# Biblical Libraries

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BIBLICAL LIBRARIES
A SKETCH OF LIBRARY HISTORY
FROM 3400 B.C. TO A.D. 150
BY
Ernest Cushing Richardson
LIBRARIAN OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Princeton University Press
Princeton
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1914
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Copyright, 1914, by
Princeton University Press
Published October, 1914
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PREFACE
A good deal of material on the early history of libraries has been gathered by the author of this essay during the last twenty-five years. This material is not yet ripe for systematic publication and the rapidly growing body of results from recent excavation suggests that it will be long before it is. Essays, addresses, and encyclopedia articles have however been prepared out of this material from time to time for various occasions and audiences and it has seemed worth while, in default of something better, to shape these in such way as to form a general survey or first orientation of the matter, and to publish in this form, in spite of the fact that they are incomplete as to material and have been prepared for very different audiences and in very different ​perspectives. Such value as they have lies chiefly in the fact that those who could do the work better do not do it at all.
Essays on Antediluvian Libraries, Medieval Libraries, Some Old Egyptian Librarians, etc., have been previously published without any attempt at complete outline of the subjects, but the present series commencing with "The Beginnings of Libraries" (1914) and followed by this volume on "Biblical Libraries," aims slightly to reshape the material of each essay so as to make of it an outline map or sketch of the whole period with which it has to do, without however attempting to fill in the detail of anything but the particular subject or to radically change the method and general style appropriate to the occasion for which it was written. The Beginnings of Libraries covered the legendary, prehistoric, and primitive period, taking to perhaps 3400 B.C. Biblical Libraries takes up the matter at ​this point and carries over into the beginning of the Christian era.
Previous volumes have on the whole been received in the spirit in which they were issued—as unpretentious essays, spreading a wide net and gathering in, together with a good deal of small fry, a considerable haul of real food—for those who like the kind of food. A few however of those who have been good enough to read or at least glance at one or an other of these essays have missed the point of them and gratitude seems to require that some effort should be made to explain. Two or three e.g. have been struck by what has seemed to them the earnest seriousness with which certain matters have been treated and one has even gone so far as to reproach the writer with "conscientious scholarship." Now to have conscientious scholarship is a high ambition but to enjoy the reputation of it on false pretenses is to prove one not a ​conscientious scholar. It seems necessary therefore to say that in setting down things which are absurd on their faces the writer has not always thought it necessary to say that they seemed absurd to him e.g. he does not really believe that Adam actually wrote any of the books ascribed to him.
Again a failure to make clear in the previous volumes that the references to secondary sources were not references to these as authorities but as secondary led a few to the impression that these represented the writer's own sources. It may therefore be explained that most of the researches underlying these essays have been conducted according to the strictest canons of modern method as to sources. Even translations were, and are here, for the most part, used as guides not authorities, although in a plentiful lack of exact knowledge of the Egyptian and Babylonian languages, little attempt has been ​made to compete with the translations of specialists in these languages. Even here, however, thanks to transliterations and the pictorial factor of the Hieroglyphic writing one is able often to control to a certain extent translations where these conflict. Use of and reference to secondary sources are, it is believed, according to correct method for an essay of this sort. References are used only sparingly and chiefly for emphasis or to acknowledge the borrowing of some specially pointed phrase or to indicate that by exception a secondary source is used at this point because the original is not easily accessible. Often they are simply elementary guides for readers to farther reading and study.
Ernest Cushing Richardson.
Princeton, New Jersey September 1914
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CONTENTS
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ILLUSTRATIONS
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