he preservation of the book itself. Consequently almost
all of the centers of the world's civilization were at the same time the
homes of great collections of books, or libraries. The ancient Egyptians
had many such although we have the record of but one. Rameses the Great,
who has been generally, though probably erroneously, identified as the
Pharaoh of the Exodus, but who probably lived within about a century of
that time, housed a great library in his palace at Thebes. Such a
library, of course, would have consisted of papyrus rolls and must have
been rich in that learning of the Egyptians which the old chronicle
tells us was familiar to Moses. What would we not give if we could only
find those precious rolls in some of the corners which the archaeologists
are so busily exploring and which are constantly yielding new stores of
information about that ancient civilization?

Some centuries later two of the Assyrian kings, Sennacherib and
Assurbanipal, collected a great library which has been in large part
recovered. Such a library, as we have seen, consisted of clay tablets
and these tablets were kept in large earthenware jars. The contents of
the library were partly contemporary but more of it consisted of copies
of ancient works. Many thousands of these texts have been recovered from
the ruins of Babylon and are now being translated. They cover the whole
field of literary activity, religion, law, history, grammar, science,
magic, and romance.

One of the old Israelitish cities, near Hebron, is called
Kirjath-sepher, or city of books. Both the city and the name, however,
antedate the Jewish occupation of Palestine and are probably memorials
of a time when this city was a center of that Assyrian culture which
covered the entire region later known as Palestine.

The classic civilization, with its great development of literary
activity, of course involved the formation of libraries in all the more
important cities, as such places were the natural centers of culture. We
know something of the libraries of Athens, Antioch, Ephesus, Pergamus,
Rome, Alexandria and Constantinople. The most famous of these was the
great collection, or rather collections, of books at Alexandria.
Collectively these rivalled in size some of the great modern libraries,
a very remarkable fact when we consider the conditions under which books
were made at that time. Undoubtedly practically the entire literary
output of the classic civilization was c