“Julian says he has seen most (if not all) of the books in George’s collection in Cappadocia”. Since historians know all too well that countless ancient things, writings, have been lost from ancient times. Often the flourish is added that he said “If the books contradict the Quran, they are sinful; if they agree with the Quran, they are redundant.” Where did that originate? And whatever counterexample is brought up to refute this statement will be dismissed as “not drastic”. But this obscures the fact that Greek proto-science was, while a distant linear ancestor of the modern sciences, very unlike them in many important respects. One small thing (which I think only further substantiates the general point you’re making). 5, Dec. 1992, pp. It was the way he used the history of science to explain scientific concepts that intrigued me as a teenager, though I was later to learn that Sagan was a much better scientist and presenter than he was a historian. The real tragedy of course is not the uncertainty of knowing who to blame for the Library's destruction but that so much of ancient history, literature and learning was lost forever. It will happen. While the story itself isn’t accurate, it speaks to us today as we face the digital book burnings that are threatening the modern-day Library of Alexandria: the internet. Instead, his narrative stops in 378. The proto-science they did do was mainly of a highly abstract and often metaphysical nature rather than anything like modern science. While he also makes the weird claim that Greco-Roman civilisation collapsed because of slavery, it’s the nineteenth century cliches about “the Dark Ages” that were finally relieved by the glorious “Renaissance” that form the basis of his depiction of western intellectual history. Natural philosophy was, as the term would suggest, the preserve of philosophers. The Temple of Serapis was estimated to hold about ten percent of the overall Library of Alexandria's holdings. It seems to be the usual flawed Mythicist arguments about the Josephan mentions of Jesus. He does not mention that George took any books from the Serapeum neither in this letter, nor his letters to Ecdicius. Indeed, Quora’s “Be Nice” policy can be the most utterly WTF thing. ?? It doesn’t take much thought, however, to realise this makes absolutely no sense. On the whole, however, lofty Greek philosophers didn’t think to soil their hands with something as lowly as inventing and making things. But our duties are not set in stone, and our failure to respond to this threat, a threat from the system itself, will doom us all. (Letter of Julian to the citizens of Alexandria, quote in Socrates Scholasticus, Church History, III.3), “There is nothing in any of the sources indicating that George plundered the Serapeum library. These facts condemning Omar were written by Bishop Gregory Bar Hebræus, a Christian who spent a great deal of time writing about Moslem atrocities without much historical documentation. theres much to go on, and Im just wondering whats your opinion on the Review in question, did he do a descent job overall? We can perhaps shoehorn in Euclid and the physicians and anatomists Herophilos and Erasistratos, depending on when the Mouseion  was established, butoverall the evidence for the institution as some great centre of scientific research is actually rather thin. This means you present this statement as the absolute truth. The temples, including the Serapeum and its adornments, are all referred to in the present tense, whereas the libraries are referred to in the past tense. “And the soldiers were unable to distinguish between books and valuable statues? As with most things on this subject, it seems the answer is no. If the Great Library ceased to exist in the century before Chrisitanity came to power in the Empire, how did Christians get stuck with the charge of destroying it? Several of these libraries were substantial. This work was written, as I said, sometime around 398 AD. 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. The library of Alexandria are desrtroyed more than once. 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? 146, No. But, again, they did not hold other “barbarian” authors in high enough esteem to even bother translating their works. Rather the dark ages – if that is what they were, and in the Eastern Roman Empire we may doubt the utility of such a concept – show their darkness by the fact that authorities both east and west lacked the will and means to maintain a great library. 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. What should also be made clear, however, is that it was not actually a “library” that was established at all. Thank you for this! Then there is the archaeological evidence that indicates that the Library of Pergamon held c. 30,000 scrolls. Then you would need to back up this speculative idea that the number of books can be massively boosted by assuming lots of Asian, African and Egyptian authors’ works with some actual evidence. So what exactly are you asking? Concerning possible books/scrolls in translation, was the Alexandrian library even an attempt to amass “accumulated knowledge ” across ancient cultures? Those who refused compliance were crucified, had both legs broken, or were put to death in some cruel manner. He notes: “We must then assume, to save the ancient figures for the contents of the Library, either that more than 90 percent of classical authors are not even quoted or cited in what survives, or that the Ptolemies acquired a dozen copies of everything, or some combination of these unlikely hypotheses. The Museum was a shrine of the Muses modeled after the Lyceum of Aristotle in Athens. And the “be nice” rule has come to mean that mild sardonic comments or sarcasm or simply saying “No, you really don’t know what you’re talking about (and here’s why)” is deemded as “not nice” and can get you banned. “Getting history right is crucial, and noone – neither the religious nor the irreligious – should get a free ride when it comes to instrumentalising the past. Is that your point? Hey Tim, Have you ever watched HistoryBuffs? And once you take out all the others, that really leaves only Eratosthenes and (maybe) Conon of Samos and, much later, Ptolemy as scholars of the Great Library who did anything like what we would call “science”. As mentioned above, when we can survey the archaeology of an ancient library’s ruins, some estimate can be made of its holdings. And it is even more of a fantasy that it was a centre of technological innovation. That much is clear. Late to this, but a very good post. Library of Alexandria, the most famous library of Classical antiquity. “he famously says that Rome had now entered its final stage (“declining into old age, and often owing victory to its name alone” 14.6.3).”. Another comment posited an even greater impact that the loss of Roman “complex central heating” (i.e. Now we agree Ammianus started to write his work in the late 380s. It has been estimated that at one time the Library of Alexandria held over half a million documents from Assyria, Greece, Persia, Egypt, India and many other nations. That aside, the idea that the Mouseion  was a major centre of scientific speculation is at best an exaggeration and largely yet another fantasy. 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. 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. 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. And the soldiers were unable to distinguish between books and valuable statues? But after all, that is just rhetoric. Required fields are marked *. The earliest account of Caesar’s siege damaging Alexandria comes from a lost work by Livy via an epitome by Florus (Florus, II.13) which describes Caesar burning the area around the docks to deprive enemy archers of a position on which to fire on his troops, and this is echoed by Lucan (The Civil War, X.24). I agree the 1/2 million figure seems inflated. The emperor Julian condemned George, but he nowhere mentions that George may have taken any books from the library. When all this is pointed out some New Atheists try to invoke counter-evidence. Significantly, writing around 378 AD, Ammianus Marcellinus gave a detailed description of the Serapeum and mentions its libraries using the past tense: In here have been valuable libraries and the unanimous testimony of ancient records declares that seven hundred thousand books, brought together by the unremitting energy of the Ptolemies, were burned in the Alexandrine War when the city was sacked under the dictator Caesar. If he was solely to blame for the disappearance of the Library it is very likely significant documentation on the affair would exist today. You really are getting creative with your attempts though. “the various contemporary statements about the Alexandria library, are spaced out over a period of 400 years. The only problem is … it never happened. The first problem relevant here is that the sources vary widely in the figures they give for the number of scrolls in the Library. a pseudo-atheist shill for Christian triumphalism [and] delusionally insane.”, – Dr. Richard Carrier PhD, unemployed blogger, Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, this post to the Reddit /r/badhistory group, “The Foundation and Loss of the Royal and Serapeum Libraries of Alexandria”, The Foundation and Loss of the Royal and Serapeum Libraries of Alexandria, http://www.geelongadvertiser.com.au/news/geelong/hundreds-protest-over-closure-of-three-geelong-library-branches/news-story/90b9f8c63e8ac986632031985b879914, “History for Atheists”! But we have to respect the right of people to believe for as long as they need. There is nothing in any of the sources indicating that George plundered the Serapeum library. I’ve seen guys who say some harsh stuff which should by all means get them punished but don’t. I haven’t seen the review, mainly because I read the /r/badhistory critique of it. For instance, would they even have been interested in works in Egyptian? It’s more likely to be closer to the latest date covered by the narrative, so “writing around 378 AD”. I do so enjoy reading it. 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. Whenever that was, it was clearly before the destruction of the Serapeum, which he describes in the persent tense. 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." Hero’s little device was not capable of doing anything more than spinning in place and Roman technology lacked the high tensile metallurgy, the mathematics or the precision tooling that would be required to make a true steam engine. HE 3.3), which is clear that George took “images, votive offerings, and such other consecrated apparatus” (the term “ransacked” is a modern invention). It is likely that the later Ptolemies began to neglect the institution and Roman imperial patronage of it was probably even less reliable. Thanks for this article! This item was created by a contributor to eHistory prior to its affiliation with The Ohio State University. In 391 AD the Serapeum was indeed torn down by Roman soldiers and a Christian mob and it is here, finally, that we find the seed of the myth. Formerly a s… In 640 AD the Moslems took the city of Alexandria. He acknowledges that we can’t know how many lost writers existed (obviously), so he bases his calculations on the ones we know about. That kind of library, which is still the model for many traditionally-styled libraries today, was developed much later by the Romans and the Mouseion would instead have had “a colonnade with a line-up of rooms behind …. The nature of Greek thought did allow them to draw useful and often correct conclusions about the physical universe, but it also set up barriers to the true scientific method that they simply did not and could not cross. If we had lower figures earlier and higher ones later then you may have had a point, but they are all over the place. Artist : Anonymous. alphabetical order.” (Greenblatt, p. 88), The figure of “half a million scrolls” (or even “half a million books”) is the one that is usually bandied about, but even that colossal number is not quite enough for some polemicists. Cause it says he died in 345? There is agreement that it was a significant event in the overall scheme of things regarding the eventual fall of the Western Empire, a full century later. It was said to be the third largest library in the ancient world, surpassed only by the great libraries of Pergamon and Alexandria. a mob of Christian zealots attacked the ancient library of Alexandria, a place where the works of the greatest rarity and antiquity had been collected …. This means that a Greek conversation about “atoms” was largely an abstract and metaphysical exercise about the philosophical nature of a thing and how many times it could be divided conceptually and what this may mean; the word comes from the Greek ἄτομος meaning “unhewn, uncut, indivisible”. Not only does this turn the site into more of an echo chamber but it really harms the quality of answers and feedback. So of course he puts emphasis on the elements of the ransacking that represent sacrilege – that emphasises his rhetorical point. So now you know what parts of the temple the troops went into? So who did burn the Library of Alexandria? But prefatory remarks at the beginning of Books XV and XXVI indicate that the book was published in instalments. You can also subscribe without commenting. This is what philosophy is. 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. But several who are often claimed as working there (or even as being “librarians” of the Great Library, no less) clearly did not. a crypto-Christian, posing as an atheist …. You have to get into a some fairly esoteric special uses and constructions to get anything close to “most”. What Julian actually says is that “all the books which belonged to George be sought out” and then says that George’s secretary be given the task, threatening him with “the test of torture” if he doesn’t send all of the collection. Unless, of course, you imagine it was a very delicate, gentle and selective ransacking that left the collection of valuable books intact. In 391 CE, Christian Emperor Theodosius had had it up to here with all the pagans, so he officially called for the destruction of the Temple of Serapis. 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. Tertullian mentions that this library included copies of the Old Testament (Tertullian, Apology, 13) and Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis, notes that it was an annex of the Mouseion’s collection, saying “later another library was built in the Serapeum …. You are ridiculous. That place was an intellectual’s heaven.”, “I get upset by the fact that the loss of all this knowledge and wisdom was at human hands, not of some accidental cause.”, “Ignorance destroys enlightenment just because of its own stupidity.”, “It reinforces my hatred for religious zealot’s, and distaste for religion in general – How much greater would our advancements be right now were it not for ridiculous acts and events such as this…”. Again, there were exceptions to this –  Archimedes seems to have had some interest in the engineering applications of his ideas, even if most of the inventions attributed to him are probably legends. I am waiting to get a creationist myther on quora who is a holocaust denier . The main culprit here is, unfortunately, the late Carl Sagan. This includes the ones that we have just fragments or sentences from and the ones who are merely mentioned in other writings. Probably everyone mentioned above had some hand in destroying some part of the Library's holdings. Please don’t misunderstand- I’m not a New Atheist, have no goal to reach any mythical number of books, admit my lack of knowledge about the library at Alexandria is nearly complete, and didn’t even know this was a “thing” with atheists. James Hannam in his summary of the evidence (see “The Foundation and Loss of the Royal and Serapeum Libraries of Alexandria”, 2003) provides a useful summary table: Some of these figures are interdependent, so for example Ammianus is probably depending, directly or indirectly, on Aulus Gellius for his “700,000” figure, which in turn is where Kirsch gets the same number in the quote above. face-palming is inevitable. In addition to some redundancy in copies. So unless Ammianus had a crystal ball or a time machine and access to modern historians’ analysis of much later events, it makes no sense that he would have seen Adrianople as “the end of the Roman Empire”. “Now we agree Ammianus started to write his work in the late 380s.”. Unfortunately, only one of these people – Eratosthenes – can definitely be said to be associated with the Great Library. | Larry Hurtado's Blog, Review - Catherine Nixey "The Darkening Age" - History for Atheists, http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/, A Response to Tim O’Neill on the Resurrection of Jesus | faithful philosophy and the past, Crítica do livro “A chegada das trevas”, de Catherine Nixey – Logos Apologetica, Pulling Back The Green Curtain Part 4 - Deeper Waters, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letters_of_Julian/Letter_23, primary meaning and the meaning in the vast majority of contexts is “many”, The Great Myths 8: The Loss of Ancient Learning - History for Atheists, The Great Myths 9: Hypatia of Alexandria - History for Atheists, Hypatie d’Alexandrie : mort d’une philosophe païenne – Bienvenue dans l'humble atrium de Cornelius Pomponius Pisces, History for Atheists on MythVision - History for Atheists, Richard Dawkins Teaches the Children - History for Atheists, Jesus Mythicism 7: Josephus, Jesus and the ‘Testimonium Flavianum’, The Great Myths 4: Constantine, Nicaea and the Bible. 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. 2: Emperor Theodosius I via Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria This theory is even more complicated, and not just because it technically involves two jocks. What is the reference to Ammianus “writing around 378 AD”? But what is missing from all this evidence is any howling, pyromaniacal Christian mob. 97, No. In a 2002 paper that debunks several of the myths about the Great Library (see Bagnall, “Alexandria: Library of Dreams”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. This is also a reason why no scholarly publication in the field ever asserted that George did away with the library in 356. This works for some other ancient libraries for which we have surveyable remains, but unfortunately that is not the case for the Mouseion, given that archaeologists still have to guess where exactly it stood. But the practical applications of his study of pneumatics and dynamics were more toys and curiosities than any great leaps forward in technology. This is a neat story that makes a direct link between the Peripatetic school of Aristotle and the founding of the Library and establishes it as being modelled on Aristotle’s Lyceum in Athens. So it’s more likely that reference is a later addition. Theophilus was Patriarch of Alexandria from 385 to 412 AD. The Mouseion and its library were almost certainly a memory by the late third century, destroyed in a series of calamities after a long period of decline. The whole idea that the destruction of a single ancient library could have singlehandedly brought on “the Dark Ages” is incoherent, and that’s leaving aside the fact that the whole concept of “the Dark Ages” is gibberish to begin with. The Great Myths 5: The Destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria, Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window). Most modern accounts say that the Great Library of Alexandria was founded at the beginning of the third century BC when Demetrios of Phaleron, a former student of Theophrastos who in turn was the student and successor of Aristotle, went into exile in the fledgling city of Alexandria and proposed a plan for the Library to Ptolemy I Soter. People chose the Jewish God because the Greek Gods left humans much to use their brains to solve their problems. Alexandria had long been known for its violent and volatile politics. Orestes was said to be under the influence of Hypatia, a female philosopher and daughter of the "last member of the Library of Alexandria". You could have made your point more credibly by just saying he saw it as a significant and dramatic end point. He notes that we know of around 450 authors for whom we have, at the very least, some lines of writing whose work existed in the fourth century BC and another 175 from the third century BC. Hmm …, “We know that it was ransacked on the orders of the Alexandrian bishop George the Cappodocian c. 360 AD and it is likely the library was looted in this action.”. Alexandria was founded in Egypt by Alexander the Great. This makes some sense, given that the Mouseion wasdedicated to the Muses, four of whom represented forms of verse. Please keep comments on posts relevant to the post. a fire under your floor fed by a gang of slaves): “I have long been of the opinion that if the Library of Alexandria and the other learning centers of the Classical World survived, the Roman Empire would have stayed unified and strong, the migrations of the fourth and fifth centuries would have been stemmed and controlled at the Rhine and Danube frontier in Europe, and that we quite possibly would have gotten into orbit at least 500 years earlier than we did. As Bagnall notes, there would need to be dozens of copiesd of absolutely everything and all works would have to be take up many scrolls to get even close to the higher figures given for the Library’s holdings. Of these, a full 245 are not about pagan statues etc, but are devoted wholly to detailed denigration of the ignorant Christian monks who destroyed the temple. So I’d say the development of new ideas is actually a benefit to the Abrahamic Tradition. Serapis was a Greek-Egyptian hybrid deity, combining Zeus and Osiris, and his cult and temple were extremely popular in Ptolemaic Alexandria. Roman libraries often had, like Trajan’s, two rooms – one for Greek and one for Latin authors. But the exaggerations would require it to be about 15 times the size of its “rival”, which doesn’t make much sense. Pardon? I must admit that, like many of my generation, I have a soft spot for Sagan. Had Rome managed that, the economic development necessary for the rest would have come in due time.”. The Library of Alexandria was destroyed about 48 years before Christ was born by Julius Caesar's forces. Of course, for this to have come about, the Roman Empire would have had to do a much better job at suppressing the religious hysterics that kept cropping up, and keeping the Imperial succession peaceful. It is also quite likely that even if the Museum was destroyed with the main library the outlying "daughter" library at the Temple of Serapis continued on. There certainly is an account from a century later which attributes the founding of the Library to Demetrios in Ptolemy I’s reign, but there are good reasons to be suspicious of its accuracy. You’ve changed “many” to “most” – they are not the same thing. Diana Delia is much less cautious, stating “Egyptian, Ethiopian, Indian, Persian, Elamite, Babylonian, Assyrian, Chaldean, Phoencian, Syrian and Latin masterpieces were probably translated and preserved in Greek as well” (Delia, p. 1457), though her “probably” there is because she is basing this on the very late Christian sources that gave Bagnell pause (i.e. Of course the moderators will require require everyone treat their ideas and them with absolute respect. Vespasian established one in the Temple of Peace in 70 AD, but probably the largest of the Roman libraries was that of Trajan in his new forum beside the famous column that celebrates his Dacian wars. Libraries were often established as adjuncts to temples but it seems Sagan was attempting to distance the “annex” of the Great Library from the temple in which it sat because this did not quite fit his theme of secular knowledge’s superiority to “mysticism”. Some try to argue that the Christian chroniclers would be ashamed of the crime of destroying the last remnant of the Great Library and so hushed it up in their accounts. So by adopting the almost certainly far  too high figure of an average of 50 scrolls to contain the work of each writer, Bagnall arrives as a mere 31,250 scrolls to contain all the works of all the writers we know about to the end of the third century. The Burning of the Library of Alexandria, 1876. Claudius built a new wing or annex to the Mouseion, which was to house his works of history and see the public reading of them twice a year. It is entirely possible that it was the largest library in the ancient world, though we have no way of confirming this given that we have little reliable information about the size of its collection. The fact that so many writers agree that Caesar’s fire destroyed the Great Library simply can’t be ignored, however, and at the very least the fire seems to have destroyed a substantial portion of the book collection, probably stored in warehouses on the docks. Quibbling over “around 378” versus “writing in the 380s” is pretty irrelevant to that key point. The emperor Julian condemned George, but he nowhere mentions that George may have taken any books from the library.”. “This is why Ammianus used 378 as his end point.”. The Library of Alexandria is so embedded in our cultural canon that it remains a broadly known and admired institution. 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. He says the Serapeum was “once a temple, but was later reconsecrated to knowledge”. But how and why it was lost is still a mystery. (e.g. Finally a place where people are reasonable and an environment to learn. He usually goes skeptical on many films that try to portray one side as being all evil or all good. During the Mouseion’s heyday in the third and second centuries BC the funding for this labour and the upkeep of the institution generally would have been regular and reliable. There were exceptions (mainly in geometry and its related field, astronomy), but the Greeks were usually not interested in empirical measurement and so were usually even less interested in genuine experiments. It’s so annoying. 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