A summer in the Library of Alexandria

Bibliotheke: Greek, from biblion, a book (after byblos, the papyrus reed), and theke, a place where things are kept. A summer around 235 BC in Alexandria, told to you, a young copyist from Rhodes: every ship searched for books, a catalogue in one hundred and twenty rolls, a king who borrowed the plays of Athens and kept them, and a librarian who measured the whole Earth with a bowl and a shadow... Inside: the lighthouse of Pharos, the birdcage of the Muses, a big book is a big evil, the sieve of prime numbers, water clocks that whistled, the winds that carry boats up the Nile, and how the Library really ended. Eratosthenes and Callimachus will be there too. Chapters: The city · The Museum · The books from the ships · The scroll · The catalogue · The great borrowing · The librarian · The shadow · The others · The evening · The tower of light · What became of it · The night. Sources: Strabo's Geography, Galen, Cleomedes, the Letter of Aristeas; Callimachus' epigram in William Cory's translation. Read by a synthetic voice; script written and fact-checked by the show's team. Additional sounds: Joseph Sardin, BigSoundBank.com (CC0).

The script

In a city by the sea, there is a building that is trying to hold every book in the world.

Not every book in the city. Not every book in the kingdom. Every book... in every language its keepers can find, on every subject anyone has ever written down. Poems and plays, medicine and mathematics, the stars, the laws of distant cities, the histories of peoples long gone. Copied by hand, rolled up, labelled, and laid in their places, one after another, in their thousands.

Nobody has ever tried anything like it before.

Embers of History. Episode six... a summer in the Library of Alexandria.

This story is read by a synthetic voice. If these stories keep you company at night, follow the show... it helps others find it.

It is about two hundred and thirty-five years before the birth of Christ. You are in Egypt, on its northern coast, where the land meets the Mediterranean Sea... in Alexandria.

You are nineteen. You were born on the island of Rhodes, the son of a ship's carpenter, and you learned your letters from a schoolmaster who beat them into you and a grandmother who read you Homer. You have a clear hand and a good eye. And this spring, by a letter of recommendation and a little luck, you came here, to work in the Library, as a copyist.

How do we know what it was like? Less well than we would wish. Not one wall of the Library has ever been found. What we have are pieces... a description of the Museum by a Greek geographer who visited two hundred years later, a story told by a doctor, a few lines of poetry, a mocking verse, the names of the librarians, and the books themselves... or rather, the few of them that survived, copied and copied again, down the centuries, to us.

So some of what follows is certain, and some is likely, and a little is what the old stories say. Where it is only a story, I will tell you so.

Chapter one. The city.

You arrived by sea, as almost everyone does.

The first thing you saw, a long way out, before the coast itself, was the lighthouse. It stands on the island of Pharos, at the mouth of the harbour... a tower of pale stone in three stages, one on top of the other, rising higher than anything you had ever seen built by people. Perhaps a hundred metres. Perhaps more. It was finished in the time of the present king's father, less than fifty years ago, and already sailors talk about it in every port of the sea.

The coast of Egypt is low and flat, with sandbanks hidden under the water, and a ship can come to grief before the sailors even see the land. The tower tells them where they are.

The island of Pharos is joined to the city by a great causeway of stone, built straight across the water. It is called the Heptastadion... the seven stades... because it is seven stades long, a little more than a kilometre. On either side of it lies a harbour. To the east, the Great Harbour, for the king's ships and the merchants. To the west, the harbour they call Eunostos... the harbour of the happy return.

Your ship came into the Great Harbour on a bright morning, past the lighthouse, past the royal island with its little palace, and tied up at the stone quays, among the grain ships and the warships and the small boats from up the Nile.

The city itself was laid out by order of Alexander the Great, who founded it, some ninety years ago, and never lived to see it built. It is a city drawn with a ruler.

Its streets run straight, crossing each other at right angles. The main street, the Canopic Way, runs the whole length of the city from east to west, and it is so wide that chariots can pass each other in it with room to spare. Along it are colonnades, for shade.

Alexander himself lies here. His body was brought to Alexandria after his death, and it rests in a tomb in the middle of the city, in a place they call the Soma... the Body.

The people of the city come from everywhere.

There are Macedonians and Greeks, who rule it, from every corner of the Greek world. There are Egyptians, whose country it is. There is a large quarter of Jews. There are traders from Syria, from Carthage, from Rhodes like you, from the Black Sea, from Arabia. You hear a dozen languages on the quays before the sun is high.

To the south of the city lies a great lake, Mareotis, joined by canals to the Nile. On the lake come the boats from inside Egypt... grain, papyrus, linen, stone. To the north is the sea, and on the sea come the ships from everywhere else.

The city faces both ways. That is why it is rich. And because it is rich, its kings can afford to do something no king has ever done.

Chapter two. The Museum.

The Library is part of something larger, and you will hear people call that larger thing by its name. The Mouseion. The Museum.

The word does not yet mean a place of old things behind glass. It means a place of the Muses... the nine goddesses of poetry and song, history and the stars. A shrine to them. A place where people serve the Muses by thinking, and writing, and studying.

It stands in the royal quarter of the city, near the palaces, by the sea. The geographer who visited, two centuries later, describes it simply. A covered walk, for walking and talking. A hall with seats, for lectures and debate. And a large house, where the scholars eat their meals together.

The scholars of the Museum are paid by the king. They have their rooms, their meals and their salaries, and they pay no taxes. In return, they do what they are best at... they read, they write, they argue, they teach, they edit the poets, they measure the stars. A priest, chosen by the king, is in charge of the whole community.

Not everyone admires this arrangement. A poet from Greece, a sharp-tongued man named Timon, wrote a verse about it that is still remembered. In Egypt, he said, crowded as it is, there are many who are fed... bookish scribblers, who quarrel without end... in the birdcage of the Muses.

The scholars, it is said, did not much enjoy that verse. They quoted it to each other for centuries.

And the Library?

Nobody now knows what it looked like. It may have been one great hall. More likely, it was a set of rooms and storerooms, with shelves... or rather, with cases and pigeonholes... along the walls, in the buildings of the Museum. There was no reading room, perhaps, as we would imagine one. Scholars took scrolls out, read them in the covered walk, or by a window, or in the garden, and brought them back.

There is also a second, smaller library in the city, in the temple of the god Serapis, in the Egyptian quarter, for the books that the great one has in copies to spare.

But you work in the great one.

Chapter three. The books from the ships.

Your day begins at the harbour.

Before dawn, you walk down through the quiet streets to the Great Harbour, with an older copyist, a grey, patient man from Athens who has been doing this work since before you were born. The ships that came in yesterday evening are tied up along the quays. And by order of the king, every ship that comes into Alexandria is searched... not for weapons, not for gold... for books.

This is one of the stories a doctor named Galen tells, four hundred years later. When ships put into the harbour, he says, any books found on board were taken to the Library. There they were copied. The owners were given the copies, and the Library kept the originals. And the originals were labelled with three words: from the ships.

So this morning, you walk along the quay with a basket, and the harbour officials hand you what they have taken. A sea captain's book of sailing directions, worn and stained with salt. A merchant's copy of a comedy, bought cheap in Athens to read on the voyage. A medical book belonging to a young doctor from Cos, who is not at all pleased to see it go.

You write the owner's name on a slip of papyrus, tie it to each scroll, and promise that the copies will be ready within the month. The young doctor asks, a little stiffly, whether the copy will be as good as his original.

The older copyist says that it will be better. He is not joking. Nobody in the world copies like the Library.

The king who gave that order is Ptolemy, the third of that name. His people call him Euergetes... the Benefactor. His grandfather, the first Ptolemy, was one of Alexander's generals, who took Egypt as his share when Alexander died, and founded the Museum. His father, the second Ptolemy, filled it. And he, the third, is making sure it never stops filling.

All three of them wanted, quite simply, every book. They sent buyers to the markets of Athens and Rhodes. They wrote to other kings asking for copies of anything worth having. And sometimes, as you will hear, they did not quite play fair.

Chapter four. The scroll.

The book in your basket is not a book as we would know it. It is a roll.

It is made of papyrus... from the tall reed that grows in the marshes of the Nile, taller than a man, with a feathery head. Workers cut the stems, peel away the green outer skin, and slice the soft white pith inside into long thin strips. They lay the strips side by side, and then lay a second layer across them, at right angles. They press the sheet, and beat it, and leave it in the sun. The plant's own sap glues the strips together. When it is dry, they polish it smooth with a stone or a shell.

Then about twenty sheets are glued end to end, and rolled up. That is a roll of papyrus, ready to write on. Unrolled, it is as long as a small room.

You write on it in columns, from left to right, column after column, along the length of the roll. A reader holds the roll in both hands, unrolling it with one hand as they read, and rolling it up again with the other.

Your pen is a reed, cut to a point with a small knife. Your ink is soot... lamp black... mixed with a little gum and water, in a small pot beside you. It is black, and it lasts a very long time. But it is not permanent. Make a mistake, and you can wipe it away with a damp sponge and write again.

In your first weeks, you used a great deal of sponge.

To each finished roll, you tie a small tag of papyrus or parchment that hangs from the end. On the tag you write the author and the title, so that a roll can be found on the shelf without unrolling it. Rolls of one work stand together in a case, or a leather bucket, like bread rolls in a bin.

A long work does not fit on one roll. Homer's Iliad needs twenty-four of them. That is why, to this day, the Iliad is divided into twenty-four books. A book, at first, was simply as much as would fit on a roll.

And one more thing you are learning. When people read, here, they nearly always read aloud. Even alone. Even in a library. Across the covered walk of the Museum, on a summer afternoon, comes a low murmur... dozens of voices, each reading to itself.

Some people can read in silence, with only their eyes. But here, reading is something done with the voice. A poem is meant to be heard, even by the one reading it.

Chapter five. The catalogue.

So many books. How does anyone find anything?

The answer is a man you never met. He died only a few years before you came, an old man, and the copyists still speak of him as if he might walk in at any moment, with a bundle of tablets under his arm. His name was Callimachus. He came here from Cyrene, west along the coast, as a young schoolmaster. He was the finest poet in Alexandria. And he made the catalogue.

He called it the Pinakes... the Tablets. It takes up one hundred and twenty rolls by itself.

In it, the books of the Library are sorted by kind... poets, lawgivers, philosophers, historians, orators, doctors, and the rest. Within each kind, the authors are listed in the order of their letters. For each one, there is a few lines on who they were. And then a list of their works... each with its opening words, so that you know you have the right one, and the number of lines it holds, so that you know you have all of it.

It is, as far as anyone can tell, the first great library catalogue in the world. Every library since has done something like it.

Callimachus is remembered for something else, too: a single short saying, which the copyists like to repeat when a long roll is giving them trouble. A big book, he said, is a big evil.

He meant it about poems. He liked them short, polished and perfect, and he disliked the long, loose epics that other poets were writing. But it is something to hear in a library that holds tens of thousands of them.

And he wrote one poem that people will still be reading two thousand years from now. It is about a friend, a poet, who has died far away, and it ends with the thought that, whatever else has gone, his songs are still alive. In one old English version, the last lines go like this.

Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake... for Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

Chapter six. The great borrowing.

Among the copyists, there is a story everyone tells about the king, and they tell it with some pride.

In Athens, two hundred years ago, there lived the three great writers of tragedy... Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Their plays were performed again and again, and actors, over the years, had begun to change the words... adding lines here, cutting them there. So the people of Athens made official copies of the plays, the true texts, and kept them safe in the city's records. Actors had to keep to them.

The king wanted those copies.

He wrote to Athens, and asked to borrow them, only to have them copied, and then he would send them back. The Athenians were not fools. They asked for a deposit... fifteen talents of silver. It is a great fortune. A talent of silver is a weight about as much as a grown man can carry, and fifteen of them would pay the crew of a warship for more than a year.

The king paid it. The precious copies came to Alexandria. And the king had them copied, beautifully, on the finest papyrus, by the best hands in the Library.

Then he sent the copies back to Athens. He kept the originals. And he let the Athenians keep the silver.

That is how the doctor Galen tells it, at least, and he was writing long after. Some scholars think the story has grown in the telling. But whether every detail is true or not, it says something true about this place. The Library does not only want books. It wants the best book... the oldest, the most correct, the closest to what the writer actually wrote.

That is what the scholars here do with them. They compare the copies, line by line... a copy from Athens, a copy from the ships, a copy from Rhodes... and they mark where they differ, and they try to work out which is right. For Homer, they invent little marks in the margin... a dash for a line that looks false, a star for a line repeated from somewhere else.

They are the first editors. Every careful edition of an old book, ever since, has done the same.

There is another story people tell here, about the second Ptolemy, the present king's father.

It is said that he wanted the holy books of the Jews in his Library, in Greek, so that everyone could read them. So he asked the High Priest in Jerusalem to send him translators... six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, seventy-two in all. They came to Alexandria, and they worked on the island of Pharos, by the sea, near the lighthouse. And in seventy-two days, they finished.

The story is surely too neat. But the translation was real, and it was made here, in Alexandria, in these years. It is still called, after the number of its translators, the Septuagint. The Seventy.

Chapter seven. The librarian.

The head of the Library is a man about forty years old. His name is Eratosthenes.

Like Callimachus, he comes from Cyrene. He studied in Athens as a young man, and the king called him here to be the royal librarian, and to teach the king's young son. He has been here some ten years.

He is a remarkable person to work for. He knows something about everything... poetry, grammar, history, music, mathematics, the stars, the shapes of the countries of the world. He writes poems. He writes on the old comedies of Athens. He is working out the dates of history... how many years from the fall of Troy to the first Olympic Games, from the Games to Alexander.

The other scholars, not entirely kindly, have given him two nicknames.

One is Beta. The second letter. Because, they say, he is second best at everything... never quite the first in any one subject, but second in all of them.

The other is Pentathlos. The athlete of the five events... running, jumping, the discus, the javelin, and wrestling. An all-rounder. Good at everything, champion at none.

He knows about both names. It is said that he does not seem to mind. And it may be that he is enjoying himself more than any of them.

He has a way of finding prime numbers that every schoolchild will one day learn. Write down all the numbers, in order. Cross out every second number after two. Then every third after three. Then every fifth after five, and so on. The ones left standing are the primes. People will call it the sieve of Eratosthenes.

He is drawing a new map of the whole known world, with lines across it, running east and west and north and south, to fix where places are... the first such lines anyone has drawn. He has a word for this kind of work, too. Geography... the writing of the Earth.

And this summer, he is thinking about the size of the Earth itself.

Chapter eight. The shadow.

Educated Greeks have known, for a century and more, that the Earth is round. They have seen its curved shadow on the Moon during an eclipse. They have watched ships disappear hull first over the horizon, with their masts last. They have noticed that, as you travel south, new stars appear above the southern edge of the sky.

But how large is it? Nobody really knows.

Eratosthenes has heard something about the town of Syene.

Syene lies far to the south, up the Nile, near the first cataract, where the river comes down over rocks. And at Syene, people say, at noon on the longest day of the year, the Sun stands directly overhead. An upright stick casts no shadow at all. And the Sun, at that one moment, shines straight down to the bottom of a deep well, and lights up the water.

In Alexandria, on that same day, at that same moment, the Sun is not quite overhead. Upright things here still have a small shadow.

He has been thinking about what that means.

The Sun is so far away that its rays arrive almost parallel, everywhere on the Earth. If the Earth were flat, every stick in Egypt would cast the same shadow at the same moment. They do not. So the difference between the shadow at Syene and the shadow at Alexandria is because of the curve of the Earth between them.

Measure the shadow here, and you know how much the Earth curves between the two cities. Know how far apart the two cities are, and you can work out how far it is all the way around.

On the longest day, a little before noon, you are in the courtyard of the Museum with him, and two of the younger scholars, and a bowl.

It is a stone bowl, the inside shaped like a small half of a sphere, with a thin upright pointer standing up from the very bottom of it, and lines cut into its curved inner face. It is a kind of sundial. The shadow of the pointer falls on the lines, and the lines show the angle of the Sun.

The courtyard is bright and still. The shadow creeps, as the Sun climbs, shorter and shorter. Then it stops getting shorter. That is noon.

Eratosthenes reads the shadow on the lines. It is about one fiftieth of a full circle.

So the curve of the Earth between Syene and Alexandria is one fiftieth of the whole way round. And the distance between the two cities, measured, as near as people know, is about five thousand stades.

Fifty times five thousand.

He writes the answer down. Two hundred and fifty thousand stades, all the way around the Earth.

How close was he?

That depends on a question nobody can now answer: which stade he used. A stade was a length used for racecourses, and it was not the same everywhere. If he used one of the shorter ones, his answer comes very close to the true distance around the Earth... about forty thousand kilometres. If he used a longer one, he was out by perhaps a sixth.

Either way, a man in a courtyard, with a bowl, a shadow, and a distance, had measured the whole Earth, without leaving home. Within two centuries, the figure was being used by scholars all across the Greek world.

Here, as always, the story comes to us late, and secondhand... the clearest account was written by a teacher named Cleomedes, a few centuries after. Whether he really stood in a courtyard on the longest day, or worked it out from other people's observations, nobody knows. But the reasoning is his, and it is beautiful, and it is right.

Chapter nine. The others.

Eratosthenes is not alone in finding things out here.

A few generations ago, a mathematician named Euclid taught in Alexandria, and wrote the book of geometry that will be used in schools for the next two thousand years. There is a story that the first King Ptolemy asked him whether there was a quicker way to learn geometry than working through his whole book. And Euclid answered that there is no royal road to geometry.

It may never have happened. But it is the kind of thing people here like to tell each other.

In Syracuse, in Sicily, there is a man named Archimedes, who, it is said, once studied in Alexandria, and who writes to Eratosthenes now and then. His letters are the most interesting post the Library receives. He sends puzzles. One of them is a problem in verse about the cattle of the Sun god, so hard that nobody here can solve it. He will one day send Eratosthenes a whole book explaining his method for finding out his discoveries... and say that he is sending it to him because Eratosthenes, of all people, will understand it.

In a workshop near the Museum works an engineer named Ctesibius. He was a barber's son, they say, and as a boy he made a mirror for his father's shop that could be raised and lowered by a weight hidden in a pipe. When it moved, the air in the pipe made a sound. That gave him ideas.

He has made a pump that pushes water with pistons. He has made an organ that is played with keys, and the wind for its pipes is steadied by water. And he has made the finest water clocks anyone has seen... clocks where water drips steadily into a tank, and a float rises with it, and the float moves a pointer, and the pointer shows the hour. Some of them have little figures that move, and whistles that blow.

There is a story that will be told about this place a few generations from now. It is about Pergamon, a city across the sea, whose kings will build a great library of their own, to rival this one.

The kings of Egypt, the story goes, were so jealous that they stopped selling papyrus to Pergamon. So the people of Pergamon, with nothing to write on, perfected a new material: the skins of calves and sheep and goats, soaked and scraped and stretched until they were thin and smooth and pale. They called it after their city. Parchment.

It is a good story. It is probably not quite true... people had written on skins long before. But the name will stay. And in the end, many centuries from now, parchment will outlast papyrus.

Chapter ten. The evening.

In the late afternoon, the light softens, and the Museum changes.

The copyists put down their pens, and wash the ink from their fingers. The scholars come out of their rooms. In the covered walk, they walk up and down in twos and threes, talking... arguing about a line of Homer, about whether a word means one thing or another, about the stars, about who said what to whom at dinner the night before.

In summer, a steady wind blows from the north, off the sea, every afternoon. The Greeks call these the Etesian winds... the yearly winds, because they come back every year at the same season. They cool the city. They make the summers here bearable, when the rest of Egypt bakes.

And they do something else. They blow straight up the Nile, from the sea toward the south. So the boats going upriver raise their sails and let the wind carry them, against the current. The boats coming down the river take their sails down, and let the current carry them. On the Nile, the wind goes one way and the water goes the other, and for thousands of years, everything in Egypt has travelled on that fact.

This is the time of year when the river begins to rise.

Far to the south, beyond Syene, beyond the edge of any map you have seen, rain is falling in mountains that nobody here has ever visited. And slowly, week by week, the Nile swells. By the end of the summer, it will spread out over the fields of Egypt, and lie on them like a lake, and when it goes down, it will leave behind a new layer of black, rich mud. That is why the Egyptians call their country the Black Land.

The priests in the old temples watch for a certain star to rise before dawn, after months hidden in the Sun's glare... the brightest star in the sky, Sirius. When it appears, they say, the river will come. The Egyptians have kept that count for thousands of years.

The scholars eat together, in the common dining hall, as the geographer will later describe. Long tables. Bread, fish from the sea and from the lake, olives, lentils, onions, cheese, fruit, and wine mixed with water. The talk, by every account, is lively.

You do not eat with the scholars. You are a copyist. You eat in a cookshop near the harbour with the other copyists, and the talk is mostly about the scholars.

Chapter eleven. The tower of light.

After dark, you go back up to the copying room, because the doctor's book from Cos has to be finished, and the young doctor's ship sails in three days.

The room is warm, and still. An oil lamp burns beside you, a small clay lamp with a spout, its flame no bigger than a fingertip, feeding on olive oil. In its light, you unroll the old copy, find your place, dip your reed, and write.

The doctor's book is about fevers, and how to tell from the patient's breath and sleep and colour which way an illness will go. It is old. It may be by the great Hippocrates himself, or by one of his pupils. You will not know which. Neither, for certain, does anyone else.

The work is slow. One line, then the next. You check each line against the original, letter by letter, before you go on.

The old copyist from Athens told you, on your first day, that the hardest thing in this work is not the writing. It is the reading. The eye wants to jump. It sees a word, and leaps ahead to the same word further down, and skips everything in between. So you keep a finger on the original. And you read every line aloud, quietly, under your breath, as you write it.

Around midnight, you finish a column, and you stand up to rest your back, and you go to the window.

Below you are the dark roofs of the royal quarter, and beyond them, the harbour, black and calm, with a few lamps on the ships. And beyond that, across the water, on its island, the lighthouse.

At night, it is said, a fire is kept burning at the top of it, and the light can be seen far out at sea. Ancient writers will say that sailors saw it from many miles away, low on the horizon, like a star that never set.

You have thought, sometimes, that the lighthouse and the Library are the same kind of thing.

One sends a light out to the ships, to bring them safely in. The other waits for the ships, and takes from them whatever they carry that is worth keeping, and keeps it. And both of them are trying to be useful to people they will never meet.

Somewhere in the gardens, a small owl calls once. The Greeks call it the bird of Athena, goddess of wisdom. Which seems, here, about right.

Chapter twelve. What became of it.

You will never know what happens to the Library. But we can.

The Library grew for another century, and more. After Eratosthenes came other great librarians... Aristophanes of Byzantium, who invented the little accent marks that Greek is still written with today, and Aristarchus, who spent his life on the text of Homer.

Then, slowly, things changed. Around one hundred and forty-five years before Christ, a quarrelsome king, the eighth Ptolemy, drove the scholars out of Alexandria. Aristarchus, the librarian, fled to Cyprus. Many of the others scattered across the Greek world, and taught there. The Library carried on. But it was never quite the same.

There is a story everyone has heard: that the Library burned, all at once, in one great fire, and everything was lost.

It did not happen that way.

In the year forty-eight before Christ, Julius Caesar was trapped in Alexandria during a war, and set fire to the ships in the harbour. The fire spread to the buildings by the quays. A Roman writer says that forty thousand rolls were burned. They may have been books stored near the harbour, waiting to be shelved, or waiting to be shipped. The Library itself seems to have gone on.

Over the next three centuries, there were more wars, more fires, and less money. The royal quarter where the Museum stood was badly ruined in a war in the two hundred and seventies after Christ. The daughter library in the temple of Serapis was destroyed in the year three hundred and ninety-one. A later story blames the Arab conquest of Egypt, in the six hundreds. But that story was first written down six hundred years after it was supposed to have happened, and scholars do not believe it.

The truth is quieter, and in a way sadder. The Library was not destroyed in a night. It faded. Over centuries, the money stopped, the scholars left, the rolls wore out and were not recopied, and slowly, there was less and less of it, until there was none.

How many books did it hold at its height? Here the scholars argue, and they argue cheerfully. Ancient writers give numbers from forty thousand to seven hundred thousand rolls. One counted the mixed rolls and the single rolls separately. Another may simply have heard a large number and made it larger. The honest answer is that nobody knows... only that it was far more than anywhere else in the world.

And yet, much of it was not lost.

The work of the Library had always been copying. And the copies went out... to Rhodes, to Pergamon, to Athens, later to Rome and to Constantinople and to Baghdad... and were copied again there. That is how Homer reached us, divided into his twenty-four books, with the lines the scholars here marked as doubtful still marked in our editions. That is how Euclid reached us. That is how we know that a man once measured the Earth with a bowl.

The building is gone. What it was for is not.

Chapter thirteen. The night.

The lamp is low. The column is finished. Tomorrow, the doctor from Cos will have his copy, as good as his original... better, the old copyist will say.

You cover your ink pot. You roll the scroll back to its beginning, and tie its tag, and lay it on the shelf beside the original, the one that will stay, with its three words on the label. From the ships.

Out on the water, the light burns on top of the tower. In the dark city, the scholars are asleep in their rooms, and the copyists in their lodgings, and the king in his palace. On the shelves around you, in the dark, are tens of thousands of rolls... plays and poems, maps and medicines, histories and the stars... most of the knowledge of the world, rolled up, labelled, and resting in their places.

Far to the south, the river is rising.

In a city by the sea, there is a building that is trying to hold every book in the world.

The Greeks have a word for it. They take the word biblion, a book... from byblos, the papyrus reed, which was named for the old port where it was traded... and they add a word for a place where something is put away and kept safe.

Bibliotheke. The place where the books are kept.

Also from the late hours: Slow Orbit · The Quiet Armoury · Myth and Score