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 American Society of
Indexers 
How
Information Retrieval StartedJump to:
Tables of
contents | Alphabetization
| Hierarchies
of information | Indexes in
history
The papyrus scroll
used by the ancient Greeks and Romans was not the most efficient way of
storing information in a written form and of retrieving it. Yet, as Greek
and Roman scholars began to write large works that were compilations of
data of various sorts, they found it useful to devise various means of
organizing the material to make locating certain passages easier for the
reader. Here are a few examples of what they did.
Tables of
contents
Pliny the Elder (died 79 A.D.) wrote a massive work
called The Natural History in 37 Books. It was a kind of
encyclopedia that comprised information on a wide range of subjects. In
order to make it a bit more user friendly, the entire first book of the
work is nothing more than a gigantic table of contents in which he lists,
book by book, the various subjects discussed. He even appended to each
list of items for each book his list of Greek and Roman authors used in
compiling the information for that book. He indicates in the very end of
his preface to the entire work that this practice was first employed in
Latin literature by Valerius
Soranus, who lived during the last part of the second century B.C. and the
first part of the first century B.C. Pliny's statement that Soranus was
the first in Latin literature to do this indicates that it must have
already been practiced by Greek writers.
One method of information organization which we take for granted
nowadays, namely alphabetization, was probably first devised by Greek
scholars of the third century B.C. at the library of
Alexandria in Egypt in order to help them organize the growing numbers of
Greek literary works. If I recall correctly, the subject of
alphabetization and its use in classical antiquity was treated years ago
in a little monograph by Lloyd
Daly.
There are a few other ancient works which employed arranging material
under headings in order to make the writing more user friendly and easier
to consult.
Valerius Maximus wrote a collection of memorable
deeds and sayings ca.30 A.D. The work is divided into nine books, and each
book is subdivided into chapters, and each chapter has its own heading,
and all entries within that chapter contain anecdotes taken from ancient
literature and history which illustrate that theme.
Marcus Julius Frontinus, a Roman senator of the
late first century A.D. and early second century A.D., wrote a book of
military strategems in four books. Each book concerns itself with a
specific area of warfare. Each book is then subdivided into chapters that
each address one specific aspect of the book's major theme. Each chapter
has a heading to clue the reader, and the chapter itself consists of brief
extracts taken from historical works that illustrate the practical
application of the topic.
Finally, Aulus Gellius wrote a work entitled The
Attic Nights ca. 160 A.D. in 20 books. The work is a crazy quilt
assortment of items on Greek and Roman history, philosophy, grammar,
rhetoric, and antiquarian material in general. Since the work was composed
with no real order but as the various topics occurred to the author, each
chapter of every book concerns an isolated subject, and this subject is
clearly spelled out in a title heading that stands at the beginning of the
chapter. A reader could therefore skim through a book and locate the
subject by glancing over the titles of the chapters.
Interested in more?
A brief but good discussion of the problems of
ancient scholarship posed by the use of the papyrus scroll can be found on
pp. 101-116 of Varro the Scholar, by Jens Erik
Skydsgaard, published in 1968 in the series Analecta Romana Instituti
Danici.
Gary Forsythe
Institute for Advanced Study
gfgf@math.ias.edu
(from Hans Wellisch's Indexing from A
to Z, H.W. Wilson Co., 1991)
Book indexes. Members of
the societies of indexers may well take pride in the fact that this sense
of index is indeed the oldest among the figurative or applied senses of
the word, and that this specific usage (like the word itself) goes back to
ancient Rome. There, when used in relation to literary works, the term
index was used for the little slip attached to papyrus scrolls on
which the title of the work (and sometimes also the name of the author)
was written so that each scroll on the shelves could be easily identified
without having to pull them out for inspection. "... ut [librarioli]
sumant membranulam, ex qua indices fiant, quos vos Graeci ... sillybus
appelatis" (so that [the copyists] may take some bits of parchment to make
title slips from them, which you Greeks call sillybus) (Cicero, Atticus,
4.41.1). From this developed the usage of index for the title of
books: "Sunt duo libelli diverso titulo, alteri 'gladius', alteri 'pugio'
index erat" (There are two books with different titles, one called "The
sword", the other having the title "The dagger") (Suetonius,
Caligula, 49.3) Those two books, by the way, were what we would
call today "hit lists" of people whom Caligula wished to have assassinated
shortly before that same fate befell him. At about the same time, in the
first century A.D., the meaning of the word was extended from "title" to a
table of contents or a list of chapters (sometimes with a brief abstract
of their contents) and hence to a bibliographical list or catalog...
However, indexes in the modern sense, giving exact locations of names
and subjects in a book, were not compiled in antiquity, and only very few
seem to have been made before the age of printing. There are several
reasons for this. First, as long as books were written in the form of
scrolls, there were neither page nor leaf numbers not line counts (as we
have them now for classical texts). Also, even had there been such
numerical indicators, it would have been impractical to append an index
giving exact references, because in order for a reader to consult the
index, the scroll would have to be unrolled to the very end and then to be
rolled back to the relevant page. (Whoever has had to read a book
available only on microfilm, the modern successor of the papyrus scroll,
will have experienced how difficult and inconvenient it is to go from the
index to the text.) Second, even though popular works were written in many
copies (sometimes up to several hundreds),no two of them would be exactly
the same, so that an index could at best have been made to chapters or
paragraphs, but not to exact pages. Yet such a division of texts was
rarely done (the one we have now for classical texts is mostly the work of
medieval and Renaissance scholars). Only the invention of printing around
1450 made it possible to produce identical copies of books in large
numbers, so that soon afterwards the first indexes began to be compiled,
especially those to books of reference, such as herbals. (pages
164-166)
Index entries were not always alphabetized by considering every letter
in a word from beginning to end, as people are wont to do today. Most
early indexes were arranged only by the first letter of the first word,
the rest being left in no particular order at all. Gradually,
alphabetization advanced to an arrangement by the first syllable, that is,
the first two or three letters, the rest of an entry still being left
unordered. Only very few indexes compiled in the 16th and early 17th
centuries had fully alphabetized entries, but by the 18th century full
alphabetization became the rule... (p. 136)
(For more information on the subject of indexes, please see Professor
Wellisch's Indexing from A to Z, which contains an account of an indexer
being punished by having his ears lopped off, a history of narrative
indexing, an essay on the zen of indexing, and much more. Please, if you
quote from this page, CREDIT THE AUTHOR. Thanks.)
Indexes go way back beyond the 17th century. The Gerardes Herbal from
the
1590s had several fascinating indexes according to Hilary
Calvert. Barbara Cohen
writes that the alphabetical listing in
the earliest ones only went as far as the first
letter of the
entry... no one thought at first to index each entry in either
letter-by-letter or word-by-word order. Maja-Lisa writes that Peter
Heylyn's
1652 Cosmographie in Four Bookes includes a
series of tables at the end.
They are alphabetical indexes and
he prefaces them with "Short Tables may not seeme
proportionalble to so long a Work, expecially in an Age wherein there
are so many that pretend to learning, who study more the Index then they
do the Book."
Other articles on the history of indexing:
"The Oldest Printed Indexes," Hans Wellisch, The Indexer 15 (2),
p. 73-82, 1986.
"Early Humanist Indexing," Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press
as an Agent of Change quoted in The Indexer 14 (1), p. 58,
April, 1984
"Indexing," Hans Wellisch, in Encyclopedia of Library History,
Wiegand and Davis, p. 268-270
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