Abstract

In ancient Egypt, temples were not only religious sanctuaries but also community centers. One of the core spaces created in the temple is the facility where priests and scribes copied and preserved texts on papyrus and other media. Its common designation was ‘pr-mḏ’(House of Books) and the ‘per-(nw)-seshw’(House of Scrolls). The general term used during that time was ‘Per Ankh’, and the modern term for it is ‘temple library’. Therefore, this study first identified the character and identity of the Per Ankh attached to the temple, and then traced whether it is appropriate to designate ‘healing place of the souls’ depicted on the hypostyle hall(Per Ankh) in the Ramesseum(mortuary temple) built by Ramses II of the New Kingdom as a library. As a result, Per Ankh, a hieroglyph combining the Per(house) and Ankh(life), was revealed to be a multi-purpose complex facility consisting of a learning and research center, a treatment and healing center with medical facilities and sanatoriums, a religious ceremony and a center for the celebration of eternal life, a scriptorium and a library. Therefore, the traditional argument that Per Ankh refers to a library cannot be justified. In the same context, the inscription ‘Ψυχῆς ἰατρεῖον’ on the doorplate of the hypostyle hall of the Ramesseum, which was first introduced by Greek historian Hecataeus of Miletus in the 4th century BC, was translated into Latin as ‘Psychēs Iatreion’ by Diodorus Siculus in the 1st century BC and described as the motto of the sacred library. However, Psyche is the goddess of Greek and Roman mythology, and Iatreion means hospital(clinic, healing center) and pharmacy, so Per Ankh in the Ramesseum is a space to heal the soul of the pharaoh (Ka). Therefore, ‘Psychēs Iatreion = library’ is a distortion and a mistranslation. It is not the motto of the library, but a metaphor for the Per Ankh.