Timgad Library

About

Timgad's public library, one of the best-preserved in the Roman world, was funded by a local benefactor named Rogatianus with a gift of 400,000 sesterces. It rose in the late 3rd or early 4th century CE, close to two hundred years after Trajan founded the colony. Niches for scroll cases lined its curved reading room, opening onto a small colonnaded court. In 117 CE the plot held nothing more than an ordinary residential block within the original grid. Built roughly 180-220 years after this map's snapshot date, funded by a donor named Marcus Julius Quintianus Flavius Rogatianus per its dedicatory inscription.

What happened here

Books are scrolls, kept in labelled pigeonholes around the walls, and you read them standing at a desk or sitting in the courtyard with a slave to hold the roll. Greek and Latin collections are kept separately, often in facing rooms. Nothing is borrowed. A staff of copyists keeps the collection alive, because a scroll handled regularly lasts a couple of generations at best, and a library that stops copying is a library that is dying. Readers are respectable men and their secretaries; access is a favour that can be withdrawn. Libraries attach themselves to baths, temples and fora rather than standing alone, so a visit is folded into a day of other business. Lamps are forbidden inside for obvious reasons.

In ancient writing

• Marcus Julius Quintianus Flavius Rogatianus, L'Annee Epigraphique AE 1908, 12

  Dedicatory inscription on the library building recording that Rogatianus, a vir clarissimae memoriae, bequeathed 400,000 sesterces in his will to fund the library's construction.

Sources

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Public_Library,_built_in_the_late_3rd_century_or_early_4th_century_AD,_a_certain_Marcus_Julius_Quintianus_Flavius_Rogatianus_gave_his_home_town_400,000_sesterces_to_fund_it,_Timgad_(Thamugadi,_Numidia),_Algeria_-_52485185102.jpg
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timgad

Nearby

Basilica

56 m

Temple of Victory

57 m

Forum of Timgad

58 m

North Baths

67 m

Curia

72 m

Timgad Public Latrines

78 m