This illustration shows scholars using the Library of Alexandria. It was not the first library built, but it became one of the best known in antiquity.
It was to be the largest single repository of classical knowledge of the ancient world, holding all the “books” known at the time. Built by the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt in the 3rd century BC, the Library of Alexandria was said to contain hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls (up to 700,000 according to one ancient source) as part of the Herculean book of a king. effort to collect “all the books in the world”.
Great minds of the Hellenistic period studied and taught in Alexandria, a cosmopolitan capital on the Mediterranean founded by Alexander the Great. The mathematician and geographer Eratosthenes lived there, as did Aristarchus, the first astronomer to argue that the planets orbited the Sun. They and others were called the “heads” of the Alexandrian Library by several ancient authors, and we can easily imagine these geniuses with beards and toga hunched over parchment inside a magnificent colonnaded hall.
And then comes the tragic part: Julius Caesar started a fire to destroy the library and this – together with the subsequent fall of the Roman Empire – is to blame for the collective loss of knowledge that plunged Western civilization into the Dark Ages.
But is this true?
As intellectually vibrant as Alexandria was and as large as the Library of Alexandria looms in our imagination, “our actual information about this period, and specifically about the library, is very scant,” says Thomas Hendrickson, a historian of ancient libraries and their legacies. . . “If the Library of Alexandria really existed, we have no information about it. But even the legend of the library seems to have been a great inspiration to the entire ancient world.”
Content
- The legend begins with a fake letter
- Other 'facts' about the library
- The Romans accepted the idea
- Was the library destroyed?
- The Legacy of the Library of Alexandria
The legend begins with a fake letter
In the third century BCE, just as the Library of Alexandria was accumulating its record archive of parchments, a man named Aristeas wrote a letter to his brother Philocrates. Aristeas claimed to be a messenger of Egypt's ruling king, Ptolemy II Philadelphus. In his letter, Aristeas gave a first-hand account of how the Library of Alexandria came to be and how large it was:
“Demetrius of Falero, the president of the king's library, received
vast sums of money for the purpose of gathering, as far as
possible, all the books in the world. …On one occasion, when I
was present, he was asked: 'How many thousands of books are there in
library?' and he replied, 'More than two hundred thousand, O king, and I
I will make efforts in the immediate future to bring together the
remainder as well, so that the total of five hundred thousand can be
Reached."
The "Letter of Aristeas," as it is known, provides the earliest description of the monumental Library of Alexandria and portrays it as a truly "universal" library, intended to collect and translate into Greek all the knowledge of the ancient world.
“The problem with the 'Letter of Aristeas' is that it is a total forgery,” says Hendrickson, who teaches at Stanford University's Online High School.
Most scholars date the letter a century later (2nd century BC) and doubt the very existence of Aristeas. The forged letter is generally described as Jewish “propaganda” intended to show the importance of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (known as the Septuagint). The author of the letter attempted to expand the size and importance of the library and claimed that Ptolemy II himself had insisted that the Hebrew Bible be included in this repository of all great knowledge.
Other 'facts' about the library
But even some non-fake ancient writers have commented on how many volumes were actually held in the Alexandrian Library, and these estimates vary enormously.
Seneca, the Roman philosopher, wrote in 49 AD that “forty thousand books were burned in Alexandria,” in reference to Caesar's alleged destruction of the library. Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman historian writing three centuries later, claimed that 700,000 parchments, “gathered by the incessant energy of the Ptolemaic kings,” were destroyed during the Alexandrian war.
The Roman physician Galen, writing in the second century AD, said that Ptolemy II was able to accumulate such a large collection because he forced every incoming merchant ship to deliver all the books on board. The king's scribes then made copies of the books, gave them to the owners, and kept the originals for the library.
Historian Roger Bagnall called the six-figure estimates “strange” and calculated that if every known Greek author from the third century BC produced 50 scrolls each, this would still have resulted in just 31,250 volumes. Arriving at numbers like 200,000 or 700,000 scrolls assumes that historians are unaware of 90% ancient Greek writers or that hundreds of identical copies of each text were kept in the library.
The Romans accepted the idea
While the actual number of scrolls in the Alexandrian Library is confusing at best, one thing is clear: “This legendary notion of a library as a 'universal library' inspired real libraries,” says Hendrickson.
Julius Caesar returned from the Alexandrian war with grand plans to build a library to rival that of the Ptolemies in Egypt, but was assassinated before this could come to fruition. Caesar Augustus took on the task and built a large library on the Palatine Hill. Later, Roman leaders built their own libraries, but Hendrickson says we don't know exactly how these libraries functioned in a largely illiterate society.
“Ancient books were extremely valuable since each one was made by hand, so it's unlikely that the Romans would lend them to people on the streets,” says Hendrickson. “It's possible that Roman libraries were more like museums, these big monumental spaces where people could walk around and see statues of poets and these impressive books.”
In fact, the first museum or Mouseion , as it was known, was also in Alexandria. Its former function is also hotly debated by historians and academics, but its name – which means “seat of the Muses” – implies that it was a place of research and creative production.
The famous Library of Alexandria may have been inside the museum, according to Strabo, a Greek philosopher and historian who lived at the turn of the millennium. When talking about Alexandria's great book collection under Ptolemy II, Strabo refers to the museum library and a smaller library called the Serapeum, but never mentions the “great” Library of Alexandria as a separate structure. So far, archaeologists have also not found any remains that definitively point to this library.
Was the library destroyed?
“You will never find a library that has been destroyed more times than the Library of Alexandria,” says Hendrickson. That's because ancient writers loved to accuse their enemies of being barbaric fools who would burn down a fortress of knowledge.
As mentioned, Julius Caesar usually takes the blame and this is because Caesar himself claimed to have burned his way out of Alexandria in his war against rival Pompey in 48 BC Caesar ordered his troops to set fire to Pompey's ships in the port of Alexandria, and the conflagration spread to nearby warehouses and reportedly to the library.
But Caesar is not the only suspect. Later Roman emperors also sacked Alexandria in their military campaigns, and in 391 a group of Christian monks are said to have destroyed the Serapeum, the “daughter” library of the legendary Library of Alexandria. Could it have been anti-pagan Christians who stole this repository of classical knowledge from the ancient world? We will never know. (In the seventh century AD, Christians blamed the Muslim caliph Amr for the burning of Alexandria's books.)
Although these ancient accusations of book burnings were effective smear campaigns, there is no reason to believe that the Library of Alexandria was, in fact, destroyed. It could simply have fallen into disuse, historian Bagnall.
Papyrus scrolls were extremely fragile – not a single ancient scroll survived in the humid Mediterranean region, unlike scrolls from the drier climate of Egypt. To keep the library running, scribes would have to continually make new copies of each scroll every few years, a truly Sisyphean task. If the Ptolemies or later rulers of Alexandria had not invested heavily in maintaining the library, its scrolls would have rotted.
“It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival improved those ages,” wrote Bagnall. “Rather, the Dark Ages, if such it were, … show its darkness by the fact that the authorities of both East and West lacked the will and means to maintain a large library.”
The Legacy of the Library of Alexandria
What is far more interesting to library historians like Hendrickson and Bagnall than how many books the library contained or how it was destroyed is how the very idea of a “universal” library in Alexandria – legendary or not – inspired the creation of ambitious libraries. in the Renaissance. and in the modern era.
“Each of our great contemporary libraries owes something [to the Library of Alexandria],” Bagnall continued.
Without this ancient image, we might not have something like the Library of Congress, the closest thing to a “universal” library on the planet. The Library of Congress has 51 million cataloged books and 173 million items in total, including rare books, maps, sheet music and sound recordings.
Now that's cool
Nearly 2,000 ancient papyrus scrolls were recovered from the ruins of a city destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, but the charred scrolls proved impossible to read. Now, a team of scientists is using high-resolution X-ray technology to try to decipher what could be the oldest papyrus on the planet.
