Ancient Libraries: A Brief History
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ก.ค. 2024
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Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:56 What is Cuneiform?
2:20 The Tablets from Nippur
3:24 Assyrian clay tablets
5:00 Burning of the Books in Ancient China
7:04 When Did Archives become Libraries?
10:23 Library of Alexandria
11:26 How did Alexandra get so many books?
13:23 Did the Library of Alexandria Burn Down?
Resources used:
Chan, Lois Mai. "The Burning of the Books in China, 213 BC." The Journal of Library History (1966-1972), vol. 7, no. 2, University of Texas Press, 1972, pp. 101-08, www.jstor.org/stable/25540352.
www.historyofinformation.com/...
www.researchgate.net/publicat...
blog.britishmuseum.org/a-libr...
Heller-Roazen, Daniel. “Tradition’s Destruction: On the Library of Alexandria.” October, vol. 100, The MIT Press, 2002, pp. 133-53, www.jstor.org/stable/779096.
Disclaimer: I am a Book Depository Affiliate. I am not sponsored for any of my reviews and will always disclose if a book I am reviewing has been sent to me for review.
DISCLAIMER
This video was produced by a random student on the internet who loves reading, especially about ancient history and classics. The purpose of my videos is to make classics and ancient history interesting and accessible to everyone. It is important to highlight that I am not a professional or qualified educator, “expert”, historian or classicist. However, I ensure that all the information I use in my video scripts has been collated from numerous credible sources, which I will link in the description box if accessible online. I always work my hardest to deliver thoroughly researched and reliable information in my videos, but please always conduct additional, independent research to formulate a thorough understanding of any topic discussed. Additionally, I am dyslexic, and I will mispronounce words throughout this video, sometimes without realising it. This is not ill-intended or stemming from willful ignorance, and I do make the effort to research how to pronounce words before I start filming, but I often misread my phonetic spelling. In light of this, please do not rely on my video for an authoritative or reliable source of how to pronounce certain words.
I noticed the mispronunciation of certain words, but you may rest assured that it doesn't detract from the quality of your videos. I would like to point out that Amunhotep* IV is better remembered as Akhenaton, and that Qin Shih Huangdi was the "First August Emperor of the Qin" ("First Emperor of China" from the Western perspective), not just a member of the Qin dynasty (which collapsed under his successor, because of ministerial interference in the succession). The First Emperor's unification of warring kingdoms into a more centralised Chinese Empire has a lot to do with the rise (on merit, not birth, or family ties) of his first minister (and the first minister's school of thought, Legalism).
Just a few thoughts in support of a video I look forward to re-watching and sharing. In particular with Ashurbanipal, who I suspect will enjoy it even more than I did. ;)
Many thanks for the links to documents on the Burning of the Books, and the Library of Alexandria. Do you have links or references to transcriptions from King Ashurbanipal's library ?
FOOTNOTE
*My spelling, but the Amun in his name refers to the deity, not to the Biblical "Amen". All the more important because the worship of Amun was "abandoned" (officially, as opposed to privately held beliefs) when Akhenaton ("He Who Serves Aton") adopted a name that reflected his new monotheistic reforms (including art and architecture that broke with traditions stretching back an almost unimaginably long way), and restored under Tutankhamun ("Living Image of Amun").
Thank you for sharing your passion with us!
This was FASCINATING -- so, I can cross "prevent the burning of the Library of Alexandria" from my time travel to-do list
I’d add the House of Wisdom of Baghdad to that list as well.
Just make sure you add 'prevent the catholic church from stealing all that knowledge' to the list
Libraries and book stores are among my most favorite places. When they invented a book store with a coffee shop, I was in heaven 🥰❤️☕️📚RIP Boarders Books and Gifts,forever in my heart ❤️
It's so nice to see a man state this. For whatever reason, I know few men who love to read. How awesome that you do. 😊
Semi-regular who is constantly asked about their strong southern American accent, tunes in for, strong English accent…I reckon. :)
Loved the video!! I have a paper on Chinese art history at uni this semester and I'm now intrigued to learn more about the book burning during that period, I'd love to hear you talk about it!♥️
Yes please for the Chinese burning books video!
YES
The Library of Ashurbanipal would have contained a lot of text on writing boards and possibly papyri but only the records on clay tablets have survived the fire and come down to us.
Omg that shirt and jacket combo is perfection. Excited for another video!
♥️♥️
I’m loving these historical videos. Super interesting topic and I love your storytelling ability to make the history more fun to listen to. You’d make an awesome university professor!
Thank you for another informative and engaging video, Cinzia. Your insights, the presentation, authenticity, brilliance and just your own charm are wonderful. They always are.
As someone who would make the library their first port of call whenever we moved to a new place, this is much appreciated. I adore libraries (would live in one if I could) and though I knew bits and pieces of the history, having you put it together and fill the gaping holes in my knowledge was magnificent. I consider these 17+ minutes very well spent. Thank you. You are a star. ❤
Thank you so much for such a lovely comment, I seriously appreciate it!
@@CinziaDuBois ❤
One of of my dreams is to walk and explore that ancient city (Alexandria), and its famous library, when it was in its heyday. Damn I need a time machine...
Or play Assassin's Creed Origins!
@@nicky_bee I’ll settle for documentary and literature because I have no choice hehe
Binned off Dave Eggers 'The Circle' after a couple of pages because it was pants, tried to read Ovids Metamorphosis but too tired to concentrate properly (Angela Reyner knocks on door...unwanted interruption...tries to get back to reading...Cinzia puts out a video...pleasant interruption....happy to watch before trying again to read armed with a cup of tea.
I appreciate the way you present information, you're informative but also really engaging 😊
♥️♥️
Thank you so much for this video! Libraries and history are so cool ☺
I'm so happy I found your channel! There's something so inviting about your vibe and channel as a whole!
Fascinating! Well organized for such a vast subject. I could listen for hours!
Absoultely loved this! ❤ I love learning about history (any type), and today you covered my greatest loves: books and libraries.
Glad you liked it, Mikki ♥️📚
Really nice introduction on the topic, it makes one want to dive a bit deeper into this - great work!
Really interesting stuff on the burning of the books in China - would love a video about it!
Another well researched and explained video. Love learning from you
Thank you for saying so 😊
I am greatly enjoying these videos. The content is fascinating, and you are a very engaging and almost ridiculously well spoken host. Your enthusiasm is evident! As someone who has to speak on educational matters in a professional capacity, I find this channel not only educational, but also inspiring. I hope others who are passionate about sharing their knowledge take your example - in their own style, of course. There are so many people bemoaning modern technology these days; we ought to remember the web also allows us opportunities like these to learn, to share, and connect with one another. Very well done - thank you! Oh, and greetings from far-off California!
Love it! More about libraries and archiving methods please.
This channel needs so much more views. Sharing this with as many folks as I can 🤞
Wow Honey! You are brilliant! It's important thing for people to get their minds around history and understand the background of it.
I would love to learn more about library history! This was dope :)
Really enjoying your videos!
Fascinating, I like this video, good topic and good presentation. Autoplay actually did something educational and good for once by playing this next! Cheers!
Really love this educational content.
Thrilled to hear it! 😊
Great video!
Thank you👍
Loved the video! I would love a more detailed video about the ancient Chinese book burnings
Thank you for your video.
Wow this is such an exciting topic i enjoyed it so much!!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Such a great vid! Love it
Thank you 😊
Great video! Thanks!
Im a regular and i love your content!!
Thank you!
I think we need a video of you out in the sun because I'm 50/50 on whether or not you are a vampire. Think about it, odd accent, translucently pale, somewhat old fashioned in your outfits, and knows a ton about history.
Fascinating!
Your channel is very cool. Keep making these very interesting videos please.
I'm better informed today because of you. Thank you.💗💗
You are so welcome, Leslie
@@CinziaDuBois You deserve it and more!
mind blowing more on that story please.
It would be amazing to see you do a video on the Akashic records - I have no idea where this comes from or if it’s based in myth or what, but I’d love to get your take on it!
A new subscriber here, absolutely splendid video.
you really have the perfect voice for this topic lol 😭 love it
Thanks!
Thank you so much 😊
Great video and very informative. The idea of “book burning” in the modern sense is probably not consistent with what likely happened to the Alexandria library. In modern times, with essentially an indefinite number of books, book burning is a political statement and reflective of state sponsored censorship. In ancient times, long before the printing press, a written document was very valuable and it’s unlikely anyone burned money, at least intentionally. In an age when so many people were illiterate, censorship via burning old scrolls was pointless. It’s an anachronistic assumption that Alexandria was intentionally burned by a mob.
we know that for several hundred years fanatical bands of christians led mainly by monks roamed the Roman Empire destroying every thing they said was pagan and libraries most certainly were classed as pagan . Leaving aside the Alexandria case we know that next to no libraries survived from a culture rich in libraries and there is only one guilty party = the christian religion , just like there monotheist brother's in islam today who all so destroy everything they see as non islamic
@@karfomachet7265 I used to believe this myself but there’s simply no evidence to support it. Putting aside that both the Catholic Church and Islamic caliphate promoted arts, literacy and sciences and saw themselves as inheritors and custodians of the legacy of the Roman empire - there’s simply no evidence that either religion in the post Roman period went on a book burning crusade. Accusations to that effect came long after when it supposedly happened by sources wi5 an ax to grind to say the least. Cicero, Livy, Plutarch etc not only survived this supposed anti- Pagan rampage, they were revived and repopularized by . . . The Catholic Church and Islamic caliphate .
@@nathanhearn356 of course there is no evidence it all got burned down .What survived did so by going east were it was rediscovered leading to the renaissance . Had those christians been able to destroy all the old knowledge then we most likely would still be in the christian induced dark ages . Likewise had Julian not been killed we would most likely be on mars now , thats how much christianity has harmed human society and culture .
@@nathanhearn356 no evidence ??? have who not read about the Nag Hamadi library which only survived by being hidden . Here is direct evidence of christians destroying knowledge , imagine how many other library's that were not hidden ???
Took me a little time to understand who you were taking about. I guess some pronunciations of ancient kings have changed from the way my professors said them back in the 1970s. One point about ancient libraries which I'm sure you will cover is the problem of medium, such as the Ptolemies having a monopoly on papyrus and preventing its export so Pergamon had to invent parchment. Hope you continue this series.
Yep. As we know the library was burned, renewed, decreased and expanded several times during history. The history of Alexandria was long and so its long journey also contained several series of unlucky coincidences. For example, Julius Caesar's soldiers accidentally set fire to the warehouses of the library because they thought that these buildings were army barracks. Or when, during the reign of Emperor Theodosius II, a group of rebels destroyed Serapeion during the religious riot that broke out between several Christian sects and Jews, and which ended in the horrible death of Hypatia. But eventually, the library of Museion was no longer renovated and refilled because the cultural focus had already moved out from Egypt.
You can do a video specifically on the book burning in China, OR make a video on the reason for book burning in general for different periods. That could also be interesting.
Please do make a Burning of the Books video.
Very interesting! You deserve more views and likes :)
Glad you think so!
If you haven't done so already, I'd love a video on the myth of Atlantis
If I remember correctly, Ashurbanipal sent envoys to confiscate what he wanted from other libraries and left THEM copies. Though, I may be mistaken… Maybe he just had the books yoinked!
Who said the Chinese don’t innovate. Not only did they invent paper and gun powder, they invented book-burning. Thousands of years later and they’re still very good at that.
Yeas! I am huge history amd bookmerd so you can imagine how interesting is to me :) i also have a special intereat in China so I wouldn't say no to a specific video on Chinese book burnings ;)
I keep drifting away thinking....imagine if the burning of the library in Alexandria was a myth in such way, they still destroyed it, but they found what was stored in it, all the scrolls etc., etc., the managed to save it all!
I wonder what the effect would be....with such a find? 😳😲🤨🤔
Either the government would hide the information or an advancement in our knowledge about the ancient world is my guess
I had heard that the Library of Alexandria forcibly searched ships for books to copy, but not that they kept the originals-that would be infuriating!!
Always find your vids interesting. Did notice a peculiarity or two, however. "Qin" (as in the dynasty): The "Q" in Pinyin stands for a sound more like "ch" than "k." So, "Chin," rather than "Kin." Wikipedia's Pinyin entry describes it more technically: (IPA) [tɕʰ] (like the "ch y" combination in) "pun[ch y]ourself" The Qin Dynasty--the privilege of being one of the first--gave its name to the country, "China."
I came to the comments to look for this. Thanks for the concise explanation.
I thought so! I thought I'd been taught wrong all these years, but thank you for confirming that I was correct in my pronunciation of Qin.
Do you have a ‘451’ kit that you can grab when you have to evacuate?
I find this video very fascinating. Love the energy. However as a non-english native I had to watch more than once to understand all of it. Sometimes the speed is a bit too fast for me 😉
If you go to the settings ,looks like a knob or a wheel,you can change the speed,! Yes you can
@@lorainemacdonald517 So simple, yet brilliant. Thanks Loraine:)
Got too excited and my post got rejected. But I love the 10,000. My post about how I love books was great. *sad* *group hug with you and some books*
First I love your video someone intelligent not getting famous for acting dumb
Small tiny correction probably others pointed it out
Ugarit is located in Lebanon, not Syria. Sure still northern Levant but still :D
Thank you!
Omg we have the same edition of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Have you seen the mini series? If so, what did you think of it?
I was wondering, How many books do you read in 1 year?
Here’s my vote for the “Chinese burning of the books” video.
It burned around the same time the cult of Zeus appeared and rewrote history to include zeus in historic events. I doubt the cult would allow contradictory documents to exist.
Burning of the books: Chinese Fahrenheit 451
I thought Qin was pronounced more like "Chin"... Has everyone been lying to me?
Btw, I love your videos Cinzia. You do a wonderful job!
You're correct, pronounced almost like "chin?"
👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
If you search up ‘history for atheists and library of Alexandria’ on youtube, Tim o'neill does a good job explaining what happened to the library of Alexandria. The library no longer existed by the time of Theodosius as you say. You have to remember that Alexandria suffered a Tsunami which would have potentially destroyed the library by the 4th century if it even still existed then. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who had been to Egypt in the mid 4th century, speaks of the library in the past tense.
Actually no, the daughter library of Alexandria was still in existence by the time of of Theodosius. The library was protected Serapeum up to the 4th century, but eye witness accounts record how it was destroyed by Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria under the imperial decree of Theodosius to wipe out all vestiges of paganism. Aphthonius visited the Serapeum before 391 and wrote of its destruction “On the inner side of the colonnade were built rooms, some which served as bookstores and were open to those who devoted their life to the cause of learning. It was these study rooms that exalted the city to be the first in philosophy. Some other rooms were set up for the worship of the old gods.” (Progymnasmata).
And recent scholarship suggest that there was no major damage caused by an earthquake and possible tsunami during this time:
pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/srl/article-abstract/91/5/2662/587728/Was-Alexandria-Egypt-Destroyed-in-A-D-365-A-Famous?redirectedFrom=fulltext
@@CinziaDuBois
You’re wrong about that. None of the five accounts of the destruction of the serapeum mention the destruction of any kind of library. This includes the account of the pagan writer Eunapius who also says nothing about any kind of library being destroyed, which is a very strange thing to omit since Eunapius was vehemently anti-Christian so you would thing he would make a big deal about it. Like I said, you should search up history for atheists - Library of Alexandria. Tim O’Neill goes into great detail. You’re also mistaken about why the serapeum was destroyed in the first place. It was destroyed because of bunch of terrorist pagans used it as a base to kidnap and torture Christians. The people in Alexandria appealed to Theodosius who ordered that pagan killers be spared, but that temple be destroyed so as not to be the cause of violent resistance again.
Also your evidence proves me right. Aphthonius visited the Serapeum in 315AD yet even then he speaks of the books there in the PAST TENSE, so they were no longer there even by his time.
my Asian self laughed so hard hearing about China being the one of the first to censor books. Because of course that's totally our culture.
So the movie Agora isn't true?
Isn't "library" simply defined as a collection of books?
No because bookshops aren’t libraries despite being a collection of books. The intention of the collection of a form of material (not always books) is what constitutes its library status
No telling what would have happened to these artifacts if left to the devices of modern Iraqi regimes. Call it antiquity theft if you're inclined, I thank God and the formidable people in unforgiving environments around the world, who salvaged and retrieved them.
I kinda love you.
Your skin tone is whiter than mine, my friends call me Casper the friendly ghost
Qin is pronounced more like "Cheen"
And calm it as European civilization. Cama will judge us all
Is just me or did your voice get deeper? Cool, but curious.
Yes. It's because we're humans - our voices fluctuate day in and day out. When you're more excited and talking quickly, your voice will go higher in tone, when you're more serious or sad and speak slower, your voice will be lower. Your voice changes when you're unwell, your voice tonality changes when you're tired.
Or, because you'd rather hear something less nuanced and not based on facts: yes, it's lower because [insert your own wild theory here, whatever makes you feel better about yourself]
@@CinziaDuBois Didn't mean of offend. I like it.
My apologies, I just get this comment a lot and it's very difficult to tell the difference between people doing it to wind me up or not.
That voice
Lady of the Library, why are You so beautiful?
Wait Carl Sagan said the library of Alexandria was burned by Christian fanatics?
Brief
Your pronunciation of quite a lot of historical names is highly confusing lol. You place emphasis on certain syllables in a way I have never heard anyone use before!
Yeah, it's dyslexia
@@CinziaDuBois Ah, no offence intended. I could still figure out who you meant thankfully but it just took me a second or two!
Where does the events of the movie Agora, fit in with the historical record? Alleging that the library of Alexandria being burnt in the 400's ce by Christians?
Fascinating!
Glad you thought so 😊