What Is the Oldest Library in the World?

There is no single oldest library in the world, because the answer depends on what you count as a library. The oldest known collections of written texts are clay tablets kept in Mesopotamia and Syria between about 2600 and 2300 BCE. The earliest large library deliberately collected was the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal’s, at Nineveh in the 7th century BCE. For the oldest library still in use, Guinness World Records names St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, from the 6th century, while the cathedral library of Verona claims the title with a book dated 517.

Each of those answers is true under its own definition. The trouble starts when the definition is dropped.

What was the first library in history?

In 1975 an Italian team digging at Tell Mardikh, in northern Syria, opened a room of the royal palace of Ebla and found it full of clay tablets. They had lain there since the palace was destroyed, around 2300 BCE. The rooms yielded over 15,000 tablets, fragments and chips, and about 2,000 of the tablets are complete.

It is often called the oldest library ever found. Its excavators call it an archive. Most of the tablets are the administrative records of a palace. Only some are word lists and literary texts.

That distinction is the heart of the question. Scholars of the ancient Near East call records that pile up as a by-product of running something an archive, and texts gathered to be read and consulted a library. They also admit the line is blurred. On that test, the earliest known groups of literary tablets kept together come from Ebla and from two sites in southern Mesopotamia, Fara and Abu Salabikh, all between about 2600 and 2300 BCE. Nobody can name one of them as “the first library”.

The wish to find one has misled people before. The “Temple Library” of Nippur, in Iraq, announced by a University of Pennsylvania professor in 1900, was never established and ended in a long scandal. Most of its tablets came from the houses and schools of scribes.

Was the Library of Ashurbanipal the first library?

Not the first collection, but the clearest early library. Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria in the 7th century BCE, wanted scholarly, religious and literary texts at his capital. He got them by having copies made, by requisition, and by seizure. Many tablets carry notes naming him as their owner.

When Nineveh fell in 612 BCE, fire is thought to have baked many of the tablets hard. About 30,000 tablets and fragments from the site are now in the British Museum, though not all of them were his: the finds mixed several collections. Historians describe the Library of Ashurbanipal as the earliest large library we know was collected on purpose.

The Library of Alexandria, founded early in the 3rd century BCE, came some three centuries later and is far more famous. It was not the first, and nothing of it survives. How it disappeared is told in What Happened to the Library of Alexandria?.

What is the oldest public library?

A Roman tradition credits Peisistratus, ruler of Athens in the 6th century BCE, with the first public library, but it was written down some 700 years later and nothing supports it.

The first public library on firm record is Rome’s. In the 30s BCE Asinius Pollio, back from a victorious campaign, paid for one from the spoils, with Greek and Latin sections and portraits of authors. “Public” meant open to people who could read, not lending. The Roman world built more libraries after it, among them the Library of Celsus at Ephesus, built in the early 2nd century as a library and a tomb.

Among working libraries, the Biblioteca Malatestiana in Cesena, opened in 1454, is often called Europe’s first civic library, meaning one owned by the town rather than by a church or a family. UNESCO calls it one of the oldest public libraries in Europe. Chetham’s Library in Manchester, founded in 1653 under the will of a merchant, describes itself as the oldest public library in the English-speaking world.

What is the oldest library still in use?

At the foot of Mount Sinai stands the Greek Orthodox monastery of St Catherine, built under the emperor Justinian around 548 to 565. Guinness World Records lists it as the oldest continuously operating library, and its Old Collection holds about 3,300 manuscripts. It rests on the tradition, widely accepted but unproved, that the monastery was never sacked or abandoned.

Verona offers a rival. On 1 August 517 a scribe named Ursicinus finished a copy of a Latin text there, and it is still in the cathedral’s chapter library, which grew out of the scribes’ workshop. The library calls itself the oldest in the world still in activity. It has come through plague, a flood and the bombing of 1945, after which its main hall was rebuilt.

Is al-Qarawiyyin in Fez the oldest library?

No. The story usually runs that Fatima al-Fihri founded it in 859. That date belongs to the al-Qarawiyyin mosque, by tradition, and Fatima’s role was first written down almost five centuries later. Several historians treat it as a legend.

The library inside the mosque was founded in 1349 by Abu Inan, a sultan of the Marinid dynasty, as an inscription over its door records. Restored by the architect Aziza Chaouni, it reopened in 2016. It is one of the oldest working libraries in the Islamic world. The Guinness record often quoted alongside it is for the oldest university, a title that is itself disputed.

What is the oldest library in Europe?

Verona’s, if its claim is accepted. The Abbey Library of St Gallen in Switzerland goes back to the abbey’s early abbot Othmar in the 8th century, and has kept its collection on the same site since. Its monks began making their own manuscripts in the mid-8th century, and more than 2,100 manuscripts are kept there today. It is one of the oldest libraries in Europe still in its original monastery.

University libraries came later. Merton College’s Upper Library in Oxford, built in the 1370s, is the oldest surviving library in the city and one of Europe’s oldest still-functioning academic libraries. The Bodleian Library nearby was refounded by Thomas Bodley and reopened in 1602, in a room finished in 1488.

What is the oldest library in America?

It depends on whether you mean the Americas or the United States. In 1646 Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, bishop of Puebla in Mexico, gave about 5,000 books to the city’s seminary colleges, on condition that readers beyond the clergy could use them. UNESCO calls the Biblioteca Palafoxiana the first public library in America.

In the United States, Harvard’s library is the oldest. It began in 1638 with John Harvard’s bequest of about 400 books, most of which burned in a fire in 1764. The Library Company of Philadelphia, founded by Benjamin Franklin and his friends in 1731, calls itself America’s first successful lending library. It was not free: members paid a fee.

The claimants at a glance

Sources and further reading

Beate Schneider’s review of Libraries before Alexandria covers the earliest tablet collections and the line between library and archive. Elena Scarpa’s The Archives of Ebla: A Primer gives the finds and the counts. Robert Ousterhout tells the Nippur affair in Three Intersecting Lives. The rival claims to the oldest working library are set out by Guinness World Records and by the Biblioteca Capitolare of Verona. UNESCO’s register entries cover the Malatestiana and the Palafoxiana.