Libraries, how do they reflect our history or passion for the word

Libraries, and their alter egos, archives and record centers, have been around for at least three thousand years, maybe longer depending upon the qualities you assign to collections of written words. We know that oral stories, histories, and accounts date back beyond the written word, passed down, changed, and cherished from generation to generation. As part of my training as a classicist, I studied Homer and Hesiod, Gilgamesh, and other early authors, learning about earlier cultures, looking for anachronistic words, hold overs from another language, dialect, culture, or era. I studied diplomatic exchanges found in letters between the Hittites and the Egyptians that documented the arrival of the sea peoples, those mysterious peoples from the east who invaded the Mediterranean World and disturbed the order of society before 1200BCE. These precious writings teach us much about how the world was and how rulers saw themselves.

Archives in the ancient world (see Lionel Casson Libraries in the Ancient World ) tell us much about how information was exchanged, organized, and retained for the next generation. Margo Fox's new book The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code recounts how tablets written in Linear B were excavated by Schliemann and Evans, and how the language was deciphered. The tablets are that year's list of tributes and inventory in various cities inhabited by Minoans and Myceneans, written in a proto-Greek, that predates the Sea Peoples. It may be the language spoken by the peoples Homer sings about. Without these written clues, preserved for millennia, we, society, would know little about life in the past.

Materials collected by and housed in libraries, archives, and record centers provide clues to the past, to reading habits and interests, to intellectual interests of our ancestors and readers today.

As we study libraries and their place in history, think about how they reflect their society, their times. Consider how these collections of words and writings reflect a passion for learning and understanding the world around us.