A new chapter in German history?

Walls believed to be Roman library found

When the Romans expanded across Europe 2,000 years ago, they made inroads into almost every corner of the continent, fighting as far away as Scotland and sending coins to what today is Estonia.

But Germany posed a particular challenge.

In year 9 of our modern calendar system, the Romans suffered an embarrassing defeat in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest near the modern-day city of Hannover. They never recovered from it and were permanently pushed back to the western side of the Rhine river that separates Germany from south to north, 50 miles away from Teutoburg. Centuries later, it was marauders from Germany that brought an end to the western half of the Roman empire.

Yet the Romans were quite active on the western side of the Rhine and they left behind a vast number of architectural masterpieces. Archaeologists still keep discovering remnants of that part of German history. And one of the most astonishing buildings from that era — the country’s oldest known public library — is only now being uncovered.

Built about 150 years after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, its walls recently re-emerged after centuries of darkness during the construction of a new community center right next to the city of Cologne’s famous cathedral.

The room that researchers believe was used as a library was 65 feet long and 30 feet wide, with a 30-foot high ceiling, according to estimates.

But what really captured the researchers’ attention were the roughly 30-inch deep wall recesses, which bore striking similarities with the setup of other rooms that were used as libraries during the Roman era.

Roman libraries have mostly been found in Egypt or Italy and the Cologne find may be the first such discovery in the Roman Empire’s northwestern regions, which at its peak spanned France, Britain and western Germany.

Across the empire, Roman emperors left their footprint by introducing currencies, occupying territories and constructing buildings that reflected a culture that prospered for centuries.

Researchers have since raised doubts over how public those libraries were, with the University of Georgia’s T. Keith Dix writing in 1994 that anecdotes from that time indicate that access remained mostly restricted to “authors close to imperial circles who might naturally be expected to have won access to libraries under imperial control.”