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Comment by ranit | Hacker News Reader

It is amazing it taught 10,000 students at once, but having 10 million books … at times when only handwritten books existed?!? Currently Indian National Library has 2.2 million books and British library has > 13 million. Something is misquoted I guess.

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I wouldn't take its numbers seriously. It's a travel article by someone who thinks Ashoka lived in the 3rd century CE instead of BCE. May not have gone through any editorial review or fact check.

Or they're taking an ancient figure at face value, which nine times out of ten end up being grossly exaggerated.

I'm not a historian. But "book" sometimes meant something much shorter in the past, at least in the West. Euclid's Elements is organized as "13 books" ... but it's one "book" today even with massive commentary included. Possibly that might account for one order of magnitude or so.

I think what the author is calling book maybe a manuscript?

I think they are counting even five written pages as a unique book?

So maybe essays are also being counted as books.

It is still an unrealistically high number. I think it is just as exaggerated as the "knowledge" of "medicine" and "mathematics" that was taught at what was just a crazy indoctrination center for a particular brand of old-fashioned superstition.

Not really.

Medicine in those times was quite standardized and effective.

There was not scientific method involved.

And the philosophy and mathematics was quite advanced.

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