Kevin Flynn, age 10 of Milford, Conn., for his question:
WHEN DID THE FIRST LIBRARY START?
First library in the United States was founded in the Massachusetts city of Newtowne in 1638 when a clergyman named John Harvard presented a local school with 400 books and a gift of money. So important was the gift that the school promptly changed its name to Harvard and the town was renamed Cambridge, the name of the English university John Harvard had attended. Man learned to write about 6,000 years ago, and almost at the same time he started saving his written records. In the early days libraries were collections of written words on either bone, metal, wax, wood, clay, papyrus, silk, leather or parchment.
In ancient Mesopotamia, an area that is now Iraq, Turkey and Syria, the early day citizens came up with a way of writing on tablets of wet clay which were later dried or baked to make them long lasting. Thousands of the tablets still exist today, although our scholars haven't as yet been able to decipher the writing.
Early Egyptians made a writing material by cutting the stems of the papyrus reed into strips and then pressing the strips into sheets to form scrolls. One scroll, now in the British Library, measures 133 feet in length.
Great libraries established in Egypt, Greece and Rome all held fine collections of papyrus scrolls. The libraries are now gone, but we can find references to them in other old writings. They went back as far as 1300 B.C.
Most famous of the ancient libraries was a Greek institution called the Alexandrian Library in Egypt. It was founded by Alexander the Great in about 330 B.C. More than 700,000 scrolls were held in the library.
Greek philosopher Aristotle started a library at his school in Lyceum which was later either taken over by the Alexandrian Library or taken to Rome when Athens was sacked.
The library tradition started by the Greeks and Egyptians was carried on by the ancient Romans. They encouraged the establishment of libraries throughout the empire. Still standing is Hadrian's Library, which was built about 125 A.D. at the foot of the acropolis in Athens.
By the time the Roman Empire ended, education and artistic activity sank to a low level. Libraries closed and disappeared and it wasn't until the Dark Ages ended in about 1300 that there was a new flourishing of a desire for knowledge. Establishment of universities reflected Europe's emergence from the Dark Ages. Scholars found and translated some of the ancient writing, and then writers started creating literature of their own. By the 1400s a number of private libraries was started.
Paper, invented by the Chinese about 105 A.D., came to Europe during the Middle Ages and by 1500 had almost completely replaced parchment for writing purposes. Then came printing, and books as we know them today replaced handwritten manuscripts. And libraries were established in all the centers of civilization.