Last weekend, I received a big box of some of my granddad’s books, as they are moving to a smaller house and so need to whittle down their grand collection. These books range from Agatha Christie novels in French, to Arthur Miller, to proper leather-bound classics like Aristotle’s ‘Politics’. As I am extremely interested in the ancient world, this made me think of the well-known Library of Alexandria, and how much more knowledge the human race would have of our muddy history if it survived the ages.
After Alexander the Great’s untimely death in 323BC, the rule of the mighty Macedonian Empire was divided between its top generals, in the Partition of Babylon. These generals then each ruled separate parts of the empire. This included Lysimachus (Thrace), Ptolemy (Egypt) and Antipater (Macedonia and Greece). The city of Alexandria was on the Mediterranean Coast (North) of Egypt, at the Western edge of the Nile River Delta. Therefore, it fell under the control of Aristotle-tutored Ptolemy, who highly prized literature and Egyptian history. It was he who initiated and proposed the idea of this great library, but it was his son - Ptolemy II Philadelphius - who established it in 283BC, forty years after Alexander the Great’s death.
The library is and was widely known as the ancient world’s largest repository of knowledge, housing some 40,000 to 700,000 papyrus scrolls. These scrolls had a vast range of expertise, from literature and plays, science, philosophy, medicine, geography and many more. Many mysteries of the ancient world that remain unanswered - one of the most famous being the production of the Great Pyramids of Giza - would almost certainly have been encompassed within the thick stone walls of this building. The Great Pyramids at that time were roughly the same age to them as the Macedonian Empire is to us now, showing how many years the collection of facts ranged.
If it were still around today, experts and archaeologists estimate that human civilization would be 200-500 years more advanced than we are now. They suspect that it could have significantly accelerated scientific and technological progress, potentially preventing the "Dark Ages" and leading to an earlier Renaissance or industrial revolution by preserving crucial ancient knowledge. Many Greek intellectuals visited Alexandria just to study in the library, proved by literary evidence such as Euxodus of Cnidus and Plato’s Phaedrus and Timaeus. It has persistently pained me that none of this knowledge has survived, and I always find myself imagining a world in which the library was never destroyed.
Although the most widely-accepted reason as to why these hundreds of thousands of scrolls were lost was due to a fire, it was in reality because of many events over time. Its destruction was likely a slow, centuries-long decline caused by funding shortage, political instability and scholarly purges, along with the odd disaster: earthquakes, tsunamis and the infamous Julius Caesar’s Fire. In 48BC, during a civil war in Egypt, Julius Caesar set fire to his own ships as a tactical distraction, but the fire spread, burning part of the city and a major section of the library which was very close to the port. The fire is said to have spread up the ropes stabilising the building to the ground, and then jumped up onto the extremely flammable papyrus scrolls, burning years and years of work. However, the building itself was not badly damaged, as it was mainly made of marble, with Greek-style columns and complex stone arches. This and the other factors all attributed to the annihilation of the papers inside the library, destroying two thousand years’ worth of vital knowledge that still puzzle archaeologists and scientists today.