ontained in these collections.
Unfortunately no traces of them remain. Accident and conquest caused
their entire destruction. The earlier historians told a pitiful tale of
the wanton destruction of the library by the Mohammedan conquerors who
in their fanaticism destroyed as useless or harmful all works not
devoted to the dissemination of their own doctrines. While it is
probably true that the Mohammedans were responsible for a wholesale
destruction, it is probable that the library had already suffered sadly
by the destruction by fire of one or more of its separate collections
and that what was destroyed in their time was only the remains of the
former splendid collection. The library of Constantinople, being later
than the others in its formation, probably had more direct effect on the
culture of mediaeval and modern times than any of the preceding ones.

In addition to these great public or semi-public libraries, there were
of course great numbers of private libraries. Wealthy and cultivated men
throughout the Roman empire and beyond had their private collections, as
wealthy and cultivated men do to-day. While the illiterate classes were
proportionally much more numerous than they are in modern communities,
and the use of books was limited to a comparatively small portion of the
population, the small educated class was highly cultivated and keenly
interested in the reading and ownership of books.

None of these early collections survives even in any existing fragments.
The devastating wars of the first Christian centuries destroyed all such
perishable things. The Assyrian records not being on perishable material
survived the destruction of the buildings in which they were contained
and remained buried until brought to light by recent excavations. The
Egyptian records have survived partly because they were so largely in
the nature of inscriptions on the walls of the great temples and the
carefully constructed tombs, and partly because so many of them were
sheltered in the resting places of the dead. Not only were the mummies
wrapped in cloth and papyrus inscribed with the Book of the Dead and
other Egyptian texts, but many documents and papers were buried with the
bodies. It was the custom of the Egyptians to bury with the dead all
their personal papers including unopened letters and papers belonging to
other persons which happened to be in the possession of the deceased at
the time of his death. Many a letter has thus