BIBLICAL LIBRARIES
temple library archive, Eumenes II king of Pergamon was founding or enlarging and providing buildings for the library which, after Alexandria, was the greatest and the most famous library of the ancient world. This library building was one of the group which made Pergamon according to Pliny "far the noblest city of Asia Minor" and which most likely, either directly or at second hand, set its mark on the buildings of Herod at Jerusalem. Although, therefore, it is only in apostolical times that external Biblical history has directly to do with Pergamon, it appears, according to the historians of Pergamon and of Graeco-Roman libraries, that an actual influence of this architecture, direct and indirect, was embodied in the buildings of all Palestine from the middle of the second century, and notably in the libraries of the temple and in the Archive. It was probably felt, moreover, not on the building only, but on the book
[172]
