Key Takeaways
It was supposed to be the great individual monument of classical knowledge in the ancient earthly concern , the holder of all the " books " known at the time . make by the Greek - speaking Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt in the third century B.CE . , the Library of Alexandria was said to turn back hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls ( as many as 700,000 according to one ancient root ) as part of one tycoon ’s Herculean effort to collect " all the books in the world . "
Great minds of the Hellenistic full point studied and taught in Alexandria , a cosmopolitan uppercase on the Mediterranean founded byAlexander the Great . The mathematician and geographer Eratosthenes lived there , as did Aristarchus , the first astronomer to argue that the planet orbited the sun . They and others were referred to as the " heads " of the Alexandrian Library by various ancient author , and we can easily picture these byssus - and - toga geniuses hunch forward over scroll inside a magnificent , colonnaded Asaph Hall .
And then comes the tragic part : Julius Caesarstarted a fire to put down the library and that — along with the later fall of theRoman Empire — is to blame for the collective red of cognition that dump Western civilisation into the Dark Ages .
But is this true ?
As intellectually vibrant as Alexandria was and as large as the Library of Alexandria loom in our resource , " our actual info about that full point , and specifically for the subroutine library , is pretty thin , " says Thomas Hendrickson , anhistorian of ancient librariesand their legacies . " If the Library of Alexandria really existed , we do n’t have any information about it . But even the legend of the library seems to have been a huge divine guidance for the total ancient world . "
The Legend Begins With a Fake Letter
In the third century B.C.E. , right when the Library of Alexandria was roll up its record - breaking archive of scrolls , a man named Aristeas wrote a letter to his brother Philocrates . Aristeas claimed to be a messenger to the ruling king in Egypt , Ptolemy II Philadelphus . In his letter , Aristeas give a firsthand explanation of how the Library of Alexandria came to be , and how very big it was :
The " Letter of Aristeas , " as it ’s known , provide the early description of the monolithic Library at Alexandria , and portrays it as a really " oecumenical " library intent on take in and translate into Greek all of the noesis of the ancient creation .
" The job with the ' Letter of Aristeas ' is that it ’s a total counterfeit , " says Hendrickson , whoteachesat the Stanford University Online High School .
Most scholars date the letter of the alphabet to a century by and by ( second century B.C.E. ) and doubt the very world of Aristeas . The forged letter is unremarkably described as Jewish " propaganda " intended to show the importance of the Hellenic displacement of the Hebrew Bible ( known as the Septuagint ) . The letter ’s writer was test to amplify the size and importance of the subroutine library and claim that Ptolemy II himself had insisted that the Hebrew Bible be included in this repository of all big knowledge .
Other ‘Facts’ About the Library
But even some non - false ancient writers chimed in about how many volume were really held at the Alexandrian Library , and those estimation alter wildly .
Seneca , the romish philosopher , wrotein 49 C.E. that " forty thousand books were burnt at Alexandria , " in point of reference to Caesar ’s aver destruction of the subroutine library . Ammianus Marcellinus , a R.C. historian write three one C later , claimedthat 700,000 scrolls , " bring in together by the unremitting energy of the Ptolemaic world-beater , " were put down during the Alexandrian warfare .
The Roman physician Galen , writing in the second one C C.E.,saidthat Ptolemy II was capable to amass such a huge ingathering because he drive all incoming merchandiser ship to hand over any Quran on display panel . The male monarch ’s scribes would then make copies of the books , deliver the copies to the owners and keep the pilot for the program library .
The historian Roger Bagnallcalledthe six - figure estimates " outlandish " and calculated that if every unmarried love Hellenic author of the third C B.C.E. produced 50 scrolls each that would still have resulted in only 31,250 book . To get at figures like 200,000 or 700,000 scrolls presumes that historian are incognizant of 90 percent of ancient Hellenic writers or that hundreds of superposable transcript of each text were kept in the library .
The Romans Ran With the Idea
While the genuine routine of scrolls in the Alexandrian Library is fuzzy at good , one thing is vindicated : " This legendary whim of a library as a ' universal library ' did inspire real subroutine library , " says Hendrickson .
Julius Caesar returned from the Alexandrian warfare with big plans for building a library that would touch the Ptolemies in Egypt , but he was assassinated before it could follow to realization . Caesar Augustus took up the job andbuilt a orotund libraryon the Palatine Hill . later on Roman leaders built their own libraries , but Hendrickson says that we do n’t know how exactly those libraries functioned in a mostly illiterate society .
" Ancient volume were extremely worthful since each one was hand-crafted , so it ’s unconvincing that the Romans were loaning these out to people on the street , " says Hendrickson . " It ’s possible that Roman libraries were more like museums , these big massive spaces where people could walk through and see statues of the poet and these telling books . "
In fact , the very first museum orMouseion , as it was known , was also in Alexandria . Its ancient function is also hotly debated by historians and academics , but its name — which stand for " seat of the Muse " — implies that it was a situation of research and creative yield .
The far-famed Library of Alexandria may have really been inside the museum , according to Strabo , a Greek philosopher and historian who be at the turn of events of the millennium . When talking about Alexandria ’s great collection of books under Ptolemy II , Strabo have-to doe with to the museum depository library and a diminished library called the Serapeum , butnever mentionsthe " great " Library of Alexandria as a disjoined structure . So far , archaeologists have not find any remainsthat definitively detail to this program library either .
Was the Library Destroyed?
" You will never find a program library that ’s been destroyed more times than the Library of Alexandria , " says Hendrickson . That ’s because ancient writer loved to accuse their enemies of being barbaric fools who would burn down a fortress of knowledge .
As refer , Julius Caesar normally gets the incrimination and that ’s because Caesar himself claimed to have burned his way out of Alexandria in his war against rival Pompey in 48 B.C.E. Caesar order his troop to set up fire to Pompey ’s ship in the Alexandria harbor , and the conflagration spread to nearby warehouses and allegedly to the library .
But Caesar is n’t the only defendant . Later Roman emperors also sacked Alexandria in their military campaign , and in 391 a group of Christian Thelonious Monk were report to havedestroyed the Serapeum , the " girl " library to the fabled Library of Alexandria . Could it have been anti - pagan Christians who rob the ancient world of this secretary of classical noesis ? We ’ll never know . ( In the 7th hundred C.E. , Christians blamed the Muslim Caliph Amr for burning Alexandria ’s books . )
While these ancient accusations of Holy Scripture electrocution were effective malignment safari , there ’s no reason to conceive that the Library of Alexandria was , in fact , destroyed . It could have simply fall into disrepair , wrotethe historian Bagnall .
Papyrus scrolls were extremely thin — not a unmarried ancient coil survives from the humid Mediterranean area , unlike those from the drier climate of Egypt . To keep the library break , copyist would have had to incessantly make fresh copies of each scroll every few years , a truly Sisyphean job . If the Ptolemies or later ruler of Alexandria did n’t put heavily in the library ’s upkeep , its scrolls would have moulder away .
" It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age , nor that its survival would have amend those ages,“wrote Bagnall . " Rather , the black age , if that is what they were , … show their iniquity by the fact that the authorities both eastern United States and west lacked the will and means to maintain a bully subroutine library . "
The Library of Alexandria’s Legacy
What ’s far more interesting to library historians like Hendrickson and Bagnall than how many books the library hold or how it was destroyed is how the very idea of a " oecumenical " library in Alexandria — legendary or not — inspired the creation of challenging libraries in the Renaissance and into the modern era .
" Every one of our great contemporary subroutine library owes something to [ the Library of Alexandria ] , " continued Bagnall .
Without this ancient image , we might not have something like theLibrary of Congress , the closest affair to a " world-wide " depository library on the planet . The Library of Congress holds 51 million cataloged book and 173 million total items including rare record , maps , canvass euphony and audio recordings .
