Ancient public library discovered in Germany
theguardian.com
Ancient public library discovered in Germany
1–10 of 40 posts
Re: Ancient public library discovered in Germany
#2They didn't mention it, but I'm assuming that no scrolls or actual library knowledge is recoverable from the site?
Whenever I listen to history people talk about all the sources that have been lost, I dream that someday someone will uncover an ancient time capsule under their house and find a pristine collection of lost works that some wise person squirreled away for future generations.
Re: Ancient public library discovered in Germany
#3They didn't mention it, but I'm assuming that no scrolls or actual library knowledge is recoverable from the site? Whenever I listen to history people talk about all the sources that have been lost, I dream that someday someone will uncover an ancient time capsule under their house and find a pristine collection of lost works that some wise person squirreled away for future generations.
There are probably quite some private storages of old sources. For example I really like to see the restricted libary/archiv of the Vatikan etc.
To finally have the proof, that all history was planned by the Illuminati and Aliens...
Or more likely to find out some shocking previously unknown heresy of some saints/popes I did not know anyway.
But more seriously, I think it is unlikely to find a sealed old libary somewhere, which was never mentioned anywhere. The best you can hope for are new scrolla here and there to maybe get new texts of Heraklit or alike, but that would be something. The detailed history of the cultures I am more interested at the moment, celtic druids for example, did not write down their knowledge. So it is unlikely that anything shows up in that regard.
Re: Ancient public library discovered in Germany
#4They didn't mention it, but I'm assuming that no scrolls or actual library knowledge is recoverable from the site? Whenever I listen to history people talk about all the sources that have been lost, I dream that someday someone will uncover an ancient time capsule under their house and find a pristine collection of lost works that some wise person squirreled away for future generations.
The best approximation we have are the scrolls from Herculanum. They're burnt and charred, but some scientists are working on reading them using CT scans, X-Rays, etc.
Re: Ancient public library discovered in Germany
#5They didn't mention it, but I'm assuming that no scrolls or actual library knowledge is recoverable from the site? Whenever I listen to history people talk about all the sources that have been lost, I dream that someday someone will uncover an ancient time capsule under their house and find a pristine collection of lost works that some wise person squirreled away for future generations.
If a truly large archive were found then who’s to say that it could survive long enough to be properly studied? There are multiple sources of untouched ancient texts today which aren’t much studied. Off the top of my head, I’ve heard there are chests full of (roughly 1000-year-old) Arabic manuscripts littering the Archbishop’s palace in Toledo, largely untouched due to a lack of interest/number of scholars (and perhaps it is hard to get access). There are also many manuscripts spread out across private basements in Timbuktu, those have survived several threats but who’s to say they will survive more? On the other hand we have hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets, most of which are unread (they had the advantage that when a library burns down the tablets are often fired instead of destroyed). It is hard to decide what is worth prioritising before it has been read.
The one solace we can take is that modern techniques may let us read manuscripts after they have been largely destroyed.
Re: Ancient public library discovered in Germany
#6They didn't mention it, but I'm assuming that no scrolls or actual library knowledge is recoverable from the site? Whenever I listen to history people talk about all the sources that have been lost, I dream that someday someone will uncover an ancient time capsule under their house and find a pristine collection of lost works that some wise person squirreled away for future generations.
The scrolls from Herculaneum definitely contain a lot of non extant works, the problem is figuring out how to read them
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/buried-ash-vesuvius-s...
Re: Ancient public library discovered in Germany
#7I think the whole "public" library theory is a bit off. Just because it was a public building does not mean it was anything resembling what we would call a public library. More likely, it was a government library, like a registrar, or for tax documents, census data, or something similar.
Re: Ancient public library discovered in Germany
#8What the article doesn't really clarify: Cologne was a Roman colony. The full name was Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium. "Colonia" means "colony" but it's also the highest tier of recognition Roman cities could have. Cologne was the Eastern-most Roman city of its kind in "Germania".
A side-effect of all of this is that you can't really dig anywhere in Cologne without encountering some Roman artifact or ruins (unless they have already been recovered/destroyed previously).
Re: Ancient public library discovered in Germany
#9They didn't mention it, but I'm assuming that no scrolls or actual library knowledge is recoverable from the site? Whenever I listen to history people talk about all the sources that have been lost, I dream that someday someone will uncover an ancient time capsule under their house and find a pristine collection of lost works that some wise person squirreled away for future generations.
Many texts formerly considered lost since Antiquity, and some that were unknown, have been recovered in the last decades. It's a steady flow, not a sudden outburst.
My personal favorite would be to recover all of the texts by pre-Socratics.
Re: Ancient public library discovered in Germany
#10They didn't mention it, but I'm assuming that no scrolls or actual library knowledge is recoverable from the site? Whenever I listen to history people talk about all the sources that have been lost, I dream that someday someone will uncover an ancient time capsule under their house and find a pristine collection of lost works that some wise person squirreled away for future generations.
If a truly large archive were found then who’s to say that it could survive long enough to be properly studied? There are multiple sources of untouched ancient texts today which aren’t much studied. Off the top of my head, I’ve heard there are chests full of (roughly 1000-year-old) Arabic manuscripts littering the Archbishop’s palace in Toledo, largely untouched due to a lack of interest/number of scholars (and perha…
This reminds me of one of the episodes of the documentary series "Endangered Civilizations". From the description[1]:
> 9. The Books Under the Sand
> During the time of trans-Saharan trading, its strategic location along the caravan route enabled it to prosper. It was also the gathering place for the pilgrims from western Sahara as they began their journey to Mecca. It had already attained the position as a prestigious economic and spiritual center. Chinguetti was considered the capital of the "Land of the Moors".
In the episode, they reference and show a lot of very old texts. If I remember correctly, they mostly came from the days when the area was replete with trading activity, around the 12th or 13th century. One of the things they discuss in the episode is the fact that there aren't enough researchers/scientists that are studying them, so many of the books end up being inadvertently destroyed or buried under the always-shifting sands.
While I was watching the show, I remember thinking how awesome it would be to have some sort-of machine that you could point at the ground and be able to just see what's buried deep underfoot, for a wide radius. There's so much history in that area that is just completely inaccessible to us because of the climate and geography.