08.09.2014 0 7285

What world libraries of the past and present can be attributed to the largest treasures human thought? For the entire time of the existence of our civilization, there were not so many of them - and the most famous of them have sunk into oblivion.

THE BEGINNING OF TIME

The most ancient libraries are called the storage of clay tablets of the Assyro-Babylonian civilization. They are over four and a half thousand years old. The first repository of papyrus books appeared only 12 centuries later. They became the library of Ancient Egypt, founded during the reign of Pharaoh Ramses II. Another no less famous "ancient book depository is associated with the name of Alexander the Great. The emperor founded a city in the Nile Delta and named it after himself.

Later, a library was built there, which was called Alexandria. It was headed by the largest scientists: Eratosthenes, Zenodotus, Aristarchus of Samos, Callimachus, and others. By the way, it was under Callimachus that for the first time in history a catalog of existing manuscripts was created in it, later regularly replenished. Thanks to this, she became the first prototype of the familiar to us, modern library. According to various estimates, it contained from 100 to 700 thousand volumes.

In addition to the works of ancient Greek literature and science that formed its basis, there were books in Oriental languages. Many of them have been translated into Greek. Thus, interpenetration and mutual enrichment of cultures took place. The library was visited by ancient Greek mathematicians and philosophers, in particular Euclid and Eratosthenes.

In those days, it overshadowed even one of the recognized wonders of the world - the Pharos lighthouse, located in the same place, in Alexandria. Unfortunately, the library has not survived. Some died in a fire as early as 48 BC, during the capture of the city by Julius Caesar. It was finally destroyed in 646 AD, during the Arab caliph Omar the conqueror who conquered Egypt. It is he who is credited with the words: "If these books repeat the Koran, then they are not needed, if not, then they are harmful."

However, there is an encouraging version that the funds of the Library of Alexandria were not destroyed, but the Arabs took possession of them as winners. It is no coincidence that at present UNESCO has developed a plan for the restoration of the Library of Alexandria, first of all, the period of Antiquity and early Christianity. For this, the collection and copying of surviving manuscripts from neighboring countries will be carried out.

WHO CREATED THE IVAN THE TERRIBLE LIBRARY?

The disappeared library of Ivan IV the Terrible, also known as "Liberia" (from the Latin liber - "book"), still haunts historians, researchers of antiquity and all sorts of adventurers. For several centuries, it has been the source of numerous rumors and speculations. It is also interesting that although a collection of rare books is named after Ivan the Terrible, it came to Moscow long before the birth of the tsar. On the contrary, under Grozny, the priceless treasure was lost, and perhaps forever.

Before entering Russia, the owner of the book collection was Byzantine emperor Constantine XI. After the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, the emperor fled to Rome with his niece, Princess Sophia Paleologus. At the same time, the main part of the library, which included folios in ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew, was taken there on a ship. The library, which had been collected bit by bit for millennia, arrived in Moscow as a dowry of Sophia, who was married to the Grand Duke of Moscow Ivan III (grandfather of Ivan the Terrible).

In addition to books related to spiritual and church topics, scientific treatises and poems of the ancient classics occupied a significant place in it. Liberia was rumored to contain books on magic and sorcery practices. Priceless tomes, which told about the history of human civilization and the origin of life on earth.

Many researchers believe that the basis of the main book collection Ancient Russia became just part of the lost Alexandria Library. Sources report that even under the Grand Duke of Moscow Vasily III - the son of Ivan III and Sophia Paleolog and the future father of Ivan the Terrible - all manuscripts were translated into Russian.

The same sources indicate that this was done by the learned Athonite monk Maxim the Greek (1470-1556), a well-known publicist and translator of that time. He was discharged from Constantinople with specific purpose: to translate books from languages ​​unknown in Russia into Church Slavonic, which he did for many years. And so that he could not tell anyone about what he had seen, he was never released from Russia again.

Later, the royal library was constantly replenished by Ivan the Terrible - he personally bought books brought from all over the world. There is a hypothesis that the tsar was able to get the legendary book collection of Yaroslav the Wise, which was kept for several centuries in the dungeons of St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv.

However, some experts express doubts about the scientific value of the lost library of Ivan the Terrible. So, academician D.S. Likhachev, one of the world's largest experts in Ancient Russia, believed that its significance was greatly exaggerated, since "a significant part of this collection was church books that Sophia Paleolog brought to Russia from Byzantium to pray in her own mother tongue". The academician also believed that it would be more important for us to save the book treasures that are perishing today.

850 KILOMETERS OF SHELVES

One of the most famous libraries of our time is the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Its dimensions are truly grandiose: the total length of the bookshelves is 850 km! They (as of 2003) contain over 130 million items of storage (books, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, photographs, sound recordings and microfilms). The annual growth of the fund is from 1 to 3 million units.

This library is the largest in the world in the history of mankind. The birth of the book depository is attributed to January 24, 1800, when, at the initiative of US President John Adams, Congress allocated 5,000 dollars to complete it. It is noteworthy that the library's Russian fund contains over 200 thousand books and more than 10 thousand different magazines. It houses a huge number of Russian printed publications for the period from 1708 to 1800, as well as many works of Russian art. literature XIX century.

The famous library of the Krasnoyarsk merchant GV Yudin is also located there. It includes books on history, ethnography, archeology, handwritten texts on the exploration of Siberia, all of Pushkin's lifetime editions, and even a complete collection of Russian journals of the 18th century! The merchant sold his unique book and magazine collection to the Library of Congress in 1907.

FIFTH IN THE WORLD

Today, UNESCO considers major libraries with funds exceeding 14 million items. This condition corresponds to 24 book depositories of the world. In this honorary list, Russia is represented by six book temples - three such libraries are located in Moscow, two in St. Petersburg and one in Novosibirsk.

The basis of the largest in the country of the Russian state library laid the famous private collection state chancellor Count N. P. Rumyantsev. By decree of Nicholas I of March 23, 1828, with the library included in it, it came under the jurisdiction of the state. In 1831, it was opened as a public institution in St. Petersburg. And after 30 years, the museum was moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow and began to work in accordance with the "Regulations on the Moscow Public Museum and the Rumyantsev Museum" approved by Alexander II.

STORAGE OF MYSTERIOUS KNOWLEDGE

Of great interest is the world's oldest Vatican Apostolic Library. It was founded in the 15th century by Pope Nicholas V. Today, its funds number about 1,600,000 printed books, 150,000 manuscripts, 8,300 incunabula, more than 100,000 engravings and geographical maps, 300,000 coins and medals. The Vatican Library also houses the richest collection of Renaissance manuscripts.

It is not without reason that it is considered the repository of the secret knowledge of mankind. There are rooms in the library where neither journalists, nor historians, nor specialists in other sciences are allowed, although a huge number of ancient and medieval manuscripts makes it the most attractive to historians of all time.

Alexander VOROBYOV

Edition: A. Glukhov. "From the Depths of Ages"

In the foggy distance of centuries, this civilization originates, the existence of which even 60-70 years ago, even the largest experts had a very vague idea.

Studying the cuneiform tables of the library of Ashurbanipal, scientists found on one of them a mention of "secret Sumerian documents". And one more thing: the king himself, the owner of the library, wrote: “It was a great joy for me to repeat the beautiful, but incomprehensible inscriptions of the Sumerians.”

What kind of country, what kind of people? Already Ashurbanipal considered the Sumerian language "incomprehensible", and Herodotus - the father of history - did not know anything about this people at all. When excavations began in Mesopotamia, "the people who began history" (as the Sumerians are sometimes called now) began to tell.

Halfway between Babylon and the Persian Gulf, in the arid desert, Varka Hill has been rising for a long time. His excavations, begun before the First World War, resumed in 1927. They were led by the German scientist Y. Jordan.

Hiding under the hill ancient city Uruk, which has existed for three millennia. Quite extraordinary things were hidden in Varka Hill. And above all - one of the most ancient clay tablets with writings. The documents found belonged to the middle of the fourth millennium BC. Therefore, they are fifty-five centuries old!

Then other equally ancient cities were discovered. The ruins of temples and palaces, household items and tools arose before archaeologists. And - mountains of clay tablets, of various shapes and sizes, covered with cuneiform writing. From them we learn about the political and social life ancient Sumer, its economy and state structure, about agriculture, cattle breeding, shipping, shipbuilding (most of the cities of Sumer stood on the banks of the Euphrates), carpentry, pottery, blacksmithing and weaving.

Clay tablets told us a lot about the life of the most ancient civilization on Earth. As early as the 4th millennium BC, the Sumerians created a network of irrigation canals. For lack of stone, they learned to make sickles, pots, plates, jugs from clay. There was no tree on their land - they began to build huts and cattle pens from reeds held together with clay.

Centuries passed. The Sumerians invented the potter's wheel, the wheel, the plow, the seeder, the sailing boat - magnificent milestones on the path of man. They learned how to build arches, how to make castings from copper and bronze. Finally, they created writing, the famous cuneiform, which spread throughout the Mesopotamia. The same clay served as the material for writing!

Sumer was famous for its populous cities. In Ur, which at one time was the capital of Sumer, there were up to 200 thousand inhabitants. Dozens of ships - from Syria, Egypt, India - moored here. Clay tablets recovered during excavations of the cities of ancient Sumer told us about how they lived, worked, what people ate in those distant times. In the religious center of Sumer - Nippur, several thousand tablets were found. They were housed in sixty-two rooms!

Another cult center was Ur, which was studied for many years by the archaeologist L. Woolley. Cuneiform tables and there were a great many. For almost four millennia, more than 20 thousand tablets have lain in the land of the city of L. Agash. They were systematized and divided into parts by content; it was already a real library.

The “booty” in ancient Shuruppak turned out to be impressive.

There, near the modern village of Fara, around which vast swamps stretch, ancient texts of Sumerian cuneiform were found. A real treasure, which is rightfully considered a library. This treasure made it possible to publish the List of Archaic Cuneiform Signs.

How such documents were kept can be judged from the finds in Uruk. Here the tablets were stacked in willow baskets. Each basket was tied up, a form was attached to it, a label with inscriptions. Here are some of them: "Documents relating to the garden", "Sending of workers", "Reed basket with documents relating to the weaver's workshop". To characterize the documents, we present two texts. One reads: "Bronze vessels received from Dadagi, Ur-Shara weighed them." Another: "Forty-five slave girls were sent for one day to carry reeds to repair the ship and to deliver beams for the palace."

These are the documents of the royal-temple households. But the Sumerians also left works on mathematics, history, literary works, works on agriculture (the calendar of the farmer and the classification of plants were found). Ancient maps have also come down to us. On one is a plan of the city of Nippur: the exact dimensions of the city are given, the location of the walls, gates, and most important buildings is noted.

Mathematicians were good at proving theorems. On one of the plates, for example, the proof of the similarity of triangles is stated, on the other - a theorem known in science as Euclid's theorem. Already in the II millennium BC, Mesopotamian scientists proved the Pythagorean theorem.

And the famous code of Hammurabi, which later influenced the Roman code of Justinian, began in Sumer.

In Nippur, among many others, a tablet with a list of recipes was found. It is quite large: 9.5 by 16 centimeters, 145 lines of text fit on it. For the preparation of medicines, the Sumerian physician used products of plant, animal and mineral origin. Most of the medicines plant origin: they were made from mustard, willow, fir, pine. Medicines were diluted with beer, wine, vegetable oil. A curious detail - the document completely lacks any magic spells.

Many tablets of the ancient Sumerians have now been deciphered, containing records of myths, proverbs and sayings. It turned out, for example, that the Sumerian collections of proverbs and sayings are several centuries older than the Egyptian ones known to us - they were written down more than three and a half millennia ago. Here are some examples of folk wisdom:

A well-dressed person is welcome everywhere;

Dodged a wild bull

Came across a wild cow;

If the country is poorly armed,

The enemy will always stand at the gate.

Sumerian fables about animals also have a venerable age. In any case, they were composed and written down more than a thousand years earlier than the Aesops. But it was Aesop that the Greeks and Romans considered the founder of this genre.

According to the cuneiform tablets that have been preserved in ancient libraries, we can judge that already at that distant time people were glorifying their land, their fields: “O Sumer, the great land among all the lands of the universe, flooded with unfading light. Your heart is deep and unknown. May your barns be numerous, may your cows multiply, may your sheepfolds be numerous, may your sheep be numberless.

The Sumerians composed the first hymn to labor, and the first in the history of mankind love elegy: “Husband, dear to my heart, your beauty is great, sweet like honey. Leo dear to my heart. Your beauty is great, sweet like honey.

They also own the oldest funeral song: “Let your life path will not disappear from memory, let your name called in the days to come."

But the greatest thing that Sumerian culture has created is the poem about Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, oppresses his people, but then, having made friendship with the wild man Enkidu, performs unprecedented feats. After the death of Enkidu, Gilgamesh vainly seeks immortality. The poem is a true hymn to man, his aspirations and daring. It clearly expresses interest in the heroic personality, and the hero himself boldly enters the fight against the unjust order established by God. The first songs of the poem originated and were recorded in Sumer. Here are its first lines (translated by the Soviet Assyrologist V.K. Shileiko):

About the one who saw everything to the end of the world,

About the one who penetrated everything, comprehended everything.

He read all the scriptures together,

The depth of wisdom of all book readers.

I saw the hidden, I knew the secret,

And he brought news of the days before the flood.

He walked a long way, but got tired and returned.

And wrote on the stone all his work.

This means that even then there were many books, even then the "book readers" owned wisdom, - there were also people who could read "all the writings."

Discoveries followed one after another. And each of them is the result of tremendous work, the result of ingenuity and skill. The fact that some texts have come down to us in later (Babylonian) copies, the fact that they are poorly preserved, is not the worst thing. Many of the works were separated. Great art, for example, was required to restore from the many fragments of cuneiform tablets literary monument"House of Fish" Parts of the poem ended up in three museums around the world: the beginning - in Istanbul, the middle - in London, the ending - in Philadelphia. Nevertheless, the text of this poem was restored, translated and commented on. It gives a description - and a very poetic one - of many fish.

Here is what is said about the slope. This fish has:

The head is a hoe, the teeth are a comb,

Her bones are branches of fir,

Her thin tail is the scourge of the fisherman.

All sorts of teachings, disputes and disputes were widespread in Sumer. Scientists of our time have managed to restore from the available tablets and fragments the teaching, conditionally called the “Farmer’s Calendar.” The first line of the “Calendar” reads: “During it, the farmer taught his son.” Further advice on how to get good harvests. They cover all types of field work: from soil irrigation to harvesting. The entire teaching consists of 107 lines.

For reference Agriculture you need to know exactly when to start sowing. And the priests of Sumer developed one of the oldest calendars - the lunar one. Gradually, the lunar calendar began to turn into a lunisolar one: the months were counted by the moon, and the year by the sun.

Of the surviving texts of many disputes, we mention the “Dispute between the Hoe and the Plow”, which describes in detail what the Plow and the Hoe are doing. The text ends with these words: "In the dispute between the Hoe and the Plow, the Hoe wins."

Of course, cult and liturgical literature was kept in the libraries: hymns to the gods and legends about them, prayers, spells, penitential psalms, divination, predictions. The most interesting in the literary sense are the penitential psalms, reflecting human sorrows and sufferings with genuine lyricism.

The German musicologist K. Sachs became interested in a clay tablet, which dates back to the 3rd millennium BC. In addition to the text of the Sumerian legend "On the Creation of Man", cuneiform signs were found on it, which are considered a musical record. According to the scientist, a melody for a harp was recorded here, the game on which accompanied the reading of the legend.

Without the Sumerian libraries, we would know much less about the life, production, beliefs of the ancient peoples who inhabited

Mesopotamia. “All these books of that time,” notes scientist S. Kramer, “needed to be somehow stored, grouped and kept in proper order. Obviously, teachers and scribes adhered to some kind of system in this "library" business. It can be assumed in advance that, to facilitate this work, lists were already compiled literary works grouped according to certain criteria. It may seem surprising, but the directories were also found and deciphered.

The researcher holds a clay tablet in his hands. At one time, it was discovered during excavations of one of the cities of Sumer and sent to the museum University of Pennsylvania. It is small in size (six and a half centimeters long and about three and a half wide) and fits freely in the palm of your hand. Cuneiform characters fill both sides of the tablet. Each of them is divided into two columns. In addition, every ten lines of text are separated by a horizontal bar.

“Some unknown poem,” thought the scientist, although the short lines and these horizontal lines were very embarrassing. He read the lines over and over again, but no coherent text came out. Reading and rereading the phrases, he was more and more amazed at their similarity with the first lines of works known to him. Then a guess flashed through, which, upon careful examination, was confirmed: it was a catalog! An ancient scribe in the smallest hand put on the tablet the names (and they, as you know, were given by the first line of the text) of sixty-two literary works. Twenty-four of them have come down to us. Soon the second catalog was deciphered in the Louvre.

Both lists have preserved for us the names of 87 literary works. Among them: the myth "The Creation of the Hoe", the teaching "In time it is a tiller", individual songs from the poem about Gilgamesh, the poem "Man, the perfection of the gods".

The exact purpose of these two directories is still unknown. Maybe the scribe made a list before hiding the tablets with texts in the vault, or maybe, on the contrary, placing them on the shelves in the “House of Tablets”. It is not clear what caused the sequence of works in the list, etc.

So far, we know very little about the libraries of Sumer, but far from all the tablets have been read. New researchers of the culture of this ancient civilization will probably discover new catalogs and new information about the book depositories of that time.

Cuneiform, invented by the Sumerians, spread widely throughout the countries of the Middle East and Asia Minor. Collections of clay tablets have been found in many cities, which give an idea about the nature of books, how they are stored, and about the increase in the fund of the oldest libraries in the world.

There is no need to enumerate all these book depositories, let us dwell only on two more, perhaps the most remarkable.

The library of the king of Assyria - Ashurbanipal, who wrote about himself: “I, Ashurbanipal, comprehended the wisdom of Nabu, all the art of scribes, learned the knowledge of all the masters, how many there are, learned to shoot from a bow, ride a horse and a chariot , hold the reins ... And he studied the craft of the wise Adap, comprehended hidden secrets art of writing, I read about heavenly and earthly buildings and meditated on them. I attended the meetings of scribes. I decided challenging tasks with multiplication and division, which are not immediately clear."

These words are inscribed, indeed, by Ashurbanipal's hand on two clay tablets. This king, two and a half thousand years ago, gathered in his capital Nineveh big library. He collected it in the truest sense of the word: he sent it to different cities Mesopotamia of its representatives, experienced scribes who sought out ancient books and made copies of them. Many of them had a postscript that confirmed the accuracy of the copy: "According to the ancient original, written off and reconciled." Some of the tablets were very ancient, with erased signs, then the scribe left a note: “erased”, “I don’t know”.

The fate of Nineveh - the capital of Assyria - is known. Under the onslaught of the combined troops of Babylonia and Media, she fell. The city was completely destroyed: “The cavalry rushes, swords sparkle, spears shine; many killed. Nineveh was plundered, devastated and devastated, ”wrote ancient historian. The fire that raged for many days after that completed the destruction, and the sands of the desert covered the remaining ruins.

In the middle of the last century, Nineveh was excavated by the English archaeologist O. Layard. Majestic palaces, huge temples, well-thought-out planning - everything spoke of high culture people. Archaeologists delved into the ruins of the burnt palace. Here are two small rooms. Their floor is covered with a thick layer (half a meter!) of broken bricks. The scientist raises a rectangular tile - on it one can see wedge-shaped letters. The second, third, fourth - all the tiles are filled with even small lines.

However, Layard opened only part of the library; most of the books were kept elsewhere. The excavations of Nineveh were continued by Layard's former assistant, O. Rassam, who discovered another magnificent palace with the Lion's Hall. So it was called because its walls were decorated with sculptural scenes of the royal hunt for lions. Here, in the Lion Hall, the bulk of the library was located. The fire partially damaged the book collection - the tablets collapsed into the basement and lay there for 25 centuries.

Despite the formidable warning inscribed on one of the tablets: “Whoever dares to carry away these tablets ... let him punish Ashur and Belit with his anger, and the name of him and his heirs will forever be forgotten in this country”, the clay tablets were carefully packed in boxes and sent to London.

The processing of this book treasure required a lot of work. After all, all the tablets were mixed, many were broken into several pieces; it was necessary to read all this, decipher, establish surnames and geographical names. Giant work! And it was done by scientists from different countries.

It turned out that the most diverse literature in several languages ​​​​(including Sumerian) was stored here. The results of astronomical observations and medical treatises, grammatical reference books and chronicles of the Assyrian kings, religious books and myths. The high development of the literature of this people is evidenced by the "plaintive song to calm the heart." It conveys the feeling of deep sorrow of a person who has experienced great grief, conscious of his loneliness.

The significance of the library of Ashurbanipal is that it is, in essence, a genuine treasury of the cultural achievements of the peoples ancient east. Suffice it to say that the Assyrian librarians copied and preserved for us the most outstanding work of the literature of Mesopotamia, one of the greatest epics of world literature - the legend of Gilgamesh.

The very discovery of the epic, or rather, a small part of it, just one tablet, caused a sensation in the scientific world. The honor of discovery belongs to J. Smith, an attendant of the British Museum, in the past - an engraver.

With excitement he studied the cuneiform tablets brought from Nineveh. Here he is reading important document- the history of the reign of Ashurbanipal. From it it became known how he collected his library.

And here is another plate, not solid, part of it is broken off. The scientist reads the lines about the global flood: “Listen, wall, listen! You man of Shuruppak, build yourself a ship, abandon your possessions and save your life! Take a pair of all living creatures with you on the ship. Subsequently, it turned out that this was the eleventh tablet (out of twelve) from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The library at Nineveh was well maintained, and the book storage system certainly helped to restore and read the scattered works.

Each book had a "library stamp": "The Palace of Ashurbanipal, the king of kings, the king of the country Ashur, to whom the god Nabu and the goddess Gaslista granted sensitive ears and keen eyes to look for the creations of the writers of my kingdom."

The library had a catalog. The tile indicated the name of the work (by its first line), as well as the room and shelf on which it was stored. And a label was attached to the shelf - the size of a little finger - with the name of the branch of knowledge.

Tablets of one book were stored in a separate wooden box. To prevent the pages from getting mixed up, they put serial number, and at the top of each tablet the initial words of the work were repeated. The book about the creation of the world began with the words: "Before that which is above was not yet called heaven." On each of the tablets of this book is written: "First that which is above." The epic of Gilgamesh began with the line "About the one who saw everything." And this line was repeated at the top of each of the 12 tablets.

Thus, through the efforts of many scientists, one of the most noteworthy libraries of antiquity was extracted from the depths of centuries. And not only extracted, but also read, translated and commented on. The catalog of this library was published in five volumes in the last century in London.

It so happened that history did not retain information about great power, which at one time was a formidable rival of Egypt itself. Greek and Roman historians have already forgotten about it. And when, at the end of the last century, Oxford professor A. Says gave a lecture about this power, he was simply called a dreamer and inventor. And he, on the basis of some inscriptions and notes of travelers, argued that in the territory of present-day Turkey and northern Syria lived a great and mighty people - the Hittites. In 1903, his book, The Hittites, or the History of forgotten people". And soon the discovery of the scientist was irrefutably proven.

The history of the state of the Hittites was helped to reveal cuneiform tablets from the library discovered by the German scientist G. Winkler. It was he who, in 1907, found during excavations in Bogazkoy (145 kilometers from Ankara) more than 10 thousand clay tablets. A careful study of these tablets, drawn up on Babylonian, gave rise to confidence - the expedition is located on the land of the ancient capital of the "rulers of the Hetty". Particular excitement was caused by a tablet with a letter from Pharaoh Ramesses II to the Hittite king. It dealt with a treaty between the Egyptians and the Hittites.

Whole baskets of tablets were brought to Winkler. Without unbending, from morning to evening, he read documents about the life of the Hittites, their history, life, and their kings and wars, cities.

One of the participants in the excavations of that time writes that he saw “in the eleventh compartment of a large temple, neatly folded rows of obliquely well-preserved clay tablets. Their position at the time of discovery can only be explained by the assumption that they were stored in the archive, which was originally located directly above this basement warehouse, and slipped down during the fire. And even then it became clear that this was the biggest find after the library of Ashurbanipal. But that was not all: a quarter of a century later, more than 6,000 cuneiform documents were recovered from the ruins.

Two and a half thousand years have passed since the Hittites ceased to exist. However, thanks to cultural monuments, the Hittites came to life for modern humanity. The world learned about the existence and culture of the Hittite state - powerful state equal to Egypt and Babylon. It occupied all Asia Minor to Syria and existed for seven centuries. At one time, the Hittites conquered Babylon and razed it (to intimidate other peoples!) To the ground, broke the power of Mittani, subjugated Ugarit - a large shopping center on the Mediterranean. The country waged successful wars with Egypt.

But not all the signs spoke. The scientist was able to read only those of them that were written in the Babylonian language.

The language of other cuneiforms was unfamiliar to him. The beginning of the decoding of the Hittite language was laid by the Czech scientist B. Grozny. It wasn't easy. Grozny himself said: “I read and reread the inscription perhaps two hundred or three hundred times, trying to find that Achilles heel, that point of Archimedes, which, however weak it may be, could serve me its service.

Deciphering the Hittite script made it possible to read the second part of the library. The bulk of the cuneiform tablets contains religious texts - rituals, hymns, prayers, descriptions of the gods, descriptions of religious holidays, texts of oracles. Astrological monuments adjoin them by their nature.

From the Babylonians, the Hittites borrowed rich literature on mathematics (and the “Chaldean wise men” already had formulas for calculating the areas of a triangle, rectangle, circle, for determining the volume of a cube, cone, etc. They knew how to raise to a power and left tablets with square and cube roots ).

The Hittites had many labors in law; the code they created was provided with numerous comments, a kind of manual for judges.

From historical literature The Annals of Mursilis are instructive. The author of the annals - King Mursilis - proved himself to be an outstanding writer. Events in the annals are strictly divided by years, and the presentation is built according to a certain scheme. Another king - Hattusilis - left a document that can be called an autobiography. This is one of the first autobiographies in world literature.

The prayer of one of the kings (Mursilis II), written in the form of a letter to the gods during the plague, is distinguished by the brightness of the presentation. Of particular interest is the story of Mursilis about how he lost the power of speech. This is the first story in the history of culture about a speech disorder. In general, the Hittites reached a high poetic level in their prayers.

Naturally, the question arises: “If the kings wrote like that, then how did the poets write?” Almost all poetic works, as a rule, were written on wooden boards, which, alas, burned down in a fire. But what remains is perfection. For example, here is an ancient poem in honor of the sun god:

The solar god of heaven, humanity's shepherd.

You emerge from the sea, from the sea - the son of heaven, and rush up to heaven.

Sun god of heaven, my lord!

Born by people and a wild beast in the mountains, a dog, and a pig, and an insect in the field - you give everyone what is given to them by right!

From day to day...

A fragment from a great epic about the struggle of the gods for power has come down to us. We also know the name of the author - Killas, he lived half a millennium before Homer.

The Hittites had a peculiar genre - short stories, dubbed "records of oversights and stupidities." These are the first critical works. They contain laconic portrait sketches of dishonest officials, judges-bureaucrats. There is also a story about a commander who cares only about compiling victorious reports to the king, and not about real victory.

The Bogazgey collection of cuneiform tablets also included fragments of the Gilgamesh epic.

This essay did not aim to tell in detail about the content of the clay books of the library, books that reflect: law and law, religion and medicine, the deeds of kings and the customs of the people, ritual texts and myths.

Here I would like to emphasize one curious detail: many books of the Hittites have authors. Along with the names of the compilers of mythological, ritual, magical texts, we also know the name of the author big textbook about caring for horses - Kikkuli from the country of Mittani. This ancient "horse breeding manual" contains 1000 lines of text. He is over 3400 years old.

Hittite librarians and archivists created the science of book preservation. The cuneiform texts of the catalogs of the library, which was also an archive, have been preserved. The catalog also contained indications of lost documents. The labels were used individual works. All this speaks of the order that was maintained in the storage of clay books.

Hattusas - the so-called capital of the Hittites - was completely destroyed by fire in the XIII century BC. Fire-resistant clay tablets have been preserved, but most of the archive, which consisted of wooden tablets, has been lost forever...

Sumer, Assyria, Hittites. Clay tablet. Cuneiform badges. Antiquity. Thanks to clay books, we became aware of the wisdom of the ancient peoples who lived at the dawn of civilization.

In 1846, the failed English lawyer G. Layard fled from cold London to the East, where he was always attracted by hot countries and cities buried underground. He was neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but it was here that he was extremely lucky. G. Layard stumbled upon the capital Assyrian kingdom — city ​​of Nineveh, which Europeans have long known from the Bible, and which has been waiting for its discovery for almost three thousand years.

Nineveh was the royal residence for almost ninety years and reached its peak under King Ashurbanipal who ruled in 669-633 BC. During the reign of Ashurbanipal, "the whole earth was a peaceful home", there were almost no wars, and Ashurbanipal devoted his free time to his library, which he collected from big love, systematically and with knowledge of the ancient "librarianship".

The one who dares to carry away these tables...
let them punish Ashur and Ballit with their anger,
and let his name and his heirs
Will be consigned to oblivion in this Country...

Such a formidable warning, according to the plan of King Ashurbanipal, should have plunged into fear and trembling anyone who only thinks about stealing books from the Nineveh library. None of the subjects of the king, of course, dared ...

But in 1854, Ormuzd entered the library of Ashurbanipal, breaking the laws ancient Assyria for the sake of saving her in the memory of mankind. And if the discoverer of Nineveh was G. Layard, who accidentally discovered several tablets from the Nineveh Library, then the library itself was unearthed by Ormuzd, one of the first archaeologists - representatives of the indigenous population of the country.

Among the ruins of the palace of Ashurbanipal, he discovered several rooms into which, it seemed, someone had deliberately dumped thousands of cuneiform tablets. Subsequently, scientists calculated that about 30,000 "clay books" were stored in the library. During the fire, when the city subsequently died under the blows of the Median and Babylonian warriors, in the fire that was destructive for Nineveh, the “clay books” were fired, hardened and, thus, preserved. But, unfortunately, many crashed.

Ormuzd Rassam carefully packed the "clay books" in boxes and sent them to London, but it took another thirty years for scientists to study them and translate them into modern language.

The library of King Ashurbanipal kept on the clay pages of its books almost everything that the cultures of Sumer and Akkad were rich in. The Clay Books told the world that the wise mathematicians of Babylon did not limit themselves to four arithmetic operations. They easily calculated percentages, knew how to measure the area of ​​various geometric shapes, they had complex table multiplication, they knew squaring and extracting square root. Our seven-day week was also born in Mesopotamia, where the foundation of modern science on the structure and development of celestial bodies was also laid.

The Assyrians could rightfully claim to be the first printers, because how many royal decrees, state and economic documents had to be written and rewritten before they were sent to all parts of the Assyrian state! And in order to do this quickly, the Assyrians carved the necessary inscriptions on a wooden board, made prints from it on clay tablets. Why is such a board not a printing press?

In the Nineveh Library, the books were kept in strict order. At the bottom of each plate was the full title of the book, and next to it was the page number. In addition, in many tablets, each last line of the previous page was repeated at the beginning of the next.

There was also a catalog in the library, in which they recorded the title, the number of lines, the branch of knowledge - the department to which the book belonged. To find the right book It was not difficult: each shelf had a small clay tag with the name of the department attached to it - just like in modern libraries.

There were historical texts, law scrolls, medical reference books, travel descriptions, dictionaries listing Sumerian syllabics and grammatical forms, and even dictionaries. foreign words, since Assyria was connected with almost all the countries of Asia Minor.

All the books of the Nineveh Library were written on clay tablets (tablets) made from the clay of the High Quality. First, clay was kneaded for a long time, and then briquettes were made from it, 32 x 22 centimeters in size and 2.5 centimeters thick. When the tablet was ready, the scribe wrote on the raw tablet with a triangular iron stick.

Some of the books in the Nineveh library were brought from the countries defeated by Assyria, some were bought in the temples of other cities or from private individuals. Ever since books appeared, there have been book lovers. Ashurbanipal himself was a zealous collector, and this is no coincidence.

Ashurbanipal - rare case among the kings of the Ancient East - was the most educated person for his time. His father Asargaddon intended to make his son a high priest, so the young Ashurbanipal studied all the sciences of that time. Ashurbanipal retained his love for books until the end of his life, which is why he assigned several rooms on the second floor of his palace to the library.

Complete the task:
The significance of LIBRARIES in the history of world culture is enormous. “Houses of Tablets”, “Shelters of the Mind”, “Pharmacy for the Soul”, “Houses of Wisdom”, “Book Storage Chambers”, “Temples of Literature” - this is how libraries were called at different times and in different countries.

Which definition do you like best? Try suggesting your own.

Think.
Why are library books stamped?

Read the book:
Lipin B., Belov A. Clay books. - M. - L., 1952.
Make up a story about what scientists managed to find out about the life of the inhabitants of Assyria.
In one of the halls of the magnificent palace, the walls of which were decorated with sculptural scenes of the royal hunt for lions, a large part of the library was found. We can imagine how library visitors read these unusual books here.

Instead of the usual rustle of pages for us, a light clatter of clay tablets was heard in these walls.

Try to imagine and draw the premises of the library of King Ashurbanipal.

It was compiled for 25 years in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh by order of King Ashurbanipal (VII century BC). It also served as a state archive.

After the death of the king, the funds were scattered among various palaces. The part of the library discovered by archaeologists consists of 25,000 clay tablets with cuneiform texts. The opening of the library in the middle of the 19th century was of great importance for understanding the cultures of Mesopotamia and for deciphering cuneiform writing.

Ashurbanipal intended to create a library that was supposed to exhaust all the knowledge accumulated by mankind. He was especially interested in the information necessary for governing the state - on how to maintain constant communication with the deities, on predicting the future by the movement of the stars and the entrails of sacrificial animals. That is why the lion's share of funds were texts of conspiracies, prophecies, magical and religious rituals, mythological tales. The bulk of the information was extracted from the Sumerian and Babylonian texts specifically organized teams scribes.

The library had a large collection of medical texts (with an emphasis on healing through sorcery), but the rich mathematical heritage of Babylonia was inexplicably ignored. There were numerous lists literary and epic tales, in particular tablets with the epic of Gilgamesh and the mythological translation of Enuma Elish, as well as tablets with prayers, songs, legal documents (for example, the Hammurabi code), economic and administrative records, letters, astronomical and historical works, records of a political nature , lists of kings and poetic texts.

The texts were written in Assyrian, Babylonian, a dialect of the Akkadian language, and also in Sumerian. A great many texts are presented in parallel in Sumerian and Akkadian, including encyclopedic editions and dictionaries. As a rule, one text was stored in six copies, which today greatly facilitates the work of deciphering the tablets. To date, Ashurbanipal's library is the largest collection of texts in the Akkadian language.

The foundation of the library took place on the orders of the Assyrian ruler Ashurbanipal, who was distinguished by a great interest in texts and knowledge in general. Ashurbanipal's predecessors had small palace libraries, but none of them had such a passion for collecting texts. Ashurbanipal sent numerous scribes to different regions of their country, so that they make copies of all the texts they come across. In addition, Ashurbanipal ordered copies of texts from all major temple archives, which were then sent to him in Nineveh. Sometimes, during military campaigns, Ashurbanipal managed to capture entire cuneiform libraries, which he also delivered to his palace.

The librarians of Ashurbanipal did a great job of cataloging, copying, commenting and researching the texts of the library, as evidenced by numerous glossaries, bibliography and commentaries. Ashurbanipal himself attached great importance to the ordering of the library. His name was written on each tablet (a kind of ex-libris), the name of the original tablet from which the copy was made was given in the colophon. The library had hundreds of waxed-page codices, which made it possible to correct or rewrite text written on wax. Unlike cuneiform tablets (which are only hardened during fires), wax tablets are short-lived. They have not survived, as well as the scrolls in the library - parchment and papyrus. Judging by the ancient catalogs, no more than 10% of all funds collected by Ashurbanipal have survived to this day.

A huge array of cuneiform texts has come down to our days solely thanks to Ashurbanipal's passion for the written word. In many cases, ancient Mesopotamian writings have survived only in copies made by order of this ruler. Some of the texts presented have a history of thousands of years (although the tablets themselves are not very ancient, in normal conditions they have rarely been kept for more than 200 years).

Ashurbanipal himself was proud that he was the only Assyrian ruler who could read and write. On one of the tablets, his personal record was found:

“I studied what the wise Adapa brought me, mastered all the secret art of writing on tablets, began to understand predictions in heaven and on earth, participate in discussions of pundits, predict the future together with the most experienced interpreters of divination by the liver of sacrificial animals. I can solve complex, complex division and multiplication problems, I constantly read masterfully written tablets in such a complex language as Sumerian, or as difficult to interpret as Akkadian, I am familiar with antediluvian stone records that are already completely incomprehensible.

Ashurbanipal's own notes (probably compiled by the best scribes) are of high literary quality.

A generation after Ashurbanipal, his capital fell under the blows of the Medes and Babylonians. The library was not plundered, as is usually the case in such cases, but turned out to be buried under the ruins of the palaces where it was kept.

In 1849 most the library (which was kept in the northwestern palace on the banks of the Euphrates) was found by the British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard. Three years later, Layard's assistant, the British diplomat and traveler Hormuzd Rasam, found the second part of the library in the opposite wing of the palace. Both pieces were taken to the British Museum for storage. The opening of the library allowed scientists to get a first-hand idea of ​​the Assyrian culture. Prior to this, Assyria was known only from the works of Herodotus and other historians of Hellas, and the Persians, in turn, served as their source. The biggest sensation in scientific community made the discovery of the epic of Gilgamesh with a presentation of the biblical story of the Flood.

When extracting the tablets from the wreckage, careful accounting of the place of their discovery was not carried out. In the British Museum, both parts were placed in a common depository, so it is now impossible to judge which tablets were found where. Scientists are still working on sorting individual fragments (“joints”), cataloging and deciphering texts. The British Museum is working with Iraqi scientists to create a museum-library in Iraq, where reproductions of the original tablets are to be displayed.

History of the book: Textbook for universities Govorov Alexander Alekseevich

5.2. BOOKS AND LIBRARIES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD AND ANTIQUITY

The most ancient material for books was probably clay and its derivatives (shards, ceramics). Even the Sumerians and Ekkadians molded flat bricks-tablets and wrote on them with triangular sticks, squeezing out wedge-shaped signs. The tablets were dried in the sun or burned in a fire. Then the finished tablets of the same content were placed in a certain order in a wooden box - a clay cuneiform book was obtained. Its advantages were cheapness, simplicity, availability. A clay label with the name of the work, the names of the author, owner, patron gods was attached to the box with the tablets - a kind of title page. Catalogs were made from clay - cuneiform lists of stored books.

In the 19th century, European archaeologists unearthed the capital of the Assyrian kings, Nineveh, on the banks of the Tigris River and discovered there an entire cuneiform library established by King Assurbanipal (7th century BC). More than twenty thousand clay books were stored there, each of which had a cuneiform stamp: "The Palace of the King of Kings." Since the Assyro-Babylonian language was the language of international communication, there were libraries of cuneiform books and entire archives of tablets in Egypt (Tel Amarna), and in Asia Minor, etc.

"Egypt is the gift of the Nile" - the historian Herodotus cites an ancient aphorism. The reed-papyrus, which made it possible for the greatest civilization of the Ancient World to arise and flourish, is entirely a gift of the great river.

The Egyptians cleaned the stalks of cut cane from the bark and cut thin ribbons from the porous core. They were laid in layers, one across the other; papyrus juice had the properties of glue. Drying, he pressed the papyrus into a solid mass, elastic, fairly even and strong. Dried papyrus was polished with pumice and sea shells, tinted and whitewashed. This is how the naturalist Pliny the Elder describes the production of writing papyrus.

Papyrus, however, was fragile, and it was not practical to cut sheets from it and bind them. Therefore, papyrus ribbons were glued together or sewn into scrolls, which were twisted, tied, placed in special cases - caps or capsules, to which labels with the title of the book were attached, a scroll was obtained - one of the first known forms of a book in world civilization.

The earliest papyrus scrolls that have come down to us date back to the 3rd millennium BC. e. Initially, they were distributed only in Egypt, but after the Macedonian conquest, in the era of the Ptolemaic kings, Egypt became the supplier of this convenient and relatively cheap writing material to all Mediterranean countries. Papyrus scrolls of Greek, Roman, Persian, Jewish, Arabic, Georgian origin are known. The age of the papyrus book ended only in the 10th-11th centuries AD. after the Muslim conquest of Egypt. The last document written on papyrus is the Papal Bull (1022).

Of the papyrus scrolls that have come down to us, the so-called Papyrus Harris (after its discoverer), now stored in the British Museum, is considered the largest. Its length exceeds 40 meters, and its width is 43 centimeters. It is believed that it was rewritten in 1200 BC. e. in Thebes. The vast majority of papyri were not so large.

Luxurious scrolls were also created. The so-called imperial papyrus was stained with the juice of shells extracted from the bottom of the sea. They wrote on it with gold and silver paints ("chrysoul", "codex argenteus", etc.). There were ordinary varieties, even a special wrapping papyrus. The papyrus manufacturer Fannius became famous in history. There were scrolls forged from precious metals, as well as glued from cloth.

The dominance of papyrus remained unchanged, although books were created from leaves Ivory or from cypress boards covered with wax. They were fastened together, the text scratched out with a sharp stylus. From this, by the way, the expression " good style". Such books were named according to the number of sheets: two (diptych), three (triptych), many (polyptych). There were scrolls forged from precious metals, as well as glued from fabrics.

Almost all state and local governments, colleges of priests, assemblies of citizens and wealthy people considered it prestigious to have a good library. Libraries were arranged at public baths, where wealthy slave owners spent their time reading books. Specially trained slave readers, in Latin they were called "lecturers", and in Greek "deacons", read aloud to everyone.

The richest book collection of antiquity was probably Library of Alexandria Ptolemaic kings, containing, as they say, more than 700,000 papyrus scrolls. The Greek scholar Callimachus created a catalog of books, and the library became the largest cultural and scientific center ancient world.

Along with papyrus, material made from the skins of young animals - calves, goats, sheep, rabbits - also became widespread. It was named parchment, after the name of the place where this method was invented. Pergamon is an Asia Minor Hellenistic state. long time papyrus and parchment were used simultaneously, but from the 3rd-4th centuries, due to the decline in the production of papyrus in Egypt, parchment began to come to the fore. To make parchment, the removed skin of a young animal was scraped off with a knife, the remnants of fat and wool were removed, then dried, polished, and dyed. The best varieties parchment was made from skin taken from the neck or abdomen, cheap parchment was made from skin taken from the hem.

The flourishing of the parchment book begins with the advent of the Christian era. Parchment was more expensive than papyrus, but more versatile and durable. At first, scrolls were made from parchment, as from papyrus. However, it was soon noticed that, unlike papyrus, it is easily written on both sides. Parchment was cut into square sheets, which were stitched together. Thus was born the now dominant universal form of the book - code, or book block. Literally "code" in translation from Latin means "wood". Perhaps this happened because the book was bound in wooden boards. The oldest parchment books-codexes have come down to us from the 2nd century AD. e.

Papyrus and parchment contributed to the widespread dissemination of learning and culture. Books were copied by numerous scribes and sold. The profitability of the correspondence of books was noticed by a friend of Cicero - Pomponius Atticus back in the 1st century BC. e. He himself was the owner of a workshop where calligraphers copied books. The workshop for copying books was described by the Roman poet Martial:

After all, you happened to come to Argillet,

There is a bookshop opposite Caesar's forum,

All the pillars are written in it this way and that,

So that you can read the names of poets as soon as possible.

Don't look for me there, but ask Atrekt

(This name is to call the owner of the shop).

From the first or from the second he is there shelves

Cleaned with pumice and dressed in purple

For five denarii, Martial will give you...

As it is clear from the works of ancient writers, the books already had a title, colored illustrations, headpieces, capital letters - initials, "red lines" (headings) were written, marginals were made - marks and notes in the margins. Parchment sheets were sometimes painted in various colors (purple, black) for greater attractiveness. Both scrolls and codices were made in various formats, up to miniature ones. Pliny testifies to a scroll with the text of the Iliad, which, according to him, could fit in a nutshell.

Bookbinding was born along with the book-code. The cut sheets of parchment were bent (folded) in a certain order. In Greek, a sheet of four additions "tetra" is called a notebook. From notebooks of sixteen and thirty-two pages, a volume was formed - a book block of any format.

The entrepreneur-slave owner, engaged in the reproduction and sale of handwritten books, was called in Greek "bibliopolis" - literally a book distributor, and in Latin "librarius" - a scribe.

The poet Martial, already familiar to us, advised everyone who wanted to read it on the way: " big book hand it over in lari, buy one that fits in your hand ... ". These lines indicate that there were already second-hand booksellers who sold old books.

The authors of books, if they were rich and noble, could buy calligrapher slaves themselves, hire them for a while, or even send their slave to be trained in a book-writing workshop. The need for books in the countries of antiquity (Greece, Rome, the Hellenistic states) increased rapidly, which led to the expansion of the book market.

Ancient writers left us a lot of evidence of how in the era of imperial Rome it was possible to multiply 50-100 copies of a work at the same time by repeated correspondence. Booksellers sought to attract writers and bibliophiles to their shops; they specially hired readers to read aloud excerpts from the books they sold. Beginning with Julius Caesar, handwritten "Acta diurna", the so-called daily news - the ancestors of modern newspapers - were created in Rome. They also bred in bookstores.

The price of the book was determined mainly by the size of the scroll or codex, but it also depended on the design, demand, and fame and popularity of the author of the book. Worn books were sold much cheaper, however, if they were rarities, that is, rare books, their price increased significantly. In the bookstore of ancient Rome, you could rent a book for temporary use.

However, a significant part of the needs of the ancient reader in the book was satisfied with the help of public libraries. They were called public. Only in Rome there were twenty-eight of them. There were also small private reading rooms in large cities. The flourishing of the book business in ancient times was the lot of major centers culture. On the periphery and in remote regions, it developed poorly.

AT Ancient China production was established bamboo books. Thinly planed bamboo sheets were fastened together with metal staples in the form of a modern sliding window shade. On such a curtain book, as well as on later invented silk, the Chinese drew their hieroglyphs with brushes, using ink for this.

The Chinese originally made paper from bamboo pulp. Obviously, therefore, she acquired the name from historical words"bombacca" and "bombicinna".

In the countries of Europe, the ancestors of the Germans and Slavs, if they happened to receive a Greco-Roman education, satisfied their need for books with the manuscripts of the Greeks and Romans. Their numerous compatriots, as the etymology of the words denoting a book ("biblio", "liber", "libro") shows, were satisfied with records or serifs on wooden plates. The most accessible material for writing was birch bark. The methods of processing it have come down to us: a thin layer of the bark of young trees was kept in boiling water, a sheet was cut from it, which was not inferior in elasticity to modern paper. Books-scrolls and books-codes were made from it.

Birch bark books were most widely used among the ancient Slavs, as well as among the peoples of North India. For the manufacture of writing material, the skin of the tree was torn off and impregnated with a special composition. The glued sheets were wrapped in fabric for better preservation. The first birch bark books in India date back to the 9th century AD. e.

So, the ancient world gave mankind writing, and with it all the wealth of spiritual culture. In the course of the development of the most ancient civilizations of Egypt, China, Greece, Rome, the most common form of the book so far, the codex, was born and developed. The book was subordinated to the purely utilitarian task of consolidating and transmitting information. With the advent of genre diversity in ancient literature, the book receives elements of decoration - drawings, ornaments, good-quality beautiful bindings. As a result, the ancient man created a book that is perceived as a single whole organism and which has served and continues to serve as a source of inspiration for more than one generation of the creators of the book.

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