Never found · room

The daughter library

Known · AttestedExistence: AttestedConjectured · Our reconstructionLocation: Never foundConjectured · After an analogy: Library of CelsusForm: After an analogyafter Library of Celsus

Never found.

A second library in the Serapeum, "called the daughter of the first". Tertullian says the libraries of Ptolemy were shown there in his day with the Hebrew scriptures; Aphthonius saw rooms in the colonnades used as book stores, "open to those who wish to study". Ammianus already speaks of its libraries in the past tense.

The evidence: Attested by four late writers; which rooms held the books is unknown. Rowe's small rooms along the precinct's west side were once proposed, but they date to the early Roman period. Its founding under Ptolemy III is a conjecture.

Within The Serapeum.

Book-rooms?
On the plan of the city, in its own line: solid where the position is known, dashed where it is conjectured.

This place through time

  1. c. 246–222 BCE · Ptolemy III builds the Serapeum Known: excavated
  2. 391 or 392 CE · The destruction of the Serapeum Known: attested

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.

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