Oldest Libraries in the World | Hacker News Reader

Oldest Libraries in the World

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These were not libraries in the modern sense so much as private archives, owned and controlled by religious orders or royalty and only available to a select few.

The oldest public library in the world, as far as I know, is the Biblioteca Malatestiana, established in 1447 and owned collectively by the town of Cesena, Italy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malatestiana_Library

In this image you can see the books still chained to their desks to prevent theft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malatestiana_Library#/media/Fi...

EDIT: It's worth mentioning that this is still Cesena's public library. Here's the library's website: http://www.comune.cesena.fc.it/malatestiana. Check out the kid's section ("Ragazzi").

Not all modern libraries are public. Many academic and law libraries are not public. So too there are internal libraries maintained by state organizations, mostly military, which are not public access. But there are all still "libraries".

Of course. I'm just saying that while cultures have been cobbling together collections of stuff since time immemorial -- doubtless there were archives much older than these -- the really interesting innovation didn't occur until the Renaissance. Yet this article doesn't even mention it.

That is one interesting innovation, but not the only interesting innovation: centralized repos of knowledge, scribes used to copy and thus distribute handwritten books, a dedicated focus to literacy(even by just a few privileged individuals)...those are all fascinating.

> Yet this article doesn't even mention it.

Yes because it's specifically about the older ones, and as you say your innovation is from... newer ones.

> These were not libraries in the modern sense so much as private archives

Not sure why you think 'library' implies public? It just means a collection of books. Many libraries today are private, owned by institutions, religious orders, private families, universities, etc. I'd guess the majority are private?

> These were not libraries in the modern sense so much as private archives, owned and controlled by religious orders or royalty and only available to a select few.

Isn't this exactly the modern definition of a library?

> A library is a curated collection of sources of information and similar resources, selected by experts and made accessible to a defined community for reference or borrowing, often in a quiet environment conducive to study. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library

> The library (of Alexandria) flourished until the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE and it was burned down and thousands of scrolls were lost.

This is just one of those legends that won't die. There was, indeed, an accidental fire in 48 BCE, but it didn't destroy everything in one cataclysmic event. The Library was in continuous operation and declined slowly over centuries. It's likely many of the scrolls were dispersed by scholars to other libraries.

We visited the Libraries in Chinguetti, Mauritania and met the custodian in this BBC Reel video [1]

It’s an amazing place. The libraries date from the late 8th century CE, and as you can see, the scientific works were ahead of their time, for the average European at least!

[1] https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p085dgnl/inside-the-abandoned...

edit: typo

> After the fall of Constantinople in 1204 CE

Fall of Constantinople was in the mid 15th century [1] (1453 to be exact), not 1204. Its unfortunate when overall informative articles make basic mistakes which could be easily verified/researched

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople

It was also sacked in 1204, which what the site refers to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Constantinople

Interesting, thank you. I had no idea. Especially since it was done by the Christian crusaders themselves.

I guess the article makes no distinction between a Sacking and a Fall.

Sack, Fall, Conquer, they pretty much amount to the same thing. Maybe the article should have used the term "Sack", but then if you google around it's also known as the "Fall" or the "Siege".

A sack in this case would be different because in the end it was still controlled by Christiandom, as opposed to the Fall when it switched to being controlled by the Ottomans. I think these small details do matter in this case, but maybe its just me.

Before the 1204 sacking it was controlled by Greek speaking Eastern Orthodox christianity and afterwards it was rued by western catholic christians with a Latin mass and a pretty fundamentally different culture. Its known as the Latin Empire and lasted about 70 years before one of the surviving remnant parts of the Byzantine empire managed to recapture the city. So while it was not The Fall Of Constantinople it was certainly A fall of Constantinople.

Having checked various dictionaries, I'm certain it doesn't matter who, religion, ethnicity or race-wise, is on the dispensing or receiving end of a sacking, fall or conquer, they're pretty much the same. That said, sacking seems to be a specific case that involves looting and running off with the good stuff, i.e. plundering, which is one of my favourite words.

Found the Venetian shill.

#remember 4th Crusade

The 1204 "Sack of Constantinople" by Western crusaders can be seen as the "fall before the Fall" though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Constantinople#Afterma...

Constantinople was successfully besieged by the fourth crusade in 1204, and the subsequent sacking of the city did apparently result in the destruction of the library. Looking at the Wikipedia page for the library it looks like the phrase was directly copied from there. I guess the problem is Constantinople has fallen many times, but only Fallen once.

If the Al-Qarawiyyin library was not able to resist Islamic influence, as I suspect based on extensive precedent, then the oldest libraries in the West are Christian or Muslim. Which I suspect had a large bearing on preserved history. I wonder how much interesting stuff was destroyed because it didn’t conform to the party line.

There are good examples of the opposite too - such as Boethius, one of the critical links saving classical philosophy from oblivion on the outset of the dark ages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boethius#De_topicis_differenti...

Indeed, the Church is responsible for preserving many ancient pagan records that would otherwise have been lost with the fall of Rome. Islamic scholars also played a role in this (e.g., the surviving Aristotelian corpus).

Like what? And why would you suspect that? Christian apologists and scholars were active in debating pagans and drew from pagan philosophy, science, etc. And part of the job of an apologist is to respond to things which do not conform to what you cynically call the “party line”. So you should expect various records that reflect that. There’s ideas would resurface sooner or later.

I was hoping this would be a list of the oldest -active- libraries, does anyone have a list of those? This is the best I could find: https://alltimelists.com/10-oldest-libraries-world/

Since the list includes libraries not in opration any more, I was expecting to find the Nalanda Library there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda#Library

Maybe libc?

I know it's not productive but this was the kind of comment I was expecting to read, thank you.

I would like to know the oldest code libraries to be reused in 'large scale' tho.

I don't know what you want to consider 'large scale', but I've definitely come across some Fortran code with dates in the comments from the 60s or 70s. Although the only I can find right now dates to 1983 (see https://github.com/nwh/lusol/blob/master/src/lusol_util.f#L3...).

DNA?

I can't be the only one who immediately thought of libraries in the context of software development.

I was expecting jQuery.

Some libraries are older than jQuery! <g>

Before I opened the link I was fully expecting to see jQuery on the list.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17141024

>"The library at Saint Catherine’s Monastery located at the foot of the legendary Mount Sinai,

is the oldest continually operating library in the world."

[...]

"Due to its age and importance in the Christian world, the monastery’s library has the second largest collection of

ancient manuscripts and codices,

just after Vatican City.

The library houses several unique and important texts, including the Syriac Sinaiticus and, until 1859, the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest known complete Bible dating back to around 345 CE. A few years ago, the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) Library began reproducing digital copies of about 1,100 unique Syriac and Arabic manuscripts from Saint Catherine’s Monastery."

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