TheBibliotheca (Greek:Βιβλιοθήκη) orMyriobiblos (Μυριόβιβλος, "Ten Thousand Books") was a ninth-century work ofByzantinePatriarch of ConstantinoplePhotius, dedicated to his brother and composed of 279 reviews of books which he had read.

Bibliotheca was not meant to be a reference work, but was widely used as such in the 9th century, and is one of thefirst Byzantine works that could be called anencyclopedia.^[1]Reynolds and Wilson call it "a fascinating production, in which Photius shows himself the inventor of thebook-review,"^[2] and say its "280 sections... vary in length from a single sentence to several pages".^[2] The works he notes are mainly Christian and pagan authors from the 5th century BC to his own time in the 9th century AD. Almost half the books mentioned no longer survive. These would have disappeared in theSack of Constantinople by theFourth Crusade in 1204, in the finalFall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, or in the following centuries of Ottoman rule, during which wealth and literacy contracted dramatically in the subordinate Greek community.

Some older scholarship had speculated thatBibliotheca might have been composed inBaghdad at the time of Photius' embassy to theAbbasid court, since many of the mentioned works are rarely cited during the period before Photius, i.e. the so-called Byzantine "Dark Ages" (c. 630–800),[3] and since it was known that the Abbasids were interested intranslating Greek science and philosophy.^[4] However, modern specialists of the period, such asPaul Lemerle, have pointed out that this cannot be the case, since Photius himself clearly states in his preface and postscript to theBibliotheca that after he was chosen to take part in the embassy, he sent his brother a summary of the works he had readpreviously "since the time that I learned how to understand and evaluate literature," i.e. from his youth.^[5] A further difficulty with supposing thatBibliotheca was composed during rather than before the embassy, besides Photius' own explicit statement, is that the majority of the works inBibliotheca are of Christianpatristic theology, and most of the secular works are histories, grammars, and works of literature, particularly rhetoric, rather than works of philosophy or science, and the Abbasids showed no interest in having Greek history or Greek high literature like rhetoric translated, nor were they interested in translating Greek Christian works. Their interest in Greek texts was confined almost exclusively to science, philosophy and medicine.^[6] In fact, "there is almost no overlap (other than someGalen,Dioscorides, andVindonius Anatolius) between the inventory of secular works in Photius'sBibliotheca and those works that were translated into Arabic"^[7] in the Abbasid period.

• Editio princeps (in Greek):David Hoeschel, Augsburg, 1601. Modern critical edition by R. Henry.
• Wilson, Nigel Guy (2002).The Bibliotheca: a selection. Duckworth.ISBN 978-0-7156-2612-2.

This list isincomplete; you can help byadding missing items.(May 2024)

Source:Treadgold, Warren T. (1980).The Nature of the Bibliotheca of Photius. Dumbarton Oaks. pp. 117–168.ISBN 978-0-88402-090-5.

• Byzantine philosophy
• Greek Orthodox Christianity
• History of the Byzantine Empire

• Photius,Bibliotheca atThe Tertullian Project
• Photius,Bibliotheca (original text in Greek)

• 9th-century books
• Byzantine Greek encyclopedias
• Books of literary criticism
• 9th century in the Byzantine Empire

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Articles containing Greek-language text
• Incomplete lists from May 2024