Ancient Roman Library Discovered Beneath German City.

Pedro_P

The excavation of the ancient library in Cologne, Germany.
Credit: Roman-Germanic Museum of Cologne
▼ Beneath the soil in Cologne, Germany, lies a bibliophile's dream: an ancient Roman library that once held up to 20,000 scrolls, according to news reports.
Archaeologists discovered the epic structure in 2017 while they were excavating the grounds of a Protestant church to build a new community center. Considering Cologne is one of Germany's oldest cities, founded in A.D. 50, it's no surprise that it still has structures dating back to Roman times.
However, archaeologists didn't figure out that the structure was a library until they found mysterious holes in the walls, each measuring about 31 inches by 20 inches (80 by 50 centimeters), The Guardian reported.
The niches in the wall were likely "cupboards for the scrolls," Dirk Schmitz, an archaeologist at the Roman-Germanic Museum in Cologne, told The Guardian. "They are very particular to libraries — you can see the same ones in the library at Ephesus [in Turkey]."
While it's anyone's guess as to how many scrolls the library once housed, it's fair to say the number would have been "quite huge — maybe 20,000," Schmitz said. He noted that the newfound library is slightly smaller than the Celsus Library in Ephesus, which was built in A.D. 117. Even so, its discovery is "really incredible — a spectacular find," Schmitz said.
"[It] is, at a minimum, the earliest library in Germany, and perhaps in the northwest Roman provinces," he said. "Perhaps there are a lot of Roman townsthat have libraries, but they haven't been excavated. If we had just found the foundations, we wouldn't have known it was a library. It was because it had walls, with the niches, that we could tell."

This is the oldest public library on record in Germany.
Credit: Roman-Germanic Museum of Cologne
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Rushcourt71

From existing archives and sources in Europe such as the Bible, a 'reading culture' at the time was composed of one or more readers who would speak in the presence of large crowds from the books. Its possible many such books were kept in libraries like the one found in Germany.  

Since so few people could then read or write, it was considered a major event for many artisans to traverse to different parts of the town or the cities just to listen to someone reading from a book.

Hearing someone talk from the pages of a book was not the same as listening to a speaker delivering a sermon, pleading a case and preaching or presenting a cause, but it was nevertheless something worth listening to in the First Century.