What really happened to the Library of Alexandria Elizabeth Cox
2,300 years ago,
the rulers of Alexandria
set out to fulfill
one of humanity’s most audacious goals:
to collect all the knowledge in the world
under one roof.
In its prime,
the Library of Alexandria housed
an unprecedented number of scrolls
and attracted some of
the Greek world’s greatest minds.
But by the end of the 5th century CE,
the great library had vanished.
Many believed it was destroyed
in a catastrophic fire.
The truth of the library’s rise
and fall is much more complex.
The idea for the library came
from Alexander the Great.
After establishing himself as a conqueror,
the former student of Aristotle
turned his attention
to building an empire of knowledge
headquartered in his namesake city.
He died before construction began,
but his successor, Ptolemy I,
executed Alexander’s plans
for a museum and library.
Located in the royal district of the city,
the Library of Alexandria
may have been built
with grand Hellenistic columns,
native Egyptian influences,
or a unique blend of the two–there are
no surviving accounts of its architecture.
We do know it had lecture halls,
classrooms, and, of course, shelves.
As soon as the building was complete,
Ptolemy I began to fill it with
primarily Greek and Egyptian scrolls.
He invited scholars to live
and study in Alexandria at his expense.
The library grew as they contributed
their own manuscripts,
but the rulers of Alexandria still wanted
a copy of every book in the world.
Luckily, Alexandria was a hub for ships
traveling through the Mediterranean.
Ptolemy III instituted a policy requiring
any ship that docked in Alexandria
to turn over its books for copying.
Once the Library’s scribes
had duplicated the texts,
they kept the originals
and sent the copies back to the ships.
Hired book hunters also scoured
the Mediterranean
in search of new texts,
and the rulers of Alexandria attempted
to quash rivals
by ending all exports of the Egyptian
papyrus used to make scrolls.
These efforts brought hundreds
of thousands of books to Alexandria.
As the library grew,
it became possible to find information
on more subjects than ever before,
but also much more difficult to find
information on any specific subject.
Luckily, a scholar named Callimachus of
Cyrene set to work on a solution,
creating the pinakes,
a 120-volume catalog
of the library’s contents,
the first of its kind.
Using the pinakes,
others were able to navigate
the Library’s swelling collection.
They made some astounding discoveries.
1,600 years before Columbus set sail,
Eratosthenes not only realized
the earth was round,
but calculated its circumference
and diameter
within a few miles of their actual size.
Heron of Alexandria created
the world’s first steam engine
over a thousand years before
it was finally reinvented during
the Industrial Revolution.
For about 300 years after its founding
in 283 BCE, the library thrived.
But then, in 48 BCE, Julius Caesar
laid siege to Alexandria
and set the ships in the harbor on fire.
For years, scholars believed the library
burned as the blaze spread into the city.
It’s possible the fire destroyed
part of the sprawling collection,
but we know from ancient writings
that scholars continued to visit
the library for centuries after the siege.
Ultimately, the library slowly disappeared
as the city changed from Greek,
to Roman,
Christian,
and eventually Muslim hands.
Each new set of rulers viewed
its contents as a threat
rather than a source of pride.
In 415 CE,
the Christian rulers even had
a mathematician named Hypatia
murdered for studying
the library’s ancient Greek texts,
which they viewed as blasphemous.
Though the Library of Alexandria
and its countless texts are long gone,
we’re still grappling
with the best ways to collect,
access,
and preserve our knowledge.
There’s more information available today
and more advanced technology
to preserve it,
though we can’t know for sure
that our digital archives
will be more resistant to destruction
than Alexandria’s ink and paper scrolls.
And even if our reservoirs of knowledge
are physically secure,
they will still have to resist
the more insidious forces
that tore the library apart:
fear of knowledge,
and the arrogant belief
that the past is obsolete.
The difference is that, this time,
we know what to prepare for.