The Creation and Destruction of The Library of Alexandria

The Library of Alexandria was not the first library, and we know it was not the last. But, along with the Library of Ashurbanipal, the Baghdad House of Wisdom, and the Imperial Library of Constantinople, it occupies a legendary position in human history.

This was an astonishing institution of learning – an example of what is possible when societies and governments prioritize wisdom and understanding. Its loss, at some point in the early centuries CE, was a loss with implications for all humankind.

But it’s also a building that exists as much in myth as in reality. The building, and the knowledge contained within, were very, very real. But the stories that have sprung up around it are often false. And, even worse, often used to further the agendas of those who told the stories in the first place. Here, we try to disentangle fact from fiction, myth from reality, as we chart the true rise and fall of the Library of Alexandria.

The Rise of the Library

The Great Library at Alexandria may have been founded by Ptolemy I, the general of Alexander the Great, and the founder of the Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt. Overseen by Demetrius of Phalerum, himself a student of Aristotle, the library was intended to be the center of knowledge across the Classical world.

It wasn’t until Ptolemy II was on the throne, however, that scholars believe the library really began to flourish. Over the following decades, the mammoth task of amassing all the world’s knowledge began in earnest. Ships arriving at the port in Alexandria were required to hand over any books they had onboard for copying. The copies were returned to the ships – the originals stayed in Alexandria.

But this was not some passive flow of information across Alexandria’s docks. The library’s administrators employed people to go out and find that information too, searching high and low across the Mediterranean, seeking out new information, new knowledge.

The Great Library at its Peak

At its greatest extent, it’s estimated that the library held anywhere from 40,000 to 400,000 scrolls. Whichever number is closest to the truth, this is still an enormous treasure trove of writing. Around one hundred scholars were believed to have worked within its walls at any one time, examining this literature, and producing their own.

Held within this store of information were works by the likes of Aristotle and Theophrastus, as well as Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, to name but a few. Working on the site were epic poets like Apollonius of Rhodes, geographers like Eratosthenes of Cyrene, and engineers like Hero of Alexandria, among countless others.

It seemed, by the third and second centuries BCE, the library was pretty close to achieving the aims of the early Ptolemaic kings. It would have contained a large proportion (although certainly not all) of the knowledge of the ancient world, and made its own big contributions to scientific and literary thought.

The Fall of the Library

The Great Library’s fall has been greatly mythologized in the intervening years. There’s a popular idea that Julius Caesar burned the library when he besieged Alexandria in 48 BCE, and a more harmful myth that it was Muslim authorities that destroyed the library, after their capture of the city some six centuries later. Both of these stories play into the idea of a great lost trove of learning, which set humanity’s development back by centuries.

Neither of these theories carry much weight. Caesar did indeed burn the docks at Alexandria, and probably a storehouse of scrolls too. But the library – and others in the city, including the ‘daughter’ library at the Serapeum Temple – existed for centuries after this point. The idea that Arab Muslim armies torched the institution in the seventh century did not arise until the thirteenth century, and was almost certainly motivated by a desire to paint Islam as somehow uncivilized and unscientific – despite the widely-known scientific contributions from the Muslim world during the same period.

Instead, the true fall of the library is likely to be rather less dramatic. After Ptolemy VIII expelled scholars from Alexandria in the middle of the second century BCE, Hellenistic academia in general fell to a new low. Under Roman rule, Alexandria was relegated to the status of provincial backwater, while once it had been a beacon of commerce and trade. As Alexandria declined, its library declined too.

The Great Library and its Position in History

The Great Library began with a lofty ambition. And while it never quite achieved those grandiose aims, it was still a monumental store of human knowledge, and a forum in which new ideas could be fomented and brought to life.

For us now, looking back, the idea of being ushered into the library’s inner chambers, into the classrooms and lecture halls contained within, must seem like a dream. Within those hallowed walls, humanity was driven forward, towards new and exciting horizons of enlightenment and understanding.

That should be enough, really. It’s not up to us to ascribe our own mythology to the building, and to the project as a whole. And it’s certainly not up to us to twist the story of its demise to suit our own worldviews. Instead, we should all simply marvel at the high-minded folly of such an endeavor – collecting all the world’s knowledge in one place – and appreciate the advances it brought to us, to everyone.