According to a medieval legend, the library of Alexandria was destroyed on the orders of the
Caliph Omar. There were so many books, the story goes, that the only way to dispose of them was to
use them as fuel in the city’s 4,000 bathhouses. So into the furnaces they went, day after day,
week after week, the wit and wisdom of a thousand years going up in smoke, and bits of
blackened books raining on the weary rooftops of Alexandria. It took six months to burn them all.
This never actually happened. Even if the Caliph had wanted to destroy Alexandria’s books,
he would have found few to burn. By his time, the library had already vanished, and was already
shrouded in mystery. That mystery endures. The library’s site has never been discovered,
and is unlikely to ever emerge from its concrete tomb beneath the modern
metropolis. Many of the questions that surround it can never be answered. But in this video,
I hope to at least contextualize the significance of the Library’s loss.
The Library of Alexandria was established around 300 BC by Ptolemy I. Ptolemy,
once a companion of Alexander the Great, had established himself as king of Egypt,
with the bustling seaside metropolis of Alexandria as his capital. By collecting texts
and intellectuals, Ptolemy hoped to burnish the reputation of his kingdom
and capital throughout the Greek world. To those ends, he offered generous stipends
to any famous scholar who would join his court, and began aggressively acquiring books.
Ptolemy’s library was part of Museion, a sort of proto-university that stood beside the royal
palace. The Museion seems to have consisted of a courtyard surrounded by shady stoas and
lecture halls, and included a dining room where the resident scholars took meals. The
storerooms and reading rooms of the library were apparently attached to the main Museion complex.
Ptolemy’s son and grandson expanded the library,
sending scholars and agents to scour the markets of the Greek world for new purchases.
Their bibliomania was so intense, supposedly, that ships arriving in Alexandria were compelled
to surrender all books on board for copying. The library soon swelled to gargantuan proportions.
Some ancient authors claimed that it contained 700,000 books – books, in this context, meaning
papyrus scrolls. We don’t know the actual number, but it’s generally assumed that it was far lower.
Those inclined to minimize the size of the library,
however, should keep in mind that some ancient scholars were extremely prolific. For example,
the Alexandrian scholar Didymus, nicknamed “bronze-guts” for his inhuman work ethic,
reportedly produced nearly 4,000 books over the course of his lifetime.
The scholars who worked in the library under the early Ptolemies became famous throughout the Greek
world. It was here that the circumference of the Earth was first calculated, that the standard
texts of the Homeric poems were established, and – appropriately – that the first library catalog was
devised. Like tenured academics in every era, the scholars of the library also spent a great deal of
time and energy attacking one another over points of pedantry, a habit that earned the Museion
the nickname “birdcage of the Muses.” The great library declined under the later
Ptolemies, who had less money and less inclination to spend that money on squabbling scholars. But it
was in 48 BC, and at the hands of Julius Caesar, that the library suffered its first disaster.
Caesar, fresh from his victory over Pompey, had become involved in a civil war that pitted the
famous Cleopatra against her brother, Ptolemy XIII. When Ptolemy’s forces tried to seize a
fleet moored Alexandria’s harbor, Caesar ordered the ships burnt to keep them out of enemy hands.
Unfortunately, the fire spread from the docks to the adjacent palace quarter.
According to some ancient authors, the flames destroyed the library.
Others authors claim that only a portion of the collection was destroyed.
It’s sometimes theorized that the books destroyed were not in the main library, but in harbor
warehouses. It seems most likely, however, that at least part of the library really was destroyed.
Only a few years later, Mark Antony is said to have given Cleopatra 200,000 books from Pergamum.
A gift of this magnitude would only make sense if the Alexandria library had been depleted.
The Library continued to operate during the Roman imperial era.
Though no longer a hotbed of original research, it seems to have remained accessible to scholars,
and was apparently subsidized by the Roman administration. During the third and fourth
centuries AD, however, Alexandria experienced a massacre, an invasion, a civil war, and a tsunami,
any or all of which might have destroyed the library. By the end of the fourth century,
if not sooner, the palace quarter, in which the main library was located, was mostly abandoned.
Ptolemy II had established a branch of the library, accessible to the public,
in the marble porticoes surrounding the Temple of Serapis. But in 391, amidst savage street warfare
between Christian and pagan mobs, the temple was demolished. The stoas that sheltered the library
were not destroyed, and would in fact survive until the Middle Ages. But since we hear nothing
more about the books, it’s often assumed that they were damaged or dispersed at this time.
We don’t know, in short, exactly when the great library in the palace and the branch library in
the Serapeum were destroyed. But there is no clear evidence for large libraries
after the fourth century; and by the time of the Arab Conquest, the library of Alexandria
was probably no more than a distant memory. Disasters must have destroyed many of the books.
But the greatest culprit was probably simple decay. The library of Alexandria was dependent on
sustained elite patronage and investment – first from the Ptolemies, and eventually, it seems,
from the Roman administration. When this patronage dried up, and when the texts ceased to be cared
for and recopied, the scrolls of the library simply rotted away in Alexandria’s humid air.
So: how much was lost with the Library of Alexandria, and how significant were these losses?
At the risk of making an obvious point, the Library of Alexandria
was not the only library in the classical world. There were hundreds of others, some very large.
Only the most obscure works in the Library of Alexandria were not represented by other copies
elsewhere. It’s only because the Library of Alexandria’s decline was symptomatic of the
broader decline of classical culture – because, in other words, all the ancient world’s libraries
fell into decay at the same time – that so many works were lost in late antiquity.
It’s sometimes said that the destruction of the Library of Alexandria set civilization back
by centuries. This is a wild exaggeration. The scrolls in the library did not contain the bases,
as is sometimes claimed, for great advances in science and technology. Although there certainly
many works of mathematics and physics in the library, the most important of these
were widely disseminated elsewhere. What perished with the library were,
overwhelmingly, lesser-known works of literature and philosophy, commentaries and monographs,
all the residue and introspection of an extremely sophisticated literary culture.
These works would be a treasure beyond price for scholars of the classics, but they were
not the stuff of a foreclosed modernity. Before we close, I’d like to talk briefly
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