Library of Alexandria

• 1. Introduction

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  The Library of Alexandria sat in the Brucheion, the Royal Quarter of a city in Egypt, and its scholars enjoyed a large salary, free food and lodging, and exemption from taxes. They ate together in a circular dining hall with a high domed ceiling. According to popular description, an inscription above the shelves read: "The place of the cure of the soul." Nobody can say how many scrolls those shelves held. The estimates run wild, from as few as 40,000 to as many as 700,000 at its height. This was no ordinary collection. It was part of a larger research institution called the Mouseion, dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts. Behind it stood a dynasty with an impossible goal: to gather all knowledge in one place. How did a single library come to be remembered as the capital of learning for the entire ancient world? Who walked its halls, what did they discover, and how did such an ambition collapse into rumor and legend?

• 2. An Unprecedented Ambition

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  Following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, his top-ranking officers fought over his empire. The territory split three ways. The Antigonid dynasty took Greece, the Seleucid dynasty held Asia Minor, Syria, and Mesopotamia from Antioch and Seleucia, and the Ptolemaic dynasty took Egypt with Alexandria as its capital. The Macedonian kings who inherited these lands wanted to spread Hellenistic culture and learning. Libraries served that goal well. They raised a city's prestige, drew scholars, and offered practical help in governing a kingdom. Eventually every major Hellenistic urban center would keep a royal library. What set Alexandria apart was scale. The Ptolemies did not merely want a fine collection; they wanted a repository of all knowledge. Egypt gave them the means. The land was the ideal habitat for the papyrus plant, and that abundant supply of writing material let them chase a dream no predecessor had attempted.

• 3. The Hunt For Scrolls

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  Royal agents left Alexandria carrying large amounts of money, ordered to buy as many texts as they could on any subject by any author. They favored older copies over newer ones, on the assumption that older copies had undergone less copying and stayed closer to what the original author wrote. The hunt took them to the book fairs of Rhodes and Athens. According to the Greek medical writer Galen, a decree of Ptolemy II ordered that any books found on ships entering port be taken to the library and copied by official scribes. The originals stayed; the owners received the copies. The Homeric poems drew special attention as the foundation of Greek education, so the Library gathered many manuscripts of them and labeled each copy to show where it had come from. The most striking acquisition story involves Athens. Ptolemy III asked to borrow the original manuscripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The Athenians demanded fifteen talents, a thousand pounds of precious metal, as a guarantee of return. He had expensive copies made on the highest quality papyrus, sent those back, kept the originals, and told the Athenians to keep the talents. King Ptolemy II Philadelphus is said to have set 500,000 scrolls as the library's objective.

• 4. Minds Of The Mouseion

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  Zenodotus of Ephesus was the first recorded head librarian, and he worked to establish canonical texts for the Homeric poems and the early Greek lyric poets. He compiled a glossary of rare and unusual words arranged in alphabetical order, which makes him the first person known to have used alphabetical order as a method of organization. His system used only the first letter of a word. Not until the second century AD did anyone extend that method to the remaining letters. Callimachus produced the Pinakes, a 120-book catalogue of authors and all their known works, sometimes considered the world's first library catalog. It divided writers first between poetry and prose, then into smaller subsections, listing authors alphabetically. Each entry gave the author's name, father's name, place of birth, brief biography, and a complete list of works. Eratosthenes of Cyrene, the third head librarian, applied mathematics to geography for the first time. In his treatise on measuring the earth, he calculated its circumference and was off by less than a few hundred kilometers. He believed the settings of the Homeric poems were purely imaginary, arguing that poetry exists "to capture the soul" rather than to record actual events. Aristarchus of Samothrace, the sixth head librarian, earned a reputation as the greatest of all ancient scholars of Homeric poetry, producing free-standing commentaries called hypomnemata that explained passages and judged whether words were genuine or later additions by scribes.

• 5. Inventions And Eccentrics

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  Archimedes, the mathematician and inventor, is said by legend to have visited the Library during the librarianship of Apollonius of Rhodes. While in Egypt he observed the rise and fall of the Nile, which led him to invent the Archimedes' screw for lifting water into irrigation ditches before he returned to Syracuse. Hero of Alexandria invented the first recorded steam engine. The doctors Herophilus and Erasistratus studied human anatomy, though protests against the dissection of human corpses, seen as immoral, hindered their work. Aristophanes of Byzantium became the fourth head librarian around 200 BC, and a legend recorded by the Roman writer Vitruvius explains how. Appointed one of seven judges for a poetry competition hosted by Ptolemy III, he alone favored the competitor the audience liked least. He declared the other poets plagiarists and proved it by retrieving from the Library, by memory, the very texts they had copied. He went on to divide poems into separate lines on the page, since verse had previously been written out like prose, and he invented the system of Greek diacritics. Not every scholar fared so well. A poet named Sotades wrote an obscene epigram mocking Ptolemy II for marrying his sister Arsinoe II. The king is said to have sealed him in a lead jar and dropped him into the sea, in a story that is likely apocryphal.

• 6. A Slow Unraveling

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  In 145 BC, Aristarchus of Samothrace backed Ptolemy VII Neos Philopator in a dynastic struggle. Ptolemy VII was murdered, and his successor Ptolemy VIII Physcon punished everyone who had supported him. Aristarchus fled to Cyprus, where he died shortly after, and Ptolemy VIII expelled all foreign scholars from Alexandria. This scattering changed the course of Hellenistic scholarship. The exiles kept working, but mostly no longer in association with the Library, which began to lose respect and prestige. Aristarchus' student Dionysius Thrax established a school on Rhodes and wrote the first book on Greek grammar, which remained the primary grammar textbook for Greek schoolboys until as late as the twelfth century AD. Another pupil, Apollodorus of Athens, went to Alexandria's great rival, Pergamum. The historian Menecles of Barca remarked sarcastically that Alexandria had become the teacher of all Greeks and barbarians alike. Inside the city, later Ptolemies treated the head librarian's post as a political reward. Ptolemy VIII appointed one of his palace guards, a man named Cydas. Eventually the position lost so much prestige that contemporary authors stopped recording the terms of individual head librarians.

• 7. Fire, Rumor, And Ruin

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  In 48 BC, during Caesar's Civil War, Julius Caesar was besieged at Alexandria and set fire to Egyptian ships in the port to block the fleet of Cleopatra's brother Ptolemy XIII. Ancient writers disagree on what burned. Seneca the Younger quotes Livy as saying the fire destroyed 40,000 scrolls. Plutarch writes that the flames "spread on and destroyed the great library." Cassius Dio describes instead that "the dockyards and storehouses of grain and books" were burned, which scholars read as warehouses near the docks rather than the Library itself. Florus and Lucan mention only the fleet and some houses near the sea. Evidence suggests the Library survived or was rebuilt. The geographer Strabo visited the Mouseion around 20 BC, decades after the fire, though he does not mention the Library separately. The scholar Didymus Chalcenterus, nicknamed "bronze guts," worked in Alexandria and is said to have produced between 3,500 and 4,000 books, more than any other writer in antiquity, which would have been impossible without a good part of the library's resources. The decline continued under Rome. Membership in the Mouseion came to depend on distinction in government, the military, or athletics rather than scholarship. References to the Mouseion vanish after the middle of the third century AD, with the last known mentions of its members dating to the 260s. In 272 AD, the emperor Aurelian fought to recapture the city from the Palmyrene queen Zenobia, and his forces destroyed the Brucheion quarter where the main library stood. Whatever remained may have been further damaged during Diocletian's siege in 297.

• 8. Afterlives And Echoes

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  The Serapeum, a temple to the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis, opened as a satellite collection under Ptolemy III and is often called the "Daughter Library." For much of the late fourth century AD it was probably the largest collection of books in the city. It drew followers of Iamblichean Neoplatonism interested in theurgy, the study of cultic rituals. The end came through religious conflict. Under the Christian emperor Theodosius I, pagan rituals were outlawed. In 391 AD, the bishop Theophilus oversaw the destruction of an old Mithraeum and paraded its cult objects through the streets to be mocked. Teachers at the Serapeum took up arms and led a guerrilla attack on the Christian population, and in retaliation the Christians vandalized and demolished the Serapeum, though parts of the colonnade still stood as late as the twelfth century. The mathematician Theon of Alexandria led a school called the "Mouseion," and around 400 AD his daughter Hypatia succeeded him as its head. She grew extremely popular in Alexandria and held profound political influence, but was caught in a feud between the Roman prefect Orestes and the bishop Cyril. In March of 415 AD, a mob of Christians led by a lector named Peter murdered her, and her school collapsed. Several Arabic sources later blamed the library's destruction on an order by Caliph Umar after Alexandria fell to Amr ibn al-As in 642 AD. The earliest such account, by al-Qifti, came before 1248, and modern scholars such as Roy MacLeod note the story first appeared 500 years after the event. The dream did not stay buried. First proposed in 1974, revived through UNESCO involvement beginning in 1986, and designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina was completed in 2002 to commemorate the library whose true size no one will ever know.