Never found · room
The book-rooms
Never found.
Where the rolls were kept: in wooden cupboards with pigeonholes, rolls lying flat with a tag (sillybos) naming author and title. Tzetzes's figures distinguish "mixed" rolls holding several works from "unmixed" rolls holding one, a rare glimpse of the cataloguers' practice.
The evidence: Existence attested; location, number and layout unknown. Shelving is shown after Pergamon for the Ptolemaic rooms and after Ephesus for the Roman ones, and the rolls after those found in place at Herculaneum. Isidore's later advice (green marble floors, no gilded ceilings, to rest the eyes) is a general rule, not an Alexandrian one.
Within The royal Library.
This place through time
No dated state of this place is recorded yet.
Drawn after
- after The library in the sanctuary of Athena, Pergamon (2nd century BCE) Rooms behind the upper storey of the sanctuary's north stoa, identified as the Attalid royal library by the German excavators in the 1880s. The largest has a stone podium along the walls, set off from them by an air gap of about half a metre, holes for anchoring wooden cases, and the base of a statue of Athena. It is the nearest Hellenistic model for a royal book-room with a cult statue, though Coqueugniot doubts the identification.
- after The Library of Celsus, Ephesus (c. 110s–135 CE) Built by Tiberius Julius Aquila as library and tomb for his father, the consul Celsus, whose sarcophagus lies beneath the apse. One hall of about 16.7 by 10.9 metres with rectangular wall niches for wooden book cupboards in tiers, a gallery to reach the upper ones, an apse for a statue, and a double wall with a gap, usually explained as a guard against damp. The best model for a Roman-period book-room; some three centuries later than the Ptolemaic foundation.
- after The Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum (rolls buried 79 CE) The only ancient library found with its rolls in place: more than 1,800 carbonised rolls and fragments, mostly Epicurean philosophy. The excavators of the 1750s describe a small room with wooden shelving round the walls to about a man's height and a free-standing case in the middle, reachable from both sides. The best evidence for how rolls actually lay on shelves.
- after The painted catalogue of the gymnasium library at Tauromenium (2nd century BCE) Painted plaster from Taormina in Sicily with catalogue entries for historians, each with a short biography, the very form of a Pinakes entry. A model for a catalogue written on a library wall.
In the show
The show has not yet spoken of The book-rooms.
Sources (4)
- Tzetzes, Prolegomena de comoedia Koster XIa I–II
- Seneca, On Tranquillity of Mind 9.6
- Isidore, Etymologies 6.11.2
- W. A. Johnson, Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004)