Libraries & Records

[Bill the barbarian]

On 2/11/2019 at 4:59 PM, Sir_Godspeed said:

Yes, but monopoly on knowledge is power. Don't underestimate someone's desire to keep their knowledge exclusive.

Part of the reason for the impossibility of organizing LM temple libraries and for the obsession that drives the reorganizations led by new Chief librarians that start on their inaugural day and tend to last their entire career.

Cheers 

[Jeff]

4 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

This is highly circumstantial, but the numbering scheme of the texts in the Knowledge temples based on how they're written in the Guide and Sourcebook, with the multiple numbers and letters, seem to imply that there is quite a lot of written pieces to keep tabs on. Such lengthy and highly abstract designations wouldn't really be needed otherwise.

If Lhankor Mhy Knowledge Temples and Libraries are also used as repositories for censuses, royal accounting, property evaluation, contracts, and other largely non-narrative documents, that could explain some of the need for complex numbering systems though.

It's very possible that the actual number of narrative documents in those temples compared to archived inventory lists and legal documents (genealogies, etc.) might be quite small.

(And apropos Iceland, I seem to remember something about it being the most literate society in the High Middle Ages in Western Europe.)

That is how I see Knowledge Temples as well. Most of their texts are records - contracts, property lists, construction drafts, recorded judgements,  foreign correspondences and engagements, aristocratic declarations, and financial matters - but they also include literary compositions as divination, religious, omens, incantations and hymns to various gods, lexical, medical, mathematical and historical texts as well as epics and myths. Not to mention plenty of wisdom texts, used to train people to scribe.