Library of Alexandria

I decided to make this article about a beautiful yet tragic story that not so many people heard about and even less people know the story behind it. I think it’s so sad that such a beautiful piece of history died and buried with it the passion of knowledge.

The Alexandrian Library (or Museum of Alexandria). Was a shrine of the Muses modelled after the Lyceum of Aristotle in Athens. The museum was a place of study which included lecture areas, gardens, a zoo, and shrines. For each of the nine muses as well as the library itself. It has been estimated that at one time the Library of Alexandria held over half a million documents from Assyria, Greece, Persia, Egypt, India and many other nations. Over 100 scholars lived at the Museum full time to perform research, write, lecture or translate and copy documents. The library was so large it actually had another branch or “daughter” library at the Temple of Serapes. It held many documents from the ancient world which I think make the tragedy even more tragic.

The loss of the library, the ancient world’s single greatest archive of knowledge, has been lamented for ages. But how and why it was lost is still a mystery. The mystery exists not for lack of suspects but from an excess of them.

According to Plutarch, the first person to blame is Julius Caesar. On his pursuit of Pompey into Egypt in 48 BCE, Caesar was cut off by a large fleet of Egyptian boats in the harbour of Alexandria. He ordered the boats to be burned. The fleet was destroyed, but the flames spread to the city and the library. It’s not known how much of the library was destroyed.

The second, more famous, burning of the library came at the hands of Theophilus who was Patriarch of Alexandria from 385 to 412 CE. He turned the Temple of Serapis into a Christian church. It is likely that the collection was destroyed by the Christians who moved in. Some sources say nearly 10 percent of the library’s collection was housed in the Temple of Serapis. In the following years, the Christian attack against the library escalated, and the last great pagan philosopher and librarian, Hypatia, was tortured and killed.

Another one is the muslim conquest in 642 CE (or thereafter). when Alexandria came under Muslim rule. The Muslim ruler, Caliph Omar, asserted that the library’s contents would ‘’either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous’’. The contents of the library were then supposedly used as tinder for the city’s bathhouses. Even then, it is said that it took six months for all the materials to burn.

Though it was the largest library in the ancient world, and the repository of so much Greek literature that was eventually passed down to us, and also so much that was eventually lost, the number of papyrus rolls preserved at Alexandria at its peak, of any other time, is unknown, At its peak, the number of rolls that it might have held has been estimated by numerous scholars, without any reliable evidence, from as many as 400,000 to 700,000 to as few as 40,000, or even less. A typical papyrus roll probably contained a text about the length of one book of Homer. No known documents from the Library of Alexandria have been recovered. The ruins of the library have also not been yet formally identified.

Written by: Oulaya Msamri