Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel where I bring you new videos
every Friday looking at the events of the past. Today on History Calling, we’re travelling back
to ancient Egypt, to look at the history of the Library of Alexandria. Once home to much of the
knowledge our ancestors had gathered, the library was arguably the Wikipedia of the ancient world,
but when was it founded and by whom? How were its contents acquired and when and how was it
lost to the sands of time? Stay tuned to hear the evidence and decide for yourself.
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A degree of mystery surrounds the foundation of the library of Alexandria,
largely because the earliest sources which mention it are so unreliable.
The oldest document we have which notes its existence is the second century BC
‘Letter of Aristeas’ also known as the ‘Letter to Philocrates’. The author was supposedly a courtier
of King (or Pharaoh) Ptolemy II Philadelphos of Egypt, but there is general agreement in the
scholarship I’ve read that Aristeas was not a real person and that the document is very untrustworthy
and littered with other information which can be proven (through comparisons to other sources), to
be false. Another heavily used source is the work of Byzantium polymath, John Tzetzes, who lived in
the 12th century AD, so a millennium later. His collection of works (which obviously drew on much
older writings) have also been found to be riddled with errors when compared with other sources.
Nevertheless, these are the two best sources available for the early history of the library
and they have produced two competing stories as to how it came into being.
The first tale you’ll often hear is that the Library of Alexandria was created in around 300 BC
or perhaps a little later, at the behest of this man, King Ptolemy I Sotor. Ptolemy I had been one
of Alexander the Great’s main generals and after a power struggle with other generals following
Alexander’s death in 323 BC, he gained control over Egypt, including Alexander’s namesake city,
Alexandria. Reigning from 305 to 282 BC, Ptolemy Sotor supposedly had the library created with
the help of a man named Demetrius of Phaleron, who was a scholar and a former ruler of Athens;
a city he’d been driven out of in 307 BC. The second version of the story gives credit to
Ptolemy I’s son, the aforementioned Ptolemy II Philadelphos, who reigned from 282 to 246 BC.
Demetrius is still present, but this time helping the second Ptolemy, alongside other men named
Lykophron of Chalkis, Zenodotus of Ephesos and Alexandros of Aetolia. As the historian Roger
S. Bagnall has pointed out however, it’s unlikely that Demetrius and Ptolemy Philadelphos would have
worked together on the Library as Demetrius had supported the claim of Philadelphos’ half-brother
to the throne, thereby earning the new King’s enmity. In short, we don’t know exactly when
or by whom the Library was created, but it seems clear that the Ptolemy royal family
was heavily involved and that the Library got up and running sometime during the 3rd century BC.
Its exact location in Alexandria is unclear, however it's believed to have been situated
within the white square you see here on this image from NASA, apparently near the modern day Nabu
Daniel Street and to the north of Horreya Avenue. There were also in fact, two libraries, according
to John Tzetzes. One which he referred to as the outer library, and another, larger one ‘inside
the Palace complex’, meaning the royal palace of the Ptolemies. We don’t know anything about their
architecture, but it’s a safe bet that they will have had plenty of shelves to hold scrolls. The
Library (or libraries) were also part of a larger learning complex, the other arm of which was the
museo, from which the modern word museum derives. This literally meant the home of the muses and was
a place where scholars could come together to live, learn and teach. We do have a description
of this building from the writer Strabo, who wrote in roughly 30-25 BC and said that:
‘The Museum is a part of the palaces. It has a public walk and a place furnished with seats,
and a large hall, in which the men of learning, who belong to the Museum, take their common meal.’
Together, the Library and the Museum therefore formed something akin to a modern university.
Egypt was the ideal place to create a library, for it was home to the papyrus plant,
which was used to create papyrus to write on, as you see in this example which shows the Book
of the Dead of the Priest Imhotep (whose name you might recognise from the movie The Mummy).
When it comes to the number of books (or rather scrolls like this one) in the Library,
again we have discrepancies in the sources. The writer calling himself Aristaes says that
Demetrious told Ptolemy II that it housed ‘More than two hundred thousand, O king,
and I shall make endeavour in the immediate future to gather together the remainder also,
so that the total of five hundred thousand may be reached’. Other sources give wildly
different numbers, ranging from 40,000 to 700,000. Remember though that scrolls could
hold multiple works on them, so their number doesn’t match the number of texts collected.
Roger Bagnall also sounds another word of caution here, urging us to consider how many books even
existed in this period of time to be placed in the library. The printing press would not be invented
until the mid-15th century after all. Every item in the library and indeed the known world
had to written out by hand by the relatively small number of literate individuals alive at the time
and while some authors certainly lived and died and have been forgotten entirely by history,
Bagnall doubts that there were enough ancient writers whose work existed in the fourth and
even the third and second centuries BC to fill up the number of scrolls being cited by some sources,
not unless the library held dozens of copies of each work. Nor, he says, could such high numbers
of scrolls have been indexed, for indexing systems which could have been used to organise such vast
quantities of material had yet to be invented. Instead the Library had the Pinakes or Tables, a
120 volume catalogue of all Greek writings written by the 3rd century AD librarian, Callimachus of
Cyrene, which, according to historian Lionel Casson, was likely based on a shelf list of the
Library of Alexandria’s contents. Nevertheless, even if it was smaller than some estimates, the
Library was certainly huge by the standards of the day and it was an impressive accomplishment. It
contained works on every subject matter known to man at the time, from literature to mathematics,
to cook books. But how was this accomplishment realised? How were its contents collected?
To answer this, we again turn to ancient sources. The man you see here was called Galen of Pergamon
and he was a Greek writer living in the 2nd century AD (so about 500 years after the supposed
foundation of the Library). Here’s what he had to say about how the Library gained its contents:
Ptolemy the king of Egypt [meaning Ptolemy III, who ruled from 246 to 222 BC] was so eager to
collect books, that he ordered the books of everyone who sailed there to be brought to him.
The books were then copied into new manuscripts. He gave the new copy to the owners, whose books
had been brought to him after they sailed there, but he put the original copy in the library with
the inscription "a [book] from the ships". They say that a copy of the third book of
the Epidemics [which was a book written in about 400 BC by the writer Hippocrates] has been found
with the inscription, "a [book] from the ships, as emended by Mnemon of Sidē". Some claim that
the inscription does not say "as emended", but simply gives the name of Mnemon; because when
books were taken from all the others who sailed there, the servants of the king wrote down their
names in the copies that were deposited in the storehouses (the servants did not place the books
in the library immediately, but first they stored them away in piles in some other buildings).
This little story suggests that knowledge was gathered up from all across the known world,
but it’s also interesting for what it tells us about how the books were supposedly organised
before being placed in the main Library. Incidentally, if you’re wondering why older
books were preferred over fresh copies, it’s because they were believed to be more accurate,
as the process of copying might introduce errors. Galen continues with another anecdote,
showing just how devious Ptolemy III could be in his pursuit of knowledge for his library:
'This Ptolemy is said to have given sufficient proof of his eagerness to collect old books,
by his behaviour towards the Athenians. After giving them fifteen talents of silver as a
surety [and a talent was a unit of weight and 15 talents was an astronomical sum],
he received from them the manuscripts of Sophocles and Euripides and Aeschylus,
[and these were three of the most famous ancient Greek writers from the 6th and 5th centuries BC]
on the understanding that he would simply make new copies from the manuscripts,
and then promptly return them intact. But after he had produced magnificent new copies
on the finest writing material, he kept the books that the Athenians had sent to him,
and sent back to them the copies that he had made. He urged them to keep the fifteen talents,
and at the same time to receive new copies instead of the old books that they had sent to him.
The Athenians would have had no other option, even if he had kept the old books without sending new
copies to them, because when they accepted the money, they had agreed that if he kept the books,
then they would keep the money; and so they accepted the new copies and kept the money.'
As well as copying and even stealing the books of others, agents were also sent out to other cities
far and wide, including Athens and Rhodes, to purchase books for the Library; the result being
that in its heyday, it (in combination with the Museum) was a great centre of learning.
It was freely available to those who were educated enough to use it (admittedly a small number of
people, but this is antiquity we’re talking about) and had a Director, or Head Librarian
to oversee its functions. The first of these was apparently the Greek scholar Zenodotus, who worked
on the poems of Homer, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey and who instituted an alphabetical
organisation system in the library, before Callimachus and his Pinakes came along later.
The Library attracted other learned men too, including the Greek polymath, Eratosthenes,
who came to the city during the reign of Ptolemy III and who is remembered for, among other things,
the incredible feat of managing to calculate the Earth’s circumference to within a few miles
(which by-the-by, just goes to show that there were people alive even thousands of years ago
who knew the Earth isn’t flat). Eratosthenes would end up becoming the Chief Librarian of
the Library of Alexandria from roughly 245 to 205 BC, followed by other eminent scholars including
Aristophanes of Byzantium from 205 to 185 BC, who unfortunately ended up in prison for life
after an attempt was made to poach him to be the librarian at the library belonging to the Attalid
dynasty of Pergamum. Here you can see the position of Pergamum (which was in modern day Turkey),
relative to Alexandria. So, we’ve heard how and when the Library may have been constructed,
grown and used, but how was such an incredible achievement lost to history?
There are several stories about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
One theory holds that it was all Julius Caesar’s fault. Supposedly when he came to the city in 48
BC, he ended up trapped in the Palace complex by fighters loyal to his enemy, Achillas. According
to the writer Plutarch ‘Caesar encountered the peril of being shut off from water, since the
canals were dammed up by the enemy; in the second place, when the enemy tried to cut off his fleet,
he was forced to repel the danger by using fire, and this spread from the dockyards and destroyed
the great library’ which I’ve highlighted on this map. The historian Dio Cassius,
writing of the same event, tells us that “many places were set on fire,
with the result that the docks and the storehouses of grain among other buildings were burned,
and also the library, whose volumes, it is said, were of the greatest number and excellence.’
This seems pretty cut and dry but modern historians have deduced that the destruction
couldn’t have been as complete as is insinuated here and indeed another translation of Dio Cassius
implies that only the books in the storehouses, which were waiting to be taken into the Library
were actually burnt. In any event, it seems that the Library (or perhaps the Museum), was damaged
in some way, but it couldn’t have been destroyed completely as it was still largely intact during
the Roman occupation of Egypt. The amount of scholarship which we know was taking place in
Alexandria in the decades afterwards strongly suggests that a good library was still present
and according to Plutarch, another famous Roman who visited Egypt, Mark Anthony, supposedly
gave 200,000 scrolls taken from other libraries at Pergamum (which was by then under his control), to
his lover, Queen Cleopatra, items which can only have been intended for the great Egyptian Library.
Admittedly even Plutarch says that this story could be fiction, but as Lionel Casson has
pointed out, the tale wouldn’t have been told by him if the Library of Alexandria was no longer
in existence. Not only do we know the Library survived Caesar, we also know that it survived him
by many, many decades at the very least. This is because during the reign of Emperor Domitian,
which lasted from 81-96 AD (so 133 years after the fire set by Caesar), we hear from one of
his biographers, Suetonius, that the Emperor ‘provided for having the libraries [meaning
Roman libraries], which were destroyed by fire, renewed at very great expense, seeking everywhere
for copies of the lost works, and sending scribes to Alexandria to transcribe and correct them.’
So we know Caesar didn’t destroy the Library, though he may have damaged it and/or the Museum.
What are the other theories regarding its fate? One is that it was mostly destroyed in
around 273 AD when the Emperor Aurelian, whilst battling his enemies in the Kingdom of Palmyra,
brought the fighting to Alexandria, wreaking havoc on the Palace complex in the process. Another is
that it survived all the way up to 642 AD, when the Arab conqueror Amr was supposedly ordered
to burn all the books by the caliph Omar. This story dates to long after the event it supposedly
describes however and as with so many other theories regarding the Library’s destruction,
it is difficult to take it too seriously. As there were actually two libraries and the museum,
it’s also possible that a combination of some or all of these events occurred, but with different
parts of the complex being damaged or destroyed at different times. Another idea also holds that
the Library wasn’t lost in one fell swoop, or even in two or three cataclysmic events,
but that it gradually deteriorated over the course of many decades, even centuries,
as less money was directed towards its upkeep (which would have necessitated the laborious task
of constantly recopying the older items), and the humid, rather than desert climate in Alexandria,
possibly combined with insect and rodent activity, gradually destroyed the papyrus. Whatever the
cause, by about the middle of the 1st millennium AD, the Library seems to have been no more.
So what do you think of this story? Do you believe that the Library of Alexandria was as impressive as
some ancient sources would have us believe, or that its size and the scope of its holdings
has been exaggerated and how do you think it was lost? Let me know in the comments section below.
If you enjoy your history with a little dash of mystery, why not check out my historical
mysteries playlist next, where you can hear about strange disappearances, dancing plagues,
a whole room made of amber which was stolen by the Nazis and much more? Whatever you choose,
please enjoy and until next time, keep learning.