Library of Celsus

The Library of Celsus is an ancient Roman building in Ephesus, Anatolia, now part of Selçuk, Turkey. It was built in honour of the Roman Senator Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus, completed between circa 114–117 CE by Celsus' son, Gaius Julius Aquila (consul, 110 AD). The library was "one of the most impressive buildings in the Roman Empire" and built to store 12,000 scrolls and to serve as a mausoleum for Celsus, who is buried in a crypt beneath the library in a decorated marble sarcophagus. The Library of Celsus was the "third-largest library in the ancient world" behind both Alexandria and Pergamum.

The interior of the library was destroyed, supposedly by an earthquake in 262 A.D., (though other evidence points to a fire during a Gothic invasion in that same year) and the façade by another earthquake in the tenth or eleventh century A.D. It lay in ruins for centuries, until the façade was re-erected (anastylosis) by archaeologists between 1970 and 1978.

Celsus, in the honour of whom the library was originally built, had been consul in 92 AD where he was in charge of all public buildings, the Roman proconsul of Ephesus, the capital of the Asian province of Rome from 105–107 AD, and a wealthy and popular local citizen. He was a native of nearby Sardis and amongst the earliest men of purely Greek origin to become a consul in the Roman Empire and is honoured both as a Greek and a Roman on the library itself. Celsus paid for the construction of the library with his own personal wealth. After commissioned by his son in 114 AD, construction of the library was completed in circa 117 AD in Ephesus, a territory that was traditionally Greek. The building is important as one of the few remaining examples of an ancient Roman-influenced library. It also shows that public libraries were built not only in Rome itself but throughout the Roman Empire.

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