What started in 1416 as a small collection of manuscripts locked in wooden chests, has now grown into a global institution housing eight million books and manuscripts, billions of words, and millions of images, all communicating thousands of years of human thought.
— Anne Jarvis
Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World, opens free to the public today (Friday) and celebrates 4,000 years of recorded thought through the Library’s unique and irreplaceable collections. More than 70 per cent of the exhibits are displayed to the public for the first time in this exhibition.
Tracing the connections between Darwin and DNA, Newton and Hawking, and 3,000-year-old Chinese oracle bones and Twitter, the exhibition investigates, through six distinct themes, how Cambridge University Library’s millions of books and manuscripts have transformed our understanding of life here on earth and our place among the stars.
The iconic Giles Gilbert Scott building, opened in the 1930s, now holds more than eight million books, journals, maps and magazines – as well as some of the world's most iconic scientific, literary and cultural treasures.
The new exhibition puts on display Newton’s own annotated copy of Principia Mathematica, Darwin’s papers on evolution, 3,000-year-old Chinese oracle bones, a cuneiform tablet from 2,000BC, and the earliest reliable text for 20 of Shakespeare’s plays.
Other items going on display include:
- Edmund Halley’s handwritten notebook/sketches of Halley’s Comet (1682)
- Stephen Hawking’s draft typescript of A Brief History of Time
- Darwin’s first pencil sketch of Species Theory and his Primate Tree
- A 2nd century AD fragment of Homer’s Odyssey
- The Nash Papyrus – a 2,000-year-old copy of the Ten Commandments
- Codex Bezae – 5th century New Testament, crucial to our understanding of The Bible
- A hand-coloured copy of Vesalius’ 1543 Epitome – one of the most influential works in western medicine
- The earliest known record of a human dissection in England (1564)
- A Babylonian tablet dated 2039 BCE (the oldest object in the library)
- The Gutenberg Bible – the earliest substantive printed book in Western Europe (1455)
- The Book of Deer, 10th century gospel book: thought to be the oldest Scottish book and the first example of written Gaelic
- The first catalogue listing the contents of the Library in 1424, barely a decade after it was first identified in the wills of William Loring and William Hunden
The six Lines of Thought featured in the exhibition are: From clay tablets to Twitter feed (Revolutions in human communication); The evolution of genetics (From Darwin to DNA); Beginning with the word (Communicating faith); On the shoulders of giants (Understanding gravity); Eternal lines (Telling the story of history) and Illustrating anatomy (Understanding the body).
University Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “It’s extraordinary to think that the University Library, which started in 1416 as a small collection of manuscripts locked in wooden chests, has now grown into a global institution housing eight million books and manuscripts, billions of words, and millions of images, all communicating thousands of years of human thought.
“Our spectacular exhibition showcases six key concepts in human history that have been critical in shaping the world and culture we know today, illustrating the myriad lines of thought that take us back into the past, and forward to tomorrow’s research, innovation and literature.”
The University Library, which is older than both the British Library and the Vatican Library, has more than 125 miles of shelving and more than two million books immediately available to readers – making it the largest open-access library in Europe.
The first Line of Thought featured in the exhibition: From clay tablet to Twitter begins with a tiny 4,000-year-old tablet used as a receipt for wool, evidence of an advanced civilisation using a cuneiform script and Sumerian language, probably written in Girsu (Southern Iraq) and precisely dated to 2039BCE. The tablet is on public display for the first time in this exhibition.
From there, it charts the many and varied revolutions in communications throughout history, taking in Chinese oracle bones, the Gutenberg Bible, a palm leaf manuscript written in 1015AD, newspapers, chapbooks and 20th century Penguin paperbacks, before ending with a book containing Shakespeare’s Hamlet written in tweets.
Watch a video and read the full story
Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World opens to the public on Friday, March 11, 2016 and runs until Friday, September 30, 2016. Entry is free.
Image: Priceless treasures: in a shot commissioned to celebrate Cambridge University Library’s 600th anniversary, Professor Stephen Hawking is pictured with Newton’s annotated first edition of Principia Mathematica.
Credit: Graham CopeKoga
Reproduced courtesy of University of Cambridge
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