You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  While the Digest was still under construction, Justinian ordered the third part of his great project, a work called the Institutes, to serve as an introduction to the whole legal system. Tribonian, Theophilus, and Dorotheus were once again involved, and they were ordered to stick close to the writings of the classical jurists.

  The resulting three-part Corpus had its failings: “Instead of a smooth, unified legal code, we have a document that shows its origins in cut-and-paste.”22 But it also had many virtues. It collected and reconciled countless scattered sources and ejected obsolete and useless provisions. Most important, though, everything was structured to help the reader find what he needed to know.23 A sequence of entries gives the flavor of the whole, as an authority is cited and the relevant provisions in the original law are presented concisely:

  54. Paulus, On the Edict of the Curule Ædiles, Book I.

  Where property is sold in good faith, the sale should not be annulled for a trifling reason.

  55. The Same, On the Edict of the Curule Ædiles, Book II.

  A sale without consideration and imaginary, is considered not to be made at all, and therefore the alienation of the property is not taken into consideration.

  56. The Same, On the Edict, Book L.

  Where anyone sells a female slave under the condition that she shall not be prostituted, and if this is violated he shall have a right to take her back; he will have power to do so, even if the slave has passed through the hands of several purchasers.

  Once the Corpus juris civilis appeared, Justinian prohibited any further references to the old commentaries: the new Corpus contained all that everyone needed to know. To make the point more emphatically, Justinian ordered many of the older writings burned. There were also to be no further commentaries: all the laws had been systematically surveyed, and everything a jurist needed to know was now in the Digest. It was a bold act, wiping out all the laws of the past and prohibiting commentaries in the future. The latter was a failure, since even during Justinian’s life, legal scholars discovered they needed to write new commentaries.

  The Corpus had a long afterlife. Although the ultimate collapse of the Empire’s administrative structure led to the abandonment of Roman law for centuries, Justinian’s brainchild was eventually revisited. There was a revival of interest in Justinian’s legal code in the ninth century in the Byzantine Empire, the successor of the Eastern Roman Empire; legal scholars published a new version of the text in Greek, known as the Basilica, which informed Greek legal practice into the twentieth century. And in the eleventh century, in Bologna, scholars began to rediscover the Roman law in the West again. An important manuscript of the Digest turned up in 1070, leading to many new copies and further study. Here the influence was even more important than in Greece. The Bolognese legal scholars, who thought of themselves as citizens of an ancient Holy Roman Empire, came together to study the ancient texts. These legal students eventually joined with readers of medicine and theology and began to develop policies to govern themselves. The various groups of students and scholars decided to band together, and in 1088 established a group they called a universitas ‘totality’. It was the first university in Europe, and it had Justinian’s Corpus at its heart.24 In many ways the university as we know it had its origins in study groups that sought to make sense of a reference book.

  These two reference “books”—one of them actually a monument, the other a collection of many scrolls—had major real-world significance. In making laws public and accessible, the Code of Hammurabi and the Corpus of Justinian made the law itself a public affair, and even though the laws may have been brutal and arbitrary, at least they were known. Both Hammurabi and Justinian lived in worlds where few people were literate, and their law codes likely had little influence on the lives of the overwhelming majority of people at the time. But works like Hammurabi’s Code and Justinian’s Corpus provide evidence that works of reference—whether they take the form of manuscripts, printed books, or slabs of diorite—can empower their readers. The fact that a legal code exists is an indication that the law is more than the whim of an individual tyrant, that everyone is answerable to the principles embodied in the texts.

  CHAPTER 1 ½

  OF MAKING MANY BOOKS

  Information Overload

  Drowning in information, being overwhelmed with more knowledge than we can ever know, is the modern condition. And yet it’s not unique to our time. As soon as there was writing, some were convinced there was too much writing. “By these, my son, be admonished,” said the preacher in Ecclesiastes somewhere between 450 and 200 B.C.E.: “of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Eccl. 12:12). Reference books are an attempt to make these “many books” manageable; they’re also a testimony to just how unmanageable they remain.

  The critic Harald Weinrich identified different modes of reading. Through most of history, people practiced “intensive” reading, focusing on a few books, since a few were all they had. Pliny the Younger advised this sort of reading: “Aiunt enim multum legendum esse, non multa,” a pun on “reading a lot”: “They say you should read much, not many” things. He meant that it was better to read a few sources intensively than to flit from book to book. But the era of print enabled “extensive” reading, where we have access to many books. And starting in the twentieth century, Weinrich found evidence of “defensive” reading, when “All readers have to defend themselves against too many books and avoid reading as often as possible.”1

  Gutenberg’s development of printing with movable type made possible a new kind of extensive reading. In the manuscript age every book was expensive, since someone had to copy it by hand. Even the devout and literate could not hope to own a Bible unless they were wealthy. But printing knocked the prices down to the point where a new middle class could hope to own a few volumes, and the market responded by making volumes available. According to one estimate, about 5 million copies of books had been made in Europe between about 450 and 1450 C.E.2 But in the half century after Gutenberg developed printing with movable type around 1450, somewhere between 8 and 20 million copies of the new printed books were circulating—more in fifty years than in the previous thousand. And in another hundred years, the number had topped 200 million.3 The trend kept accelerating. Nobody knows how many new books appear these days, but the global figure is probably more than a million new titles annually, most of them in thousands of copies, for billions of new copies every year. The number is too large for precise counts, but by some estimates, the English-speaking world alone generates somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million titles and editions a year. On the conservative assumption that each is around 250 pages, and each page contains around 340 words, that’s more than forty billion words of English text every year—116 million words a day, nearly 5 million an hour, 80,680 a minute, or 1,347 a second.

  The idiom information fatigue is first attested in 1991, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “Apathy, indifference, or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information, esp. (in later use) stress induced by the attempt to assimilate excessive amounts of information from the media, the Internet, or at work.”4 The term is new, but the idea is ancient. Ecclesiastes says that “in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (Eccl. 1:18). Writing in 1621, Robert Burton included a section in his monumental Anatomy of Melancholy, an account of the causes of what we would call depression, on “Loue of Learning, or overmuch study. With a Digression of the misery of Schollers.” He quoted Niccolò Machiavelli to the effect that “study weakens their bodies, dulls their spirits, abates their strength and courage, and good Schollers are never good souldiers.”5

  Enter the reference book, an attempt to cure the disease of overmuch study and to alleviate the misery of scholars. The atlas promises to take the world’s maps and put them in a handy form; the encyclopedia promises to take an entire library and deliver only the parts you need and only when you
need them. The degree to which they succeed will be one of the recurring themes of this book.

  CHAPTER 2

  IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD

  The First Dictionaries

  Erya

  third century

  B.C.E.?

  Amarasimha

  Amarakosha

  c. third century C.E.?

  No one knows what the first dictionary was or when it was compiled, but we can reasonably assume that dictionary-like works appeared not long after the dawn of writing. The dictionary as we know it—a book containing an alphabetical list of words with etymologies, pronunciations, and a series of definitions, all in one language—was long in coming, and some of the earliest dictionaries seem unfamiliar to us. But dictionaries come in many varieties. Some of the earliest and most rudimentary are simply lists of words—lists with no definitions, etymologies, or notes of any sort—but still useful, because they might list all the words in some particular category.

  The story begins in the ancient Middle East. He was called Šarru-kinu—the true king—though sources in other languages usually represent Šarru-kinu as Sargon. This is not the Sargon mentioned in the Bible—“In the year that Tartan came unto Ashdod, (when Sargon the king of Assyria sent him)”—but another king who lived more than fifteen hundred years earlier and came to prominence by conquering Sumer and establishing the Akkadian Empire.

  Sumerian seems to have died out, more or less, as a spoken language around 1800 B.C.E., though that history is notoriously murky. Still, it did not disappear completely, and it remained the language of religious rituals and works of literature for another fifteen hundred years. This left the Akkadians in a difficult position. The Sumerian civilization had reached heights to which the Akkadians aspired, and they wanted to emulate the erudition of their predecessors. But that meant mastering their language, and the Sumerian language was a challenge. Written Akkadian borrowed the cuneiform characters of the Sumerians, but a shared writing system is not the same as a shared language. Akkadian scribes were obliged to learn to read and write Sumerian, but Sumerian struck Akkadian speakers as thoroughly alien.

  The Akkadian language—sometimes called Assyro-Babylonian—is a Semitic language, part of the large family of languages including modern Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, and Ge‘ez. Sumerian, on the other hand, is not part of the Semitic family, and scholars to this day are unsure where it fits in the family tree of human languages. (Some propose that it is a “language isolate” with no known relatives.) It goes back at least to 3350 B.C.E., making it one of the earliest languages for which we have any evidence. The differences between Sumerian and Akkadian were more than a matter of vocabulary. Sumerian verb forms depended on roots along with prefixes and suffixes; Akkadian, like other Semitic languages, changed its verb forms by altering the vowels inside the words. Akkadian even had a different sound system from Sumerian. It was this difference that needed to be bridged. And so some of the earliest known word lists were born.

  The first surviving glossary goes by the clumsy name of Urra=hubullu, compiled sometime in the second millennium B.C.E. (The title is sometimes presented, even more clumsily but more precisely, as UR5-RA=hubullu or HAR-ra=hubullu.) The work gets its name from the first line, which gives an equivalent for “debt; interest-bearing loan; interest”: urra in Sumerian means the same as hubullu in Akkadian.1 It is a collection of twenty-four stone tablets containing a total of around 9,700 word pairs in Sumerian and Akkadian. Cuneiform writing had no alphabetical order, so the entries are arranged thematically: the first two tablets are devoted to legal and administrative matters, the rest to the material world. Trees and things made of wood appear in tablets 3 through 7, for instance; pottery is discussed on tablet 10; tablet 13 contains the names of domesticated animals; tablet 14 contains the names of 410 animals, including 120 insects; tablet 15 catalogs parts of the body; and so on.

  The compilers of Urra=hubullu, concerned only with making life easier for scribes, had no grand thoughts of describing their universe. They were bureaucrats, not philosophers or poets. And yet they inadvertently left a picture of the universe as they understood it. As one writer puts it, “the work comprises a comprehensive survey of the animate and inanimate world, geography, and stars, as well as artificially produced objects, victuals, and many other things.”2 The most important version survives in the Louvre in Paris, though other copies, including students’ copies (glossaries were often assigned as scribal exercises for students), can be found in other museums. The text was apparently used by students—and, if the clues provided by the text are to be believed, by beginning students.3

  Lexicography became more sophisticated in ancient Greece. Even our word lexicography is Greek, from lexikos ‘of words’ and graphia ‘writing’. The Greeks were fascinated by language, both their own and language in general. In the fourth century B.C.E., Philitas of Cos—an Alexandrian Greek scholar and poet, famous in his day as an early type of the absent-minded professor—pulled together the Átaktoi glôssai, or “Miscellaneous Glosses,” and a few centuries later, Apollonius the Sophist compiled the Lexeis Homerikai, the first comprehensive dictionary of words found in Homer. Aristophanes of Byzantium, the librarian at Alexandria starting around 195 B.C.E., created a major lexicon, and the fifth-century-C.E. lexicon by Hesychius is valuable for containing the only surviving evidence of some Greek words.4

  Some of the most interesting early dictionaries, though, are not from Babylon or Greece but from China. A work called Shizhou existed as early as the ninth century B.C.E., but it does not survive, and little is known of it beyond the title. The Erya or Erh-ya, though, written in China probably in the third century B.C.E., is the oldest surviving dictionary of the Chinese language, containing glosses on just over 4,300 words drawn from early Chinese literature. The title means something like “approaching what is correct, proper, refined,” and it is sometimes called Approaching Elegance, sometimes The Ready Guide. Heming Yong and Jing Peng describe its “remarkable position in the history of philological and linguistic studies in China”:

  It is the first work of exegetic studies conducted on a systematic basis and the first thesaurus dictionary of an encyclopedic nature. It aims to explain the meaning of ancient words and a great variety of object names and serves as the starting point from which other classic works can be justifiably interpreted. That partly explains why [Erya] has always been placed into the category of ancient Chinese classics rather than ancient Chinese dictionaries.5

  Its background is murky; the identity of the writer or writers is unknown, as is even the century in which he, she, or they worked. (Tradition says the author was the Duke of Zhou, but so many things are attributed to this semilegendary figure, including the I Ching and the earliest Chinese classical music, that we should be skeptical of all such attributions.) Most experts agree, though, that it was written by a Confucian scholar sometime between the eighth and second centuries B.C.E.6

  The Erya set out to explain the words in old Chinese literature—old even when the dictionary was compiled. The Qin Dynasty, which began in 221 B.C.E., was the first of the imperial dynasties in China. But the literature of the long Zhou Dynasty (1046 to 256 B.C.E.), from before the unification of China, was of particular interest. In the Confucian bureaucracy, the way to climb through the ranks of both the government and the larger society was to pass examinations on classic works of literature. Aspiring civil servants knew that their promotion depended on access to good dictionaries. Dictionaries were classified among the hsiao-hsüeh ‘minor learning’ rather than ta-hsüeh ‘major learning’, and major learning, as they understood it, had moral implications. But even the minor learning, which covered more or less the same territory as the modern word “linguistics,” remained an essential step on the way to the better life. And so the Erya became an important work, sitting on the boundary between high culture and official culture.

  The Chinese language lacks an alphabet, and the logographical system does not have
any obvious equivalent to alphabetical order. For a long time Chinese dictionaries have been ordered according to either the “radicals” (basic strokes) of the Chinese characters or the tones and final sounds of the spoken words. Around 100 C.E., for instance, Xu Shen composed his Shuowen jiezi, a collection of 10,516 characters organized under 540 headers, one for each “radical” or basis to a written word. It deserves to be called the first systematic dictionary of Chinese, and its classification of words by radical would be used in Chinese dictionaries for a millennium and a half. But when the Erya was compiled, those systems had not yet been developed, so the anonymous creator of the Erya organized the work by subject. This places the work in a middle ground between dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia: it gave not only definitions but clusters of thematically related words, and therefore gestures out to the larger world.

  TITLE: Erya

  COMPILER: Unknown

  ORGANIZATION: Primarily topical

  PUBLISHED: third century B.C.E.?

  ENTRIES: 2,094

  TOTAL WORDS: 13,113

  The book came in two parts: the first, chapters 1–3, focuses on common words, especially verbs and particles; the second, chapters 4–19, on specialized terms, mostly nouns. The nouns were divided into sixteen sections, grouped by topic: kinship, implements, architecture, geography, and so on.7 The approach to defining was distinctive. “In the first section,” one critic observes, “entries are defined by combining words of the same or similar meaning and then explaining them in terms of a word more commonly used at that time. If one of the words had an additional meaning, there would be an additional explanation.”8 A typical entry shows the associative logic that structures the whole work: