribution in the form
of rations to household employees, that the need for arithmetic and
algebraic calculation and for the storage of information arose and that
the modus operandi, in the form of writing, was invented. 13
Writing was devised, purely and simply, as a solution to an account[1]technical problem, not for the perpetuation of myths, epics, hymns,
historical records, or royal propaganda. All of this followed, but it was
not in the minds of writing’s inventor(s). What did accompany the
earliest economic texts immediately, i.e. in the very first phase of
writing’s development, were lexical texts, word lists containing terms
belonging to discrete semantic domains – titles and professions, names
of metal objects, ceramic vessels, textiles, cities, trees, plants, cattle,
swine, birds, fish, etc. Along with mathematical reckoning, these lexical
lists were undoubtedly the backbone of early scribal education.
With this new technology came, it seems, an associated development
of what we may call ‘archival behaviour’. The vast majority of the c.
4500 Archaic texts from Uruk were found abandoned in lots, in
secondary or even tertiary context (e.g. used as fill beneath new build[1]ings) outside of the temples and other structures which make up the
Eanna complex, the great temple household of Inanna, the city
goddess of Uruk. 14 What is evident is that they had been discarded
some time, perhaps a century or more, after having been written. As
Veenhof has noted, ‘Normally, old records no longer needed by the
administration were thrown away in due time or put to secondary use,
as building material.. etc’. 15 The important point here, however, is
that, for an unspecified period of time which probably exceeded several
20
BEFORE ALEXANDRIA: LIBRARIES IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
generations, texts at Uruk were curated or archived, in spite of the fact
that the economic texts among them were certainly no longer current.
Thus, in tandem with the birth of writing in the Near East we observe
the birth of an archival, curatorial attitude towards written texts.