Ancient public library discovered in Germany | Hacker News Reader

Ancient public library discovered in Germany

theguardian.com

172 pointswalterbell38 comments

What the article doesn't really clarify: Cologne was a Roman colony. The full name was Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium. "Colonia" means "colony" but it's also the highest tier of recognition Roman cities could have. Cologne was the Eastern-most Roman city of its kind in "Germania".

A side-effect of all of this is that you can't really dig anywhere in Cologne without encountering some Roman artifact or ruins (unless they have already been recovered/destroyed previously).

Since "colonia" originally denoted any Roman outpost established in conquered territory, you can't invoke the word as a singularly significant element of the city name.

Mainz was also part of Germania and is much further East.

The current extent of modern Köln is much wider than that of the Roman city of 20,000 people, so you'd have to dig in very specific places to find Roman artifacts.

The colonia status survives in the name, that's indeed the main significance. There were of course hundreds of coloniae. Some similar, in that the status also gave the town its name today. E.g. Lincoln, England from "Lindum Colonia". Not every outpost in conquered territory was a colonia though. Some were oppida, while others were military outposts

In contrast to CCAA and Augusta Treverorum, Mogontiacum (Mainz) was not a colonia. It was primarily a military post. The main difference is that citizens of a colonia were in fact fully Roman with all the rights and duties. It was also part of a different province - Germania Superior, whereas CCAA was the centre of Germania Inferior.

Mogontiacum (Mainz) is further east than CCAA. One of it's purposes was to secure the Limes, but there was a comfortable buffer between the Limes and the town itself. Further north, the wilderness basically began when you crossed the Rhine at Colonia Ulpia Traiana (Xanten) or in fact CCAA...

You'll find the majority of Roman artifacts in an area roughly a third of the size of medieval Cologne, which itself is basically just the very city centre of Cologne today. However, a lot of digs were made along the roads leading out of Cologne since these were prominent burial sites for rich Romans. These roads follow the old layout until today...

As the other commenter pointed out, the distinction is that citizens of CCAA were citizens of Rome. You're right that Cologne was founded before "colonia" gained its distinctive meaning of status, though, but my statement about Cologne having had that special status (especially compared to e.g. Mainz) is still true nevertheless.

Of course you're also right that modern-day Cologne is bigger than just the Roman center but that's a bit pedantic. The Roman center is of course full of actual ruins (sometimes with medieval ruins on top of them) but artifacts in general (e.g. coins) are still discovered anywhere in the vicinity and especially along the historic roads.

In the Roman city center it's enough of a problem that construction projects tend to be delayed extensively but even outside of it "Roman stuff" is still among the things you might accidentally find by digging, alongside more exciting things like live bombs from WW2 air raids.

EDIT: It's also worth mentioning that there was also a military outpost on the other side of the river in what is now the "Deutz" district.

They didn't mention it, but I'm assuming that no scrolls or actual library knowledge is recoverable from the site?

Whenever I listen to history people talk about all the sources that have been lost, I dream that someday someone will uncover an ancient time capsule under their house and find a pristine collection of lost works that some wise person squirreled away for future generations.

There are probably quite some private storages of old sources. For example I really like to see the restricted libary/archiv of the Vatikan etc. To finally have the proof, that all history was planned by the Illuminati and Aliens...

Or more likely to find out some shocking previously unknown heresy of some saints/popes I did not know anyway.

But more seriously, I think it is unlikely to find a sealed old libary somewhere, which was never mentioned anywhere. The best you can hope for are new scrolla here and there to maybe get new texts of Heraklit or alike, but that would be something. The detailed history of the cultures I am more interested at the moment, celtic druids for example, did not write down their knowledge. So it is unlikely that anything shows up in that regard.

There definitely were Roman public libraries.

Plinus reports that Pollio built the first public library in Rome around 30 BC. He was a patron of Virgil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Asinius_Pollio_(consul_4...

The best approximation we have are the scrolls from Herculanum. They're burnt and charred, but some scientists are working on reading them using CT scans, X-Rays, etc.

If a truly large archive were found then who’s to say that it could survive long enough to be properly studied? There are multiple sources of untouched ancient texts today which aren’t much studied. Off the top of my head, I’ve heard there are chests full of (roughly 1000-year-old) Arabic manuscripts littering the Archbishop’s palace in Toledo, largely untouched due to a lack of interest/number of scholars (and perhaps it is hard to get access). There are also many manuscripts spread out across private basements in Timbuktu, those have survived several threats but who’s to say they will survive more? On the other hand we have hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets, most of which are unread (they had the advantage that when a library burns down the tablets are often fired instead of destroyed). It is hard to decide what is worth prioritising before it has been read.

The one solace we can take is that modern techniques may let us read manuscripts after they have been largely destroyed.

This reminds me of one of the episodes of the documentary series "Endangered Civilizations". From the description[1]:

> 9. The Books Under the Sand

> During the time of trans-Saharan trading, its strategic location along the caravan route enabled it to prosper. It was also the gathering place for the pilgrims from western Sahara as they began their journey to Mecca. It had already attained the position as a prestigious economic and spiritual center. Chinguetti was considered the capital of the "Land of the Moors".

In the episode, they reference and show a lot of very old texts. If I remember correctly, they mostly came from the days when the area was replete with trading activity, around the 12th or 13th century. One of the things they discuss in the episode is the fact that there aren't enough researchers/scientists that are studying them, so many of the books end up being inadvertently destroyed or buried under the always-shifting sands.

While I was watching the show, I remember thinking how awesome it would be to have some sort-of machine that you could point at the ground and be able to just see what's buried deep underfoot, for a wide radius. There's so much history in that area that is just completely inaccessible to us because of the climate and geography.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B079J3NT2V

While not incredibly high-resolution, ground penetrating radar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar) is often used in archaeology to try and find buildings/artifacts without digging anything up.

At least for cuneiform tablets, somewhere I read most of them are utterly boring, mostly inventory and transactions. Maybe you could pass years sifting through it to finally find something valuable.

In the aggregate that data might be incredibly valuable, and valuable in a way that might not be obvious to the gatekeepers of these materials. You never know what people can do with more data until you put it out there.

But neither do the people who might do something with it, which I guess is why there's little funding for such endeavors. You need somebody with the money and conviction to make the gamble.

This is very true. A lot about civilisation can be learned from tax records but just because there are lots of tax records it does not mean they are particularly easy to read or to recognise, even for an expert.

"Dammit Zuel, this is the last time I'll give you grain on credit. Bring the camels next week or else!" scribles another tally onto the tablets.

Give me a civilizations inventory and transaction log and I'll show you their economy, and society.

Here's the cuneiform scans if you're interested:

https://cdli.ucla.edu/?q=news/machine-assisted-translation-c...

That's only the announcement that they will be scanned?

> There are also many manuscripts spread out across private basements in Timbuktu, those have survived several threats but who’s to say they will survive more?

-Which reminds me of Joshua Hammer's brilliant book 'The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu', detailing the efforts to save those collections from the latest threat to them - islamic militants.

The title alone was enough to make me want to read the book, I'll admit.

The scrolls from Herculaneum definitely contain a lot of non extant works, the problem is figuring out how to read them

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/buried-ash-vesuvius-s...

Many texts formerly considered lost since Antiquity, and some that were unknown, have been recovered in the last decades. It's a steady flow, not a sudden outburst.

My personal favorite would be to recover all of the texts by pre-Socratics.

Well ancient and pristinely preserved do not really usually go together... but Villa Papyri, near Pompeii, almost gets you there. The villa's name derives from the discovery of its library, the only surviving library from the Graeco-Roman world that exists in its entirety. It contains over 1,800 papyrus scrolls. The scrolls are coarbonized and rolled up, but each scroll gets very slowly unrolled, read, studied and preserved in the National Library in Naples. With the use of new technologies the analysis of the scrolls is becoming faster and allowing the recover more and more of the works. It’s possible to go visit both the ruins of the villa and the scrolls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_of_the_Papyri

The linked methods don't look promising (yet) https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6895