After this there was mass havoc as Christians retaliated against both the Jews and the Pagans - one of which was Hypatia. The other figure who is regularly invoked as being associated with the Great Library, and even presented as its “last librarian”, is (again) Hypatia. Probably everyone mentioned above had some hand in destroying some part of the Library's holdings. When the sedition had prevailed for some time, the rulers came and urged the people to remember the laws, to lay down their arms, and to give up the Serapion (Sozomen, History of the Church, VII.15). The idea that if the Great Library had not been burned down by wicked Christians we’d all be living in gleaming space cities on Europa or Callisto is, therefore, a silly fantasy. You can also subscribe without commenting. Sagan took a wide-ranging theme of the history of the cosmos and how we humans have come to understand it, using science and reason. And why do you think Ammianus wrote his work in 398? The Serapeum survived most of the fourth century, but it is very likely that the expense of maintaining an extensive library would have been a strain. Really nice piece – many thanks. One of the odder elements of the New Atheist myths about the Great Library is the strange idea that its (supposed) destruction somehow singlehandedly wiped out the (alleged) advanced scientific knowledge of the ancient world in one terrible cataclysm. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. After his death, his nephew Cyril became Patriarch. Again, James Hannam has provided a useful table (though I have made a couple of additions): Again, of these scholars, only Eratosthenes is known for doing anything that we would consider “science”, the others were devoted to literary and textual analysis, poetry and grammar. What is absolutely clear, however, is that the idea that the Great Library of Alexandria was unique, whether in nature or even in size, is nonsense. As mentioned above, when we can survey the archaeology of an ancient library’s ruins, some estimate can be made of its holdings. The loss of the ancient world's single greatest archive of knowledge, the Library of Alexandria, has been lamented for ages. The Mouseion , like all ancient libraries, needed a large staff to undertake the constant and unending task of repairing, replacing and recopying books and these staffs, even when made up of slaves, were expensive to maintain. The loss of scientific understandings in that of physics and medicine, as well as the loss of cultural and historical documentation and knowledge, and much more, is unlike any other event in recorded history. We then get Julian writing to to the Prefect of Egypt, Ecdicius, him to send George’s large private library on to him at Constantinople. Required fields are marked *. Caesar accidentally burned the library down when he set fire to his own ships to frustrate Achillas' attempt to limit his ability to communicate by sea during his escapades with Cleopatra etc. This estimate is presumably based on the traditional identification of the library with the rooms behind the northern stoa in the sanctuary of Athena Polias. Most importantly, it was not destroyed by a crazed Christian mob intent on the destruction of rationally-based knowledge. The idea that any ancient library could have survived into the modern era is also ridiculous, given that none of the many other libraries of the time did so. Yes, you are right that Ammianus mentions the entire temple district (templa) of the Serapeum and specifically the outer colonnade, as well as the statues and artwork adorning the outer structure. But it was his 1980 TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage that made him a household name. Since historians know all too well that countless ancient things, writings, have been lost from ancient times. It set the world back for sure. A virtual alternate universe.”, “If religious barbarians hadn’t destroyed the library of Alexandria, we’d probably have colonies on Mars and the Jovian moons by now.”, “probably the single greatest loss to general knowledge,science engineering etc in history, even hitlers book burning pales by comparison”, “Science was set back two hundred years at least.as an example remember the romans had compex central heating 2000 years ago not widely seen again till 20th century.”. Thank you for this! Theophilus was Patriarch of Alexandria from 385 to 412 AD. And you somehow think that means there was a library there in 386? This argument is hard to sustain. If the destruction of the Library of Alexandria set us back a thousand years, why do we not destroy more libraries as a means of time travel? At any rate, John Chrysostom (First Discourse against the Jews) says that the Serapeum contained books in 386. He points out that most of these writers probably only wrote works that filled a couple of scrolls at most, though a small number of them – like the playwrights – would have had a total corpus that filled many more than that, even up to 100 scrolls. The Library of Celsus at Ephesus was built in c. 117 AD by the son of Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus in honour of his father, who had been a senator and consul in Rome, and its reconstructed facade is one of the major archaeological features of the site today. Writing between 1776 and 1778, Gibbon was working well before any later ideas about historians being judicious and objective. It seems to be the usual flawed Mythicist arguments about the Josephan mentions of Jesus. His successor as Pharaoh, Ptolemy I Soter, founded the Museum (also called Museum of Alexandria, Greek Mouseion, “Seat of the Muses”) or Royal Library of Alexandria in 283 BC. Perhaps one of the most interesting accounts of its destruction comes from the accounts of the Roman writers. But what has it got to do with the Great Library of Alexandria? a pseudo-atheist shill for Christian triumphalism [and] delusionally insane.” – Dr. Richard Carrier PhD, unemployed blogger. This includes the ones that we have just fragments or sentences from and the ones who are merely mentioned in other writings. It’s certainly a great story, retold in Carl Sagan’s seminal Cosmos TV series (1980) and in Alejandro Amenabar’s film Agora (2009). Roger S. Bagnall is characteristically scathing about this silly idea: It is idle …. 5, Dec. 1992, pp. It was no longer there. There was no discernible line to draw between the religious and scholarly functions of the Mouseion, the priest of the shrine was the head of the scholarly institution and the scholars dwarfed in number any ‘purely religious’ staff. In 640 AD the Moslems took the city of Alexandria. He may have finished or revised it in 391 or later. We can only go on the information we have. That would have been news to the Emperors of Constantinople, whose Empire continued for another millenium. If it was considered a serious rival to the Great Library of Alexandria then the latter could not have been too much greater in size. You have to get into a some fairly esoteric special uses and constructions to get anything close to “most”. The collection may have ebbed and flowed as some documents were destroyed and others were added. Despite his earlier rant on George plundering statues from the Serapeum, he nowhere mentions the possibility George could have taken books from the Serapeum. This is despite the fact that both the Great Library and its daughter library in the Serapeum had ceased to exist by her time. I mean, where else could you just hop off of the main road and go to “college”? “. a hack …. Alexandria Burning rating: +230 + – x. The full phrase I used, in context, was “a shrine with scholars attached to it, not a secular university”. 30,000 books. It is not known if the Mouseion was sacked in this action, but John Malas records that its funding was stopped by Caracalla at this time (Delia, p. 1463). In addition to some redundancy in copies. I agree the 1/2 million figure seems inflated. He says the Serapeum was “once a temple, but was later reconsecrated to knowledge”. No Greek philosopher walked away from such a conversation and decided to try to build some equipment to explore the physical nature of atomic structure and would probably have considered such an idea absurd. This article and a previous poster raise a question for me. 1449-67, James Hannam, “The Foundation and Loss of the Royal and Serapeum Libraries of Alexandria” (bede.org.uk). (e.g. Daniel 12 foretells Knowledge will Increase in the End Days. This means he is not just referring the books George had back in the 340s, though he is stressing he knew what books George had then as a further warning against being short-changed on the collection. The burning of the Library of Alexandria ranks among the worst crimes ever committed against humanity. As Umar was an important early legal authority, a decree like this would absolutely have been taken as legal precedence, which it never was. “The consensus is that Ammianus came to Rome in the 380s and started to write his history work not before that time (in the late 380s) because of the central role attributed to the city of Rome (he lived in Antioch before that time).”, “The battle of 378 is a decisive date because it marks the end of the Roman Empire. Carrier assures his online fan club “[a]ll he describes is the raid on its pagan statues, and some vague looting otherwise. Given that this library was considered a genuine rival to the Great Library of Alexandria, it is most likely that the latter held around 40-50,000 scrolls at its height, containing a smaller number of works overall given that ancient works usually took up more than one scroll. His successor as Pharaoh, Ptolemy I Soter, founded the Museum (also called Museum of Alexandria, Greek Mouseion, “Seat of the Muses”) or Royal Library of Alexandria in 283 BC. (Ammianus, XXII.16.12). It is often thought that Ammianus continued Tacitus’ work, who did not write the history of his own day and age either. “This was not some foreign war, this was more like a police action.”. It is clear that the losses were huge, as Plutarch also tells the (probably apocryphal) story of Mark Antony confiscating the whole collection of the Great Library of Pergamon and giving them to Cleopatra to replace the books lost in the fire (Plutarch, Antony, 58). So where are these people getting all this stuff that makes them so angry? The fact that the Great Library was actually associated with a religious shrine is something that is ignored or glossed over in many modern accounts. The Mouseion at Alexandria was far from the only shrine to the Muses in the ancient world, nor was it the only one with an associated centre of study. But several accounts of the end of the temple note that it came as the climax of a series of attacks by pagans on Christians in reaction to the desecration of pagan idols. The Museum was a shrine of the Muses modeled after the Lyceum of Aristotle in Athens. It can therefore be ruled out that George had any of the books from the Serapeum library in his own library. After his death in 323 BCE, Alexander's Empire was left in the hands of his generals, with Ptolemy I Soter taking Egypt and making Alexandria his capital in 320 BCE. Serapis was a Greek-Egyptian hybrid deity, combining Zeus and Osiris, and his cult and temple were extremely popular in Ptolemaic Alexandria. That’s why I became excited about THIS Site. As mentioned above, this large building probably contained around 20,000 scrolls and had two main chambers – one for Greek and the other for Latin authors. These retellings focus on the supposed destruction of its library, so they tend to assume that the mob was there simply because they hated learning. The idea of the all powerful, all knowledgable, of heaven, of resurrection, etc., are seductive, not because they are factually correct but because they are conforting. Now can you please point me to the exact passage where he mentions the Serapeum temple building (the one that contained the library) in the present tense? Sozomen was writing in the following century and, as a Christian, may not be reliable on the lurid details, but Socrates Scholasticus, writing a little closer to the events, confirms that many Christians were killed in the unrest. The Museum was a shrine of the Muses modeled after the Lyceum of Aristotle in Athens. Scholars traveled the world to find books to bring back to the library. Unsurprisingly he does not mention the inner building that contained the library other than in the past (perfect) tense (fuere).”. At best, it was a highly rational attempt at understanding fundamental precepts of the physical and natural world. So the library would contain many non Hellenistic writings.”. face-palming is inevitable. If you start calling ancient institutions ‘primarily shrines’ then you end up with unhelpful stuff like “the Curia Julia was a temple for holding sacrifices and divination ceremonies and also some politics happened afterwards”. “you are right that Ammianus mentions the entire temple district (templa) of the Serapeum and specifically the outer colonnade, as well as the statues and artwork adorning the outer structure. Tbeir “Be scrupulously nice to passive aggressive trolls and complete lunatics” policy is pretty annoying and their attitude that all views are somehow equally valid means that site can simply be a pooling of ignorance. 97, No. What is the reference to Ammianus “writing around 378 AD”? 2: Emperor Theodosius I via Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria This theory is even more complicated, and not just because it technically involves two jocks. Alexander wanted to create a city … The End of the Serapeum and the Beginning of the Myth. a crypto-Christian, posing as an atheist …. What about works from former empires such as Persian, Babylon? The other technological wonder that is often invoked here is the Antikythera mechanism. In case Theophilius ruined the library in Alexandria, it was possibly the “daughter library’ set … The library of alexandria was situated in alexandria egypt. 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