PAPYRUS INSCRIBED IN THE HIERATIC CHARACTER WITH AN EGYPTIAN ROMANCE AND BEARING THE NAMES OF ANTEF, ELEVENTH DYNASTY, ABOUT B.C. 2600, AND THOTHMES III, EIGHTEENTH DYNASTY, ABOUT B.C. 1600.

JEAN MIELOT, A FAMOUS SCHOLAR AND CALIGRAPHER OF THE MIDDLE AGES

Portrait taken from a MS. in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. This picture is interesting as showing how books were produced until the invention of printing.

Photo: Rischgitz Collection.

evolved, certainly as early as the eighth century B.C. In his Greek literature Jevons says that reading and writing were taught in Greece as early as 500 B.C., in which year there were boys' schools in the island of Chios, and it was generally regarded as shameful not to be able to write and read. Jevons, however, suggests that education in Greece at this time was usually only enough to make a man capable of keeping accounts and of writing to his friends, and that there is no reason to suppose that the Greeks in this early age had acquired the habit of reading books. The Greek public reciters, who flourished before writing became common, were called "rhapsodists," and their custom was to entertain audiences in the open air with a complete recital of the Homeric epics. The rhapsodists travelled from town to town like a modern theatrical company on tour, and the poems and legends that they learned by heart were the stock-in-trade that secured them a living.

Alexandria succeeded Athens as the capital of Greek culture, and the Ptolemies, who were enthusiastic book-collectors, endeavoured to collect every available copy of the great Greek masterpieces. There were 700,000 Greek books1 in the library at Alexandria, which was partly burnt by Julius Cæsar in the year 48 B.C. To-day, nearly 2,000 years later, there are only four million books in the British Museum Library. On the shelves at Alexandria, the reader found the Iliad and the Odyssey, Plato's Republic, the writings of Xenophon and Herodotus, the plays of Euripedes, Sophocles, Eschylus, and Aristophanes, Euclid's Geometry, and many books on mathematics and science which have been entirely lost. It is a remarkable fact that, though the ancients, and particularly the Romans, were expert road makers, working according to scientific plans, there is in existence no treatise on the ancient art of road-making nor on any other branch of ancient engineering. Such books

Not 700,000 separate works, but that number of volumes. The library was also a publishing concern, where books were manifolded.

must have been in existence, but they have completely disap

peared.

The Library at Alexandria

The books in the library at Alexandria were very different things from the books in the British Museum. Most of them were written on papyrus, a material made from the pith of an Egyptian reed, and a few were written on parchment, the use of which had been discovered about a hundred years before the Alexandria library was set on fire. The papyrus book looked very much like a modern map. The matter was written on one side only, and the papyrus was fastened to a wooden roller, round which it was rolled. Some of these rolls were very long, but the usual habit was to make them comparatively short. The papyrus was generally about a foot in width. The book was written in a series of narrow columns running the full length of the roll, and the columns were from two to three and a half inches, with lines in red ruled between them. Homer's Iliad would probably have been written on at least twenty-four different rolls, and there were many copies of the same work in the Alexandria library, so that the actual number of individual books was very much less than the number of rolls. After the book had been written on the papyrus by the scribe, it was ornamented and embellished by a craftsman, who was the prototype of the modern book illustrator. Then the binders received the manuscript, and their business was to cut the margins and smooth the parchment or papyrus. The scroll was then fixed to a wooden roller, and the knobs at the end of the rollers were often decorated with metal ornaments. The manuscripts were written with reed pens in ink made of lamp-black and gum. The back of the book was dyed with saffron, and the rolls were usually wrapped in parchment cases, dyed purple or yellow.

The scribes were, also, the earliest booksellers. They would borrow a manuscript, possibly for a fee, laboriously copy it on

their papyrus scrolls and sell the copies. There were many of these scribe-booksellers dwelling in Athens fifty years before the birth of Christ. They had their shops in the market-places, and by the time of Alexander the Great the book-selling trade had become an established institution. The ancient bookseller was not always particularly honest, and it was a common practice to give a modern manuscript the appearance of a rare antique by burying it in a sack of grain until the colour had changed and the papyrus had become worm-eaten.

§ 3

It was in the third century before Christ that Alexandria under the incentive of Ptolemy Philadelphus, and his great librarian and publisher Callimachus, became the centre of Greek literary activity, and about the same time Roman writers began to create original work in the manner of the Athenians. Perhaps the most famous literary achievement at the beginning of Alexandria's literary history was the translation of the Old Testament into Greek in the version that is known as the Septuagint. According to tradition the translation was made by seventy learned Jewish Rabbis. The fact that the papyrus was manufactured in Egypt helped to give Alexandria its importance as a book-producing centre, and its geographical position kept it, to a large extent, outside the constant wars that devastated so large a part of the ancient world. Staffs of expert copyists worked in the great Alexandrian library under the supervision of authoritative scholars, and the copies they made were distributed throughout the world by the Alexandria booksellers. The prominent literary position of Alexandria continued long after its conquest by the Romans and until Greek ceased to be the fashionable language of the ancient world. Even as late as the fifth century A.D. Alexandria was a centre of culture and learning, a fact which Charles Kingsley has employed with dramatic effect in his novel Hypatia.

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