The Library of Alexandria was utilized by some of the most famous scholars of its time, and it amassed a collection of books. Some say it was half a million or more. No other institution had such a reputation. Ultimately the library was destroyed, but scholars do not know how or even in what century it met its demise. Although the Library is one of the most famous relics of the ancient world, we know very little about its appearance, the work is done there, or how it eventually came to its end.
With the invention of writing, believed to have occurred in Mesopotamia around B. Most of the earliest clay tablets that were created contained information saved for practical purposes. When their relevance expired, the tablets were either erased and used again or reused as building materials. Their creators did not need to save or archive them, and as such, those first examples of writing are lost. The earliest known collection of archived content comes from the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk, located in the southeast of Iraq.
Archaeologists discovered roughly texts as part of a collection of varying topics from astronomy to mathematics. It is said that, upon seeing Ashurbanipal, Alexander the Great was inspired to establish his own Library, and he bestowed that responsibility upon his Macedonian general Ptolemy I.
The Library and Museum were founded sometime between and BC. The Enlightenment skeptic was scathing in his analysis of that account: it was scarcely logical that the Caliph would burn Jewish and Christian religious books, which were also considered holy texts in Islam. For Gibbon, the Library of Alexandria was one of the great achievements of the classical world and its destruction—which he concludes was due to a long and gradual process of neglect and growing ignorance—was a symbol of the barbarity that overwhelmed the Roman Empire, allowing civilization to leach away the ancient knowledge that was being re-encountered and appreciated in his own day.
The fires were major incidents in which many books were lost, but the institution of the library disappeared more gradually both through organizational neglect and through the gradual obsolescence of the papyrus scrolls themselves.
Alexandria is, in that telling, a cautionary tale of the danger of creeping decline, through the underfunding, low prioritization and general disregard for the institutions that preserve and share knowledge : libraries and archives. Today, we must remember that war is not the only way an Alexandria can be destroyed. The impact that these various acts of destruction of libraries and archives has had on communities and on society as a whole is profound. Communities in places like Iraq and Mali have seen Islamic extremists target libraries for attack, and in the U.
Today, with major technology companies taking control of the archive as it moves into the digital realm, the complacency of society has meant lack of regulation, control and privacy surrounding the most powerful bodies of knowledge ever seen.
That Library is still operating today, together with one of the best Schools of Library and Information science in the region. No other institution illustrates the spirit of Hellenism better than the ancient library of Alexandria, Egypt.
Impressed by the extensive knowledge and deep learning of Demetrius, Ptolemy assigned him the task of creating a library. The library was intended as a resource for the scholars who did research at the Museum. The library is believed to have housed between , and , books, divided between two library branches. They brought the books they found to the library for inspection. Some regard the death of Hypatia as the final destruction of the Library.
Others blame Theophilus for destroying the last of the scrolls when he razed the Temple of Serapis prior to making it a Christian church. Still others have confused both incidents and blamed Theophilus for simultaneously murdering Hypatia and destroying the Library though it is obvious Theophilus died sometime prior to Hypatia. The final individual to get blamed for the destruction is the Moslem Caliph Omar. In AD the Moslems took the city of Alexandria.
Upon learning of "a great library containing all the knowledge of the world" the conquering general supposedly asked Caliph Omar for instructions. The Caliph has been quoted as saying of the Library's holdings, "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.
Even then it was said to have taken six months to burn all the documents. But these details, from the Caliph's quote to the incredulous six months it supposedly took to burn all the books, weren't written down until years after the fact.
So who did burn the Library of Alexandria? Unfortunately most of the writers from Plutarch who apparently blamed Caesar to Edward Gibbons a staunch atheist or deist who liked very much to blame Christians and blamed Theophilus to Bishop Gregory who was particularly anti-Moslem, blamed Omar all had an axe to grind and consequently must be seen as biased. Probably everyone mentioned above had some hand in destroying some part of the Library's holdings.
The collection may have ebbed and flowed as some documents were destroyed and others were added.
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