[00:01] According to a medieval legend, the library of 
Alexandria was destroyed on the orders of the
[00:06] Caliph Omar. There were so many books, the story 
goes, that the only way to dispose of them was to
[00:13] use them as fuel in the city’s 4,000 bathhouses. 
So into the furnaces they went, day after day,
[00:21] week after week, the wit and wisdom of a 
thousand years going up in smoke, and bits of
[00:27] blackened books raining on the weary rooftops of 
Alexandria. It took six months to burn them all.
[00:36] This never actually happened. Even if the 
Caliph had wanted to destroy Alexandria’s books,
[00:42] he would have found few to burn. By his time, 
the library had already vanished, and was already
[00:49] shrouded in mystery. That mystery endures. 
The library’s site has never been discovered,
[00:56] and is unlikely to ever emerge from 
its concrete tomb beneath the modern
[01:00] metropolis. Many of the questions that surround 
it can never be answered. But in this video,
[01:07] I hope to at least contextualize the 
significance of the Library’s loss.
[01:13] The Library of Alexandria was established 
around 300 BC by Ptolemy I. Ptolemy,
[01:20] once a companion of Alexander the Great, 
had established himself as king of Egypt,
[01:25] with the bustling seaside metropolis of 
Alexandria as his capital. By collecting texts
[01:32] and intellectuals, Ptolemy hoped to 
burnish the reputation of his kingdom
[01:36] and capital throughout the Greek world. To 
those ends, he offered generous stipends
[01:41] to any famous scholar who would join his 
court, and began aggressively acquiring books.
[01:46] Ptolemy’s library was part of Museion, a sort 
of proto-university that stood beside the royal
[01:52] palace. The Museion seems to have consisted 
of a courtyard surrounded by shady stoas and
[01:58] lecture halls, and included a dining room 
where the resident scholars took meals. The
[02:03] storerooms and reading rooms of the library were 
apparently attached to the main Museion complex.
[02:10] Ptolemy’s son and grandson expanded the library,
[02:13] sending scholars and agents to scour the 
markets of the Greek world for new purchases.
[02:19] Their bibliomania was so intense, supposedly, 
that ships arriving in Alexandria were compelled
[02:23] to surrender all books on board for copying. The 
library soon swelled to gargantuan proportions.
[02:30] Some ancient authors claimed that it contained 
700,000 books – books, in this context, meaning
[02:37] papyrus scrolls. We don’t know the actual number, 
but it’s generally assumed that it was far lower.
[02:44] Those inclined to minimize 
the size of the library,
[02:47] however, should keep in mind that some ancient 
scholars were extremely prolific. For example,
[02:54] the Alexandrian scholar Didymus, nicknamed 
“bronze-guts” for his inhuman work ethic,
[03:00] reportedly produced nearly 4,000 
books over the course of his lifetime.
[03:05] The scholars who worked in the library under the 
early Ptolemies became famous throughout the Greek
[03:10] world. It was here that the circumference of the 
Earth was first calculated, that the standard
[03:16] texts of the Homeric poems were established, and – 
appropriately – that the first library catalog was
[03:22] devised. Like tenured academics in every era, the 
scholars of the library also spent a great deal of
[03:29] time and energy attacking one another over points 
of pedantry, a habit that earned the Museion
[03:35] the nickname “birdcage of the Muses.”
The great library declined under the later
[03:41] Ptolemies, who had less money and less inclination 
to spend that money on squabbling scholars. But it
[03:48] was in 48 BC, and at the hands of Julius Caesar, 
that the library suffered its first disaster.
[03:55] Caesar, fresh from his victory over Pompey, had 
become involved in a civil war that pitted the
[04:01] famous Cleopatra against her brother, Ptolemy 
XIII. When Ptolemy’s forces tried to seize a
[04:06] fleet moored Alexandria’s harbor, Caesar ordered 
the ships burnt to keep them out of enemy hands.
[04:14] Unfortunately, the fire spread from the 
docks to the adjacent palace quarter.
[04:19] According to some ancient authors, 
the flames destroyed the library.
[04:24] Others authors claim that only a 
portion of the collection was destroyed.
[04:28] It’s sometimes theorized that the books destroyed 
were not in the main library, but in harbor
[04:33] warehouses. It seems most likely, however, that 
at least part of the library really was destroyed.
[04:41] Only a few years later, Mark Antony is said to 
have given Cleopatra 200,000 books from Pergamum.
[04:48] A gift of this magnitude would only make sense 
if the Alexandria library had been depleted.
[04:55] The Library continued to operate 
during the Roman imperial era.
[04:59] Though no longer a hotbed of original research, 
it seems to have remained accessible to scholars,
[05:04] and was apparently subsidized by the Roman 
administration. During the third and fourth
[05:09] centuries AD, however, Alexandria experienced a 
massacre, an invasion, a civil war, and a tsunami,
[05:17] any or all of which might have destroyed the 
library. By the end of the fourth century,
[05:22] if not sooner, the palace quarter, in which the 
main library was located, was mostly abandoned.
[05:29] Ptolemy II had established a branch of 
the library, accessible to the public,
[05:33] in the marble porticoes surrounding the Temple of 
Serapis. But in 391, amidst savage street warfare
[05:41] between Christian and pagan mobs, the temple was 
demolished. The stoas that sheltered the library
[05:48] were not destroyed, and would in fact survive 
until the Middle Ages. But since we hear nothing
[05:54] more about the books, it’s often assumed that 
they were damaged or dispersed at this time.
[05:59] We don’t know, in short, exactly when the great 
library in the palace and the branch library in
[06:04] the Serapeum were destroyed. But there 
is no clear evidence for large libraries
[06:10] after the fourth century; and by the time of 
the Arab Conquest, the library of Alexandria
[06:16] was probably no more than a distant memory. 
Disasters must have destroyed many of the books.
[06:22] But the greatest culprit was probably simple 
decay. The library of Alexandria was dependent on
[06:29] sustained elite patronage and investment – first 
from the Ptolemies, and eventually, it seems,
[06:32] from the Roman administration. When this patronage 
dried up, and when the texts ceased to be cared
[06:35] for and recopied, the scrolls of the library 
simply rotted away in Alexandria’s humid air.
[06:46] So: how much was lost with the Library of 
Alexandria, and how significant were these losses?
[07:18] At the risk of making an obvious 
point, the Library of Alexandria
[07:22] was not the only library in the classical world. 
There were hundreds of others, some very large.
[07:30] Only the most obscure works in the Library of 
Alexandria were not represented by other copies
[07:36] elsewhere. It’s only because the Library of 
Alexandria’s decline was symptomatic of the
[07:43] broader decline of classical culture – because, 
in other words, all the ancient world’s libraries
[07:49] fell into decay at the same time – that 
so many works were lost in late antiquity.
[07:55] It’s sometimes said that the destruction of 
the Library of Alexandria set civilization back
[08:01] by centuries. This is a wild exaggeration. The 
scrolls in the library did not contain the bases,
[08:08] as is sometimes claimed, for great advances in 
science and technology. Although there certainly
[08:15] many works of mathematics and physics in 
the library, the most important of these
[08:19] were widely disseminated elsewhere. 
What perished with the library were,
[08:25] overwhelmingly, lesser-known works of literature 
and philosophy, commentaries and monographs,
[08:31] all the residue and introspection of an 
extremely sophisticated literary culture.
[08:36] These works would be a treasure beyond price 
for scholars of the classics, but they were
[08:42] not the stuff of a foreclosed modernity.
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[09:04] Thanks for watching.