Library of Alexandria
 Scrolls were the library's form of the book | |
| Location | Alexandria, Ptolemaic Egypt |
|---|---|
| Founded | Early 3rd century BC |
| Founder | Ptolemy I or Ptolemy II |
| Holdings | Estimated 40,000–400,000 scrolls |
| Fate | Gradual decline over centuries |
The Library of Alexandria was the largest library of the ancient world, founded in Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt in the early third century BC. It was part of the Mouseion, an institution dedicated to the Muses that functioned as something between a research institute and a royal court appointment.
Purpose and method
[edit]The library's stated ambition was to hold a copy of every book in the world. Its acquisition methods were aggressive: ships docking at Alexandria were searched for scrolls, which were copied, with the copy sometimes returned to the owner and the original kept. Agents bought books across the Mediterranean.
The scale of collection created a problem that had not existed before: finding anything. Callimachus responded with the Pinakes, a catalogue in 120 scrolls organising authors by genre with biographical notes and opening lines, which is the ancestor of the library catalogue and, arguably, of bibliography itself.
Scholarship
[edit]Work associated with Alexandria includes some of the most consequential of antiquity. Eratosthenes, its chief librarian, calculated the Earth's circumference from the difference in the angle of the noon sun at Syene and Alexandria, arriving at a figure within a few percent of the modern value. Euclid's Elements was compiled in the city. Aristarchus proposed a heliocentric model some eighteen centuries before Copernicus. Herophilus and Erasistratus conducted systematic human dissection, briefly permitted there and almost nowhere else in the ancient world.
The library's textual scholarship shaped what survives of Greek literature: editors produced authoritative editions of Homer, developing critical marks to flag doubtful lines, and the versions they settled on are substantially the ones read today.
Decline
[edit]The popular image of the library destroyed in a single catastrophic fire is not supported by the evidence. Several events damaged it, and the sources for each are late, partisan or both:
- Julius Caesar's fire in the harbour in 48 BC, which by Plutarch's account spread to the library. This is the most commonly cited incident, though what and how much burned is unclear.
- The purge of scholars under Ptolemy VIII in 145 BC, which scattered Alexandrian scholarship across the Mediterranean.
- Aurelian's suppression of a revolt in AD 270–275, which devastated the Brucheion quarter where the library stood.
- The destruction of the Serapeum, a daughter library, in AD 391.
- The Arab conquest of 641, to which the destruction was attributed only in accounts written centuries later, now generally rejected by historians.
The more likely account is undramatic: declining royal funding, the loss of scholars to rival institutions such as Pergamum, the ordinary decay of papyrus in a humid coastal climate, and a shift of intellectual life elsewhere. The library did not end; it wore out.
Legacy
[edit]Alexandria is the standard reference point for the idea of a universal library, a single place holding everything known, and for the fragility of one. That the ancient world's knowledge could be concentrated and then lost is the argument most often made for distributed copies, which is what the printing press and later the Internet provided.