The latest bedside readings have been both related to the Mediterranean area; two very interesting little books: Libraries in the Ancient World by Lionel Casson. It charts the growth of that wonderful institution, libraries, through ancient Middle East, Greece, and Rome. The fabled library of Alexandria is of course mentioned (it was really more of a think tank, a research institute funded by the thick purse of the Ptolemaic rulers, and the library was just the most visible manifestation of it).
To the library of Alexandria we owe alphabetic ordering, the earliest known (surviving) work is a list of rare (Greek?) words by a certain Zenodotus. Many of the well-known figures of Greek (Hellenistic) science was actually head librarians in Alexandria, for example Erathostenes who managed to compute the circumference of Earth within few percentages, by the simple use of trigonometry and sunlight (by a deep well in Syene, modern day Aswan), all this about 200 BCE...
One funny thing to remember about the ancient libraries is of course that they didn't have books as we know them: flat paper slabs bound together. Instead, they had scrolls: mostly made out of papyrus, fewer out of parchment. (In really ancient times, clay tablets.)
Only in later Roman times did codices start to emerge, which resembled modern books in shape, but the material was parchment, carefully prepared calf skin. Parchment of course (the English spelling being unhelpful: in other European languages it is more like "pergament") being the writing material from the rich little kingdom of Pergamon (also known as Pergamum). Since the Egyptians had a nice little natural monopoly to papyrus (the papyrus plant grows well only in the Nile Valley), parchment was a competitor (but an expensive one) to papyrus.
(If you want to see the altar of Pergamon (that's a 1:1 partial reconstruction, partially real!), the market of Miletos, and the Gates of Ishtar of from Babylon, go to the Musee Inseln in Berlin, and the Pergamon Museum. For some odd reason, German archaeologists have always been very active in Turkey, Persia, and Mesopotamia.)
The Libraries book ends at the beginning of Middle Ages. Personally I would have liked if it had gone into some detail about how the Arab culture, then at its height, saved much of the scientific literature of the ancient Mediterranean world, while Rome (at least the Western half) descended into the "dark centuries". But hey, this means that I have to find a new book about that...
The second book was Beyond the Edge of the Sea by Mauricio Obregón. The subtitle is longish but descriptive: Sailing with Jason and the Argonauts, Ulyssses, the Vikings, and Other Explorers of the Ancient World. Most of the book consists of tracing the travels of J&a and O, based on the geographical descriptions in Homer and other works, all around Mediterranean and the Black Sea. That is not all, though: as promised, the Vikings' travels (the most famous of course being the Vinland). The vast oceaning voyages of the Polynesians and the navigational skills of Arabs are briefly touched upon.
Posted by jhi at May 17, 2002 11:21 AM
