The Libraryof Civilisation
Every civilisation’s foundational texts, indexed in one place, held in public trust — from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Universal Declaration, in the languages they were written.
A library is a promise that what was thought can be thought again — in every language it was thought in.
The written record of humanity is not a single canon. It is the braid of many — Sumerian tablet and Sanskrit sūtra, Greek elenchus and Chinese analect, Arabic commentary and K’iche’ cosmology — each the infrastructure of a civilisation, each held unequally by the digital libraries that survived the twentieth century.
Project Gutenberg gave the Western canon a public-domain home. ctext did the same for classical Chinese. Perseus for the Greco-Roman. Wikisource for the polyglot middle. Our task is the next one: to gather these traditions into a single, provenance-bearing archive that treats every civilisation as a first-class tradition — not an appendix.
We ingest from verified upstream libraries, we credit them plainly, and we keep the sources open for mirroring. The ambition is scale. The discipline is provenance.
— The Editors, Ninth Heaven Literature & Arts Association (NHLAA)
The Rooms
Nine rooms hold the library. Each is a tradition; each a door. Enter a room to see its index and to pick up its texts where they have been accessioned.
- 01
Mesopotamia & Egypt
The earliest written record of law, myth, and mortality.
Enter → - 02
Chinese
A continuous four-thousand-year textual tradition.
Enter → - 03
Indian
Veda, epic, sutra — the roots of Indic thought.
Enter → - 04
Greco-Roman
Epic, geometry, rhetoric, empire.
Enter → - 05
Islamic World
Revelation, medicine, history, the thousand nights.
Enter → - 06
Japanese
Court literature, chronicle, and the way of the sword.
Enter → - 07
African
Oral epic, chronicle, and the modern African novel.
Enter → - 08
Indigenous Americas
The surviving record of pre-Columbian cosmology and voice.
Enter → - 09
Modern & Global
The shared texts of the scientific and rights-bearing era.
Enter →
Upstream Sources
We ingest, verify, and rehouse. Every text in the archive carries its upstream attribution. These are the libraries we stand on.
70,000+ public-domain works, primarily European.
Pre-modern Chinese canon with parallel translation.
Classical Greek and Latin texts with apparatus.
Multilingual community-verified editions.
Scanned editions and preservation copies.
Research-library scholarly archive.
Comparative religion and mythology.
Sanskrit, Tamil, Bengali, and other Indic languages.
Classical Arabic and Islamic texts.
Arabic manuscripts and digital heritage.
Primary sources across world cultures.
European manuscripts, prints, and artworks.
Proposing a source or contesting an attribution? Editorial review is public. See the colophon.
Principles
Four rules govern what enters the library and how it is held.
- I.
Provenance
Every text enters with a verified edition, translator, language, and rights basis. Upstream sources are named, not obscured.
- II.
Plurality
The canon is not one tradition. The library admits Greek and Sanskrit, Akkadian and K'iche', Arabic and Nahuatl.
- III.
Longevity
Static-first, open-format, mirrorable. The library should outlive its tools, its platforms, and its editors.
- IV.
Austerity
Typography carries the hierarchy. Surfaces stay quiet. Motion orients, never entertains.
Editorial foundation first.
The catalog, reading surfaces, and ingestion pipelines from Gutenberg, ctext, Perseus, Wikisource, and the rest arrive in subsequent plans. This foundation is the shell that will carry them — the masthead, the index, the principles, and the quiet paper they rest on.