From the Temple of the Muses to the Hall of Knowledge.
藏書閣 (장서각) means a hall for keeping books. museum means museum; the temple of the Muses. East Asian idiom and Western myth mirror the same human truth.
The Meeting
The Mouseion of Alexandria was both a temple consecrated to the nine Muses and the greatest library of the ancient world, while the Joseon royal house had its Jangseogak, where all the books of the dynasty were kept. One was a sanctuary of knowledge open to foreign scholars; the other, a treasury of records accessible to royalty alone. Yet both pointed to the same truth -- human civilization begins, in earnest, only when it builds a place to keep its books.
Western Myth — The Mouseion, the Temple of the Muses
Mouseion (Μουσεῖον) means, literally, "the house of the Muses." In the early 3rd century BCE, Ptolemy I, successor to Alexander the Great, founded a vast complex of learning at Alexandria in Egypt -- a temple enshrining the nine Muses and, at the same time, the greatest library of the ancient world (the Library of Alexandria). The Mouseion held lecture halls, dining rooms, gardens, an astronomical observatory, an anatomical laboratory, and as many as seven hundred thousand papyrus scrolls. The greatest scholars of the ancient world -- Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Hero -- conducted their research there. The Ptolemaic dynasty seized the books from every ship that entered the harbor of Alexandria, copied them, kept the originals in the library, and returned the copies -- so that the Mouseion's holdings grew explosively. The word museum entered English in the 1610s; at first it meant "a space for scholarly research," and only in the 18th century did it shift to its modern sense of "a place of exhibition." To go to a museum today is, in truth, to enter the temple of the Muses.
Once you learn that the etymology of museum has nothing to do with mouse, the word suddenly looks different. The essence of the Mouseion was not exhibition but preservation and research. The seven hundred thousand scrolls were not a mere collection but a backup system for human knowledge. When Caesar's army invaded Alexandria, part of the library burned, and it was decisively destroyed during the 7th-century Arab conquest. The death of the Mouseion was the death of the ancient system of knowledge, and for the next fifteen hundred years humanity did not again possess a knowledge infrastructure of comparable scale.
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Oxford English Dictionary"museum" etymology entry.
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Etymonlinemuseum word origin.
Eastern Hall — The Book Repository of the Joseon Royal House, the Jangseogak
Jangseogak (藏書閣) means, literally, "a hall (閣) where books (書) are stored away (藏)." From early on, the Joseon royal house systematically preserved royal texts, uigwe (儀軌, records of royal ceremonies), and royal genealogies. In 1782, during the reign of King Jeongjo, the king established the Outer Gyujanggak (外奎章閣) on Ganghwa Island to store royal books including the uigwe. Within the palace in Hanyang there was also the Gyujanggak (奎章閣), which was not merely a library but a royal scholarly institution that Jeongjo himself directed. Jeongjo promoted learning by appointing young scholars such as Jeong Yak-yong as librarian-editors of the Gyujanggak. After the Japanese colonial period, the royal documents were scattered, and the uigwe held in the Outer Gyujanggak were looted by French forces during the 1866 French campaign against Korea (some were returned in 2011 in the form of a permanent loan). Today the Jangseogak of the Academy of Korean Studies holds some two hundred and fifty thousand items of royal materials, uigwe, genealogies, and old documents, making it a core infrastructure for the study of Korea.
If the Mouseion was a sanctuary of knowledge open to foreign scholars, the Jangseogak was a treasury of authority accessible to royalty alone. The West saw the library as the infrastructure of scholarship; the East saw it as a symbol of power. Yet in the end both met similar fates -- the Mouseion to conquest, the Outer Gyujanggak to plunder, both scattered by violence from without. Those who gathered the books were the powerful, but those who lost them were, in the end, the powerful as well.
Where the Mirrors Meet — Where the Two Myths Converge
Both share the theme of from the temple of the Muses to the hall of knowledge.
Museum, from Greek myth, and the Jangseogak, from the East Asian tradition, captured the same human truth.
Both live on in everyday language. Museum still endures in English, and Jangseogak in Korean.
Yet their modes of expression differ. The West conveyed this wisdom through a mythic character, while the East conveyed it through the combination of Chinese characters.
Mnemonic — One Line to Take Home
- ✓ museum = from Mouseion. Museum; the temple of the Muses.
- ✓ 藏書閣 = a hall for keeping books.
- ✓ Remember in one line: "Museum and Jangseogak -- two different civilizations telling the same story."
"Myth never dies. It still breathes today within museum and Jangseogak."
