Part 2
There are several classes of alleged libraries, which if they have real existence must necessarily precede all others. These include the libraries of the gods, animal or plant libraries, Preadamite and Coadamite libraries and the alleged libraries of the antediluvian patriarchs. All of these may be included under the term antediluvian and the period subdivided chronologically into Adamite or Patriarchal, Preadamite, Prehuman (plant and animal libraries) and Precosmic (libraries of the gods)!
There is a considerable literature on the subject of antediluvian libraries (cf. Schmidt, Bibliothekswissenschaft, 1840, p. 67; Richardson in Library Journal, 15, 1890, pp. 40-44), but this term has been, until recently, used to include mainly libraries which were alleged to have existed from Adam to Noah. Modern explorations in comparative psychology on the one hand and comparative mythology on the other have however now brought to light many potential or alleged libraries from before Adam—not forgetting that this first ancestor of ours has quite recently been dated some sixty million years before the Christian era!
§ 6. _Libraries of the gods_
The oldest of all alleged libraries are the libraries of the gods.
Almost all the great god families, Indian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Scandinavian, had their own book-collections, so it is said. According to several religions there were book-collections before the creation of man; the Talmud has it that there was one before the creation of the world, the Vedas say that collections existed before even the Creator created himself, and the Koran maintains that such a collection co-existed from eternity with the uncreated God. It is obviously idle to try to trace libraries back farther than this.
Brahma, Odin, Thoth, and substantially all the creator gods who are described in terms of knowledge or words, are each sometimes in effect looked on by the mythologists as himself an incarnate library and sometimes even the books of which he is composed are specified.
On the other hand, by many all creation was looked on as a library. To the ancient Babylonians the stars of heaven were themselves books in which could be read the secrets of heaven and earth and the destiny of mankind. The whole firmament was thus a library of celestial tablets—tablets of destiny or tablets of wisdom from the “house of wisdom”, which was before creation, or carried upon the breast of the world ruler. “The Zodiac forms the Book of Revelation proper ... the fixed stars ... the commentary on the margin” (cf. Jeremias. Art. _Book of Life_, in: Hastings ERE.)
This belief, developed into the so-called science of astrology, had a prodigious influence even on the political history of mankind through its effect on the decisions and acts of kings. The conviction that the will of the gods as to future events was here written down, stored up and might be read, was at times the controlling factor in the shaping of human events.
Two of the most famous libraries of the gods are those of Brahma and of Odin. The books of Thoth, equally or more famous, belong to a somewhat different class. Brahma’s library contained or was the Vedas—themselves in fact a large collection of various works. These were, it is alleged, preserved in the memory of the omniscient Brahma and at the beginning of this present age they were, in the modern language of an ancient Sanskrit writer, Kalkuka Bhatta “drawn out”. Attention has been called to the fact that this library was represented as a classified library with notation founded on the points of the compass!
“From the eastern mouth of Brahma ... issued ... the rich verses.... From his southern mouth ... the yajash verses.... From the western mouth ... the saman verses and the metics.... From the northern mouth of Vedas (Brahma) was manifested the entire Atharvana” (Muir. 3:12). This library was, it should be noticed, quite up to date in having the special collections kept in separate rooms with separate exits. It was also, it appears, not a mere reference library but books were issued for outside use.
Brahma’s library was represented in various other forms e.g., as the milk of the cow goddess or the juice of the Soma plant, and in the same way Odin’s collection of words or knowledge is represented in various forms e.g., as the milk of the goat Heidrun, the water of the fountain of memory, the apples of Iduna, which were the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the blood of the wise Kvaser.
That which best identifies the mead, which is the source of the immortality of the gods themselves and without which they languish and die, with books, is the story of Kvaser. Kvaser was the wisest of all the gods (Fooling of Gylfe 54). The dwarfs put him to death and gave out that he had drowned himself in his own wisdom, but in fact they slew him for this wisdom, which was his blood. This was drawn off into a kettle called Odrörer (“that which moves the mind”) and mixed with honey was most carefully kept in jars. Drinking out of these jars makes an ordinary man “a poet and man of knowledge” but the mead is most jealously kept to renew the life of gods and poets (Brage’s talk 3 sq.) and grudged to mortals. Once Odin, hard pressed in flight, let fall a few drops of this essence of knowledge, and this scanty supply eagerly caught up by mortals produced the rabble of bad poets.
This collection of jar-fulls of knowledge was an obvious library and recalls the fact that almost all the mythologers represent books or knowledge as food or drink, kept in jars. It is not wholly excluded that this great series of myths came from the earliest practice of keeping clay tablets or papyrus rolls in clay jars, precisely similar to the jars in which wine, oil and grain were kept in some treasure houses. But however that may be the soma of India, the haoma of Persia, as well as the Scandinavian mead and the ambrosia and nectar of classical times, were all looked on as concrete knowledge and as such the food and drink of the spiritual or immortal life—a very reasonable philosophy.
These libraries of the gods should not be confused with real collections of books of alleged superhuman authorship like the books of the Old Testament, which are not claimed by any to have been written before 1200 or 1500 B.C., or the collections of actual oracles delivered at Delphis, Dodona or other shrines, or even with the forged oracles of Greece, or the apocryphal Jewish and Christian books. All these were actual historical book collections and the question whether authorship was really superhuman or not is indifferent at this point which has to do with the libraries which the gods are alleged to have had for themselves before man was.
§ 7. _Animal and plant libraries?_
The modern psychologists, by the science which they call comparative psychology, have gradually been robbing humanity of much that it used to plume itself upon as its own unique possession. Among the last strongholds to yield were reason and language, and the defenders of these, although retreating, are hardly yet put to rout. Even if the articulate speech of the parrot and the jackdaw is only “imitation”, and the alleged language of the apes a delusion, still it is something of an open question whether the sounds and gestures which animals use with one another are not really of the nature of language. The fox who doubles on his track in order to lead the dogs on a false scent is getting very close to language in a rudimentary sense, and the dog who sits up or barks for food or wags his tail to express good will, perhaps nearer still.
It is a long step, however, from even developed oral and gesture language to record, and it is still generally denied that among the traits of our kinship with the beasts any evidence has been discovered of what can be called record keeping. If this were true, then it would seem to follow that the animal ceased to be animal and became man precisely when he invented and began to practice record keeping—in short that libraries mark the very beginning of the human race!
On the other hand, however, it cannot be ignored that the psychologists are publishing monographs on the arithmetic of animals and the memory for facts among animals, and scores of other monographs on the minds of animals. There are those too who claim that the dog even marks the place where he caches his surplus of bones, and certainly the bringing home of a dead woodchuck, in order to show his master what he has done, comes very close to that keeping and exhibiting of human trophies which is recognized as among the beginnings of “handwriting”. If it is true that the animals do make conscious marks to guide them back to hidden objects, or even that they do have memory for facts, which is true memory, then possibly the beginnings at least of memory libraries and perhaps of external records must in the future be sought in the animal world. The ancient Egyptians, of course, found it there when they made the writing ape author, owner, and keeper of books. Perhaps after six thousand years modern psychology is about to catch up with this idea! Whether or not future psychology discovers anything like actual record collections and memory libraries among the animals, it remains true that the study of comparative psychology does lead into the beginnings of memory and helps therefore to the study of the real nature of human memory-books and memory libraries, while again it leads into the question of the nature of gesture language, and gesture is the own father of hand-written books. When true libraries have been discovered among animals it will be time enough to take up the question of plant libraries. Nevertheless it may be said that the question of “memory” among plants is seriously discussed and plants may perhaps receive impression as sensitively as animals. It is a little figurative to say that a tree which carries in itself a hundred annual records of its growth is a library in the sense of a public record office which keeps the annals of a nation’s growth for a like period. There is however a certain analogy which the discussions of natural records and object writing suggests may even have some slight germ of scientific interest. Of course where there is memory there may be groups of memorized records which would be collections of very rudimentary “Books”, but so far the weight of evidence seems to be against the existence even in animals, let alone plants, of that kind of memory which retains permanently fixed forms of expression. Sub-human libraries may therefore be for the present left to the fabulists and put with apocryphal, legendary and mythological libraries outside the pale of the real or historical libraries.
§ 8. _Preadamite libraries_
Whatever psychologists and mythologists may have to say about libraries before the existence of the human race, there seems to be a surprising consensus of opinion that book collections must have started at latest very soon after man himself. A great number of such libraries are claimed by the ancients for the period between Adam and Noah, and if there were human beings before Adam, as many say, it is likely that there were at least memory libraries, for, as will be seen later in discussing memory libraries, these are almost inseparable from human nature. And further than this it appears from those very same sources, which so fluently allege and describe the library of Adam, that the books of Adam’s library represent such an advanced stage in the evolution of handwritten records as to necessitate a long library history previous to his time. These books included e.g., it is said, inscriptions cut in stone, and such inscriptions imply centuries if not tens of centuries of knot and other mnemonic forms of writing, preceding. Therefore if Adam’s library was as described in its literature, there must have been, for a long time before, Preadamite libraries!
Moreover if those writers on the Preadamites are correct who hold that Adam was the father of the Caucasian race only, (M’Causland. Adam p. 282), and that Mongols and negroes at least (M’Causland. Babel p. 277) were already existing when Adam was created, then of course all negro or Mongol libraries are Preadamite survivals! It is true that such writers represent culture, and by implication libraries, to have been introduced to the Mongols from the Adamite line and by Cain, but if premises are granted, the inference is complete, that primitive libraries of all kinds at least up to the time of phonetic records were Preadamite in origin and were shared by Mongol and negro races as well as by the Caucasian Adamites! For that matter some of these ancient, if not veracious sources assert that Adam was the inventor of the alphabet, which makes the matter even clearer, throwing even syllabic written libraries, not to mention ideographic libraries, back into the Preadamite period!
For those who care to follow up this fruitful but not profitable subject, some guide to the extensive literature on the Preadamites will be given farther along.
§ 9. _Adamite and Patriarchal libraries before the Flood_
The very considerable literature on Antediluvian libraries which has been already mentioned is, in general, confined chiefly to the line of the patriarchs, whom the various writers on the Preadamites often describe as Adamites to distinguish thus the patriarchal or Caucasian line from its Mongolian and negro contemporaries—Adam, Cain, Abel, Seth, Noah, Ham, etc.
According to some of these veracious historians, on the seventh day of the first month of the first year Jehovah wrote a work on the creation in several volumes, primarily to teach Adam the alphabet, and secondarily, to preserve the record of the creation. This seems to have formed Adam’s entire library, until the fall. After this, however, Jehovah published a new edition of this work in one volume on stone, and added another work on another stone. These were placed by him in a “Beth” or “House” on a mount east of the Garden of Eden, where were also the Cherubim. This was according to them the first library building, and by inference the Cherubim were the first librarians. This library was bequeathed by Adam to Seth and by Seth to Enoch. It formed a part of the library of Noah, and was consulted by Moses, who incorporated, it is alleged, from it the Elohistic and Jehovistic documents into Genesis.
The libraries of Cain, Seth, Enoch and Ham were also famous among these old chroniclers—Seth’s for its astrological and astronomical works, and Ham’s for the heretical works, which he was not allowed to take into the ark with him.
Far the most famous however of all these libraries is the library of Noah. It contained that of Adam, with very many additions. At the time of the flood Noah was commanded to bury his books—“the earliest, middle, and recent”—in a pit dug at Sippara—and from this it appears that the library must have been very large since there was room in the ark for all kinds of animals, but not enough for the books.
After the flood this library was dug up by Noah, and preserved in his Beth at Nisibis, or, according to Berosus, was dug up by the sons of Noah, after their father had been translated, and formed the nucleus of the Babylonian libraries. A legend of the digging up of the library still exists, it is said, on the spot, where re-excavations are now going on.
The Hindu account of this library (Sir William Jones’ works. I, 288) has an interesting variation. It states that the flood came because, the sacred books having been stolen away, men had become wicked. After the deluge Vishnu slew the thief, and restored the books to Noah.
If Cassianus may be believed, however, these buried books were not all of Noah’s library since he took with him into the Ark at least a select collection, presumably for use on the voyage.
Nor were these the only libraries supposed to have been in existence when the flood came, for the Egyptian priests told Solon of many libraries which were destroyed by it. One rather wonders at this too, for in those days of course they were apt to make their books fire and water proof (rather than the buildings as now) and the flood should not have hurt them, but if they were in fact destroyed it simply shows that they were made of papyrus, leather or unbaked clay!
These writers not only tell us in detail about many of the books which Noah must have had in his library, but even in some cases give us a list of the books themselves. We find thus e.g. that the library must have contained the following works at least by Adam (a) “De nominibus animantium”, (b) a census report of the Garden of Eden, which included all living things, (c) The 92d psalm, (d) A poem on the creation of Eve, and various other works, all, it is to be presumed, written after the fall; for the very same authentic chroniclers who ascribe these works to Adam declare that he was born at three o’clock, sinned at eleven, was “damnatus” at twelve of one day and driven out of Eden early next morning—which left little time for literary work on his part, one may suppose, while in Eden.
The library must have contained also, if our sources are correct, works by Eve (“conversation with the serpent”), Cain, Seth, Enos, Enoch, Methuselah and others, and various works by Noah himself, including his history of the world to his own time, written before the flood and published in two editions, one on wood and one on stone.
The surviving samples of these alleged works are not calculated to make one regret anything about the deluge so much as its failure to be more thorough. Take e.g. Adam’s poems on the creation of Eve. Imagine Noah’s sons, “In the Springtime, when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thought of love”, drawing out a tablet or two of this poem for inspiration and reading how calmly the new bride is invited by Adam to “shake hands and kiss him”!
The efforts to date the library of Adam have been various. A _terminus ad quem_ is offered by Berosus, who asserts that the capital of the world before the Flood was named “The Library” or the “Book All”. He puts this at 250,000 years B.C., but this of course implies considerable development between Adam and the time when the world was populous enough to need a capital at all. There is, therefore, no necessary conflict between the veracious Berosus and the veracious modern historians of science, who place the _terminus a quo_ at sixty million years ago. There is, however, considerable discrepancy between even the later of these two on the one hand and the very earliest of the one hundred and forty different dates between 3483 and 6984 B.C. actually assigned by more timid historians of the beginnings of Adamic civilization. As sober historians are bound to confess that at best the historical evidence for some 243,016 years on the one hand and 59,748,087 or so years on the other of Berosus’ date is not wholly continuous and 6984 B.C. may be regarded as about the earliest exact date known to have been ventured for Adamite libraries.
It hardly needs to be added that all these alleged patriarchal books and libraries are apocryphal although many of them have a respectable antiquity of more than two thousand years and most of them belong either to pre-Christian, early Christian or Mohammedan times. They have been by no means without their influence on human thought and on the actions of those who believed their statements to be historical truth. They are therefore not to be ignored in reckoning the influences which have shaped library development.
§ 10. _Prehistoric and historic libraries_
Leaving aside, however, all kinds of imaginary libraries, mythological, fabulous, legendary or apocryphal, we still have for real human libraries a very respectable historical and prehistorical antiquity.
This long period may be divided into prehistoric and historic or beginnings and later history—the prehistoric period or period of beginnings being understood to be the time before chronological record by years, or before the time of abundant and decipherable hand-written records.
On the whole, the term “beginnings”, is better for the early periods than the term “prehistoric period”. “Beginnings” in this point of view differs from “prehistoric period” simply in overlapping a very little the shifting and uncertain borderland between the old prehistoric and historic, carrying over just far enough onto the firm land of annual chronological history to insure a safe footing in the field where written records begin to abound.
In the case of books and libraries this line of division is most clearly made at the invention of phonetic writing, and this seems to correspond pretty well in time with the point of abundant written sources and of definite chronological data in the general history of mankind.
In terms of relative chronology this line corresponds fairly with the first dynasty of Egypt. No doubt in its real beginnings it shades back far beyond its distinguishable first appearance at this time, but in broad terms it begins for Egyptians and Sumerians about this time, and even if this was not the earliest point of its appearance, it is the point at which the earliest abundant well dated and understood phonetic records are found. What time we shall count this to be in terms of annual chronology depends altogether by about 1000 years on whether we accept the views of the school of chronology illustrated by Breasted’s History or that for which Flinders Petrie is champion and in the same way with the Sumerian where King stands for the reduced chronology. When doctors disagree, prudent conservatism suggests the acceptance of that minimum amount on which both agree, in this case about 3400 years of the pre-Christian era. Without prejudice, therefore, to the possibility that Flinders Petrie may be right in putting the first dynasty a thousand years or so earlier, and remembering that even Breasted accepts a predynastic historic period extending to 4500 B.C. with a strictly historic period from “the earliest fixed date in the history of the world” in 4241 B.C., the division between phonetic records and earlier forms of written documents may be taken as falling at about 3400 B.C. At this time the invention of alphabetic writing was still perhaps two thousand years in the future but writing of some kind, mnemonic and picture writing, had already been practised for perhaps two thousand years or even much more. The beginnings, or the prehistoric, prephonetic and predynastic period of libraries, lie therefore back of the phonetic writing of 3400 B.C.—in picture book libraries, mnemonic libraries, object and memory libraries.
§ 11. _The evolution of record keeping_