The Great Library of Alexandria is by far the most famous library that existed in the ancient world. At its height in the third century BC, it attracted renowned scholars from all over the Hellenistic world. It is likely that it held more scrolls than any other library in the Mediterranean at the time. Many people today see this library as a symbol of everything the ancient world accomplished.
As a result of the Great Library’s fame, however, it has become heavily mythologized. Many of the things that many people today believe about the library are simply not true. For instance, contrary to what you may have read on the internet, the Library of Alexandria was not the first library ever built, its famous destruction is not the primary reason why so many texts from ancient times have been lost, and it was certainly not deliberately destroyed by religious obscurantists of any kind.
Misconception #1: The Library of Alexandria was the first library ever.
Some people have tried to claim that the Library of Alexandria was the first library in the world. For instance, an article titled “11 Greek Influences and Contributions to Today’s Society,” originally published on the website Owlcation on 9 April 2018, describes the Library of Alexandria as “the first library in the world.”
This statement is entirely false. The Library of Alexandria was not even close to being the first library; there were countless libraries that existed before it. The earliest known collections of written texts curated by scholars were in ancient Sumer and date to around the middle of the third millennium BC—over 2,000 years before the Library of Alexandria was even a thought in anyone’s head.
The Library of Alexandria was not even the first library to become famous for its impressively large collection. The Library of Ashurbanipal, founded by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (ruled 669 – 631 BC) around three centuries before the founding of the Library of Alexandria, was famous for its enormous collection as well.
The ruins of the Library of Ashurbanipal were excavated by the British archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard (lived 1817 – 1894) in the mid-nineteenth century. The library was discovered to contain over 30,000 cuneiform tablets. One of the most important cuneiform texts that was found there is the most complete version of the now-famous Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written in Akkadian in the late second millennium BC by a Babylonian scribe named Sîn-lēqi-unninni.
The Library of Alexandria was not the first public library in the ancient Greek tradition either. Peisistratos, who ruled as tyrant of Athens at several points in the sixth century BC, is said to have established the first major public library in Greece. Whether or not this account is accurate, both public and private libraries certainly existed in Greece long before the Hellenistic Period.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of cuneiform tablets from the Library of Ashurbanipal on display in the British Museum in London
Misconception #2: The destruction of the Library of Alexandria is the primary reason why so many classical texts have been lost.
I cannot count how many times I have encountered this claim. It is a claim I first heard from my own father when I was growing up and I have heard it countless times since then. No matter how often this claim is repeated, though, it is still false. The destruction of the Library of Alexandria is not the primary reason why so many texts from the ancient world have been lost.
What people who believe this fail to realize is that the Library of Alexandria was not the only library in the ancient world. In fact, virtually every town in the Hellenistic world had a public library of some kind. The Library of Alexandria was undoubtedly one of the largest and most prestigious of all the libraries that existed during the Hellenistic Period, but this does not obviate the fact that there were plenty of others that existed.
The Library of Alexandria even had a rival: the Library of Pergamon, which, at its height, according to the Greek writer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 AD) in his Life of Marcus Antonius 58.5, housed roughly 200,000 scrolls. Although none of the scrolls that were held in the Library of Pergamon have survived to the present day, the ruins of the building itself are still visible at the site of Pergamon in Turkey.
ABOVE: Photograph from this website of the ruins of the Library of Pergamon. None of the scrolls have survived, but the remains of the building are still there.
Another large, impressive library in the ancient world was the Library of Kelsos at Ephesos, which was constructed in the 110s AD under the commission of the Roman consul Gaius Julius Aquila as a monument to his father Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus. At its height, the Library of Kelsos is estimated to have held around 12,000 scrolls.
Unfortunately, the Library of Kelsos’s entire collection was destroyed by a fire that occurred in around the year 262 AD. The building itself collapsed due to an earthquake in around the tenth or eleventh century AD. In the 1970s, however, a group of archaeologists reconstructed the façade of the building using the original building materials, which were still mostly intact.
The reconstructed façade can still be seen at the site of Ephesos in Turkey today. It is widely considered to be one of the most beautiful surviving buildings from the ancient world.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the surviving façade of the Library of Kelsos at Ephesos
ABOVE: Another photograph from Wikimedia Commons with a different view of the façade of the Library of Kelsos at Ephesos
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons with a different view of the façade of the Library of Kelsos at Ephesos
Meanwhile, book collecting was also wildly popular among wealthy elites throughout the ancient Mediterranean world because it was seen as a way for them to display their wealth and erudition. In fact, it was so wildly popular for wealthy people to amass massive private collections of books and then not actually read them that multiple Greek and Roman writers actually complain about this practice, seeing it as an unnecessary extravagance.
The Roman Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca the Younger (lived c. 4 BC – 65 AD) famously saw the Library of Alexandria itself as nothing more than yet another ostentatious display of wealth. In his treatise De Tranquillitate Animi (“On the Tranquility of the Mind“), he uses the partial destruction of the Library of Alexandria’s collection by the fire of Alexandria in 48 BC to scold his contemporaries for amassing enormous collections of scrolls just to show how rich and educated they were. In De Tranquillitate Animi, chapter 9, Seneca proclaims, as translated by Aubrey Stewart:
“Forty thousand books were burned at Alexandria: some would have praised this library as a most noble memorial of royal wealth, like Titus Livius, who says that it was ‘a splendid result of the taste and attentive care of the kings.’ It had nothing to do with taste or care, but was a piece of learned luxury, nay, not even learned, since they amassed it, not for the sake of learning, but to make a show, like many men who know less about letters than a slave is expected to know, and who uses his books not to help him in his studies but to ornament his dining-room. Let a man, then, obtain as many books as he wants, but none for show.”
“‘It is more respectable,’ say you, ‘to spend one’s money on such books than on vases of Corinthian brass and paintings.’ Not so: everything that is carried to excess is wrong. What excuses can you find for a man who is eager to buy bookcases of ivory and citrus wood, to collect the works of unknown or discredited authors, and who sits yawning amid so many thousands of books, whose backs and titles please him more than any other part of them?”
“Thus in the houses of the laziest of men you will see the works of all the orators and historians stacked upon bookshelves reaching right up to the ceiling. At the present day a library has become as necessary an appendage to a house as a hot and cold bath. I would excuse them straightway if they really were carried away by an excessive zeal for literature; but as it is, these costly works of sacred genius, with all the illustrations that adorn them, are merely bought for display and to serve as wall-furniture.”
About a century later, the Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 AD) wrote a satirical letter in Greek titled Remarks Addressed to an Illiterate Book-Fancier. Here is how the letter opens, as translated by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler:
“Let me tell you, that you are choosing the worst way to attain your object. You think that by buying up all the best books you can lay your hands on, you will pass for a man of literary tastes: not a bit of it; you are merely exposing thereby your own ignorance of literature. Why, you cannot even buy the right things: any casual recommendation is enough to guide your choice; you are as clay in the hands of the unscrupulous amateur, and as good as cash down to any dealer. How are you to know the difference between genuine old books that are worth money, and trash whose only merit is that it is falling to pieces? You are reduced to taking the worms and moths into your confidence; their activity is your sole clue to the value of a book; as to the accuracy and fidelity of the copyist, that is quite beyond you.”
Clearly, wealthy people in ancient times had a hobby of collecting scrolls. As a matter of fact, the only library from the ancient world whose collection has survived to the present day nearly complete is the private library from the so-called “Villa of the Papyri” in the Roman city of Herculaneum, which originally contained over 1,800 papyrus scrolls. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, these scrolls were carbonized and the entire villa was buried in ash.
The Villa of the Papyri lay buried for nearly 1,700 years until it was accidentally rediscovered in 1750 by workers who were digging a well. Two years later, the Bourbon royal family ordered the excavation of the ruined villa. At first, the scrolls that were discovered were simply thrown away because they looked like merely lumps of charcoal and the excavators assumed they were worthless.
After it was realized that the charred objects from the villa were scrolls with writing on them, experts began trying to unravel them. Unfortunately, early efforts to unravel the papyri were destructive and they generally revealed very little text that could be transcribed. Now, though, scholars are using X-rays and multispectral imaging to digitally unravel the papyri without completely destroying them.
There were certainly many other private libraries in the ancient world just like the one in the Villa of the Papyri. These other private libraries, however, have not survived to the present day intact. The only reason why the collection from the Villa of the Papyri has survived is because it was preserved thanks to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which was an unbelievable, almost unique occurrence.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the entrance to the Villa of the Papyri, an enormous luxury villa in the Roman city of Herculaneum that contained a private library of over 1,800 scrolls
Although there can be no doubt that scrolls were often very expensive in ancient times, they were nonetheless highly prized and widely collected, especially by the wealthy. It is therefore clear that the vast majority of the texts that were held in the Library of Alexandria were probably also held in at least several dozen other libraries and private collections.
To use a rather crude modern analogy, think how much information would be lost if the Library of Congress were to burn down today and everything in it were to be completely destroyed. Sure, we would lose thousands of rare and priceless manuscripts and the cost of the damage would be beyond words, but how much actual information would be lost? Probably very little.
Nearly all the books in the Library of Congress’s collection are also held in other libraries around the world and in private collections. The same thing is true about the texts that were held in the Library of Alexandria.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the main reading room of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
The real reason why so many texts that were written in ancient times have been lost is not because one library was destroyed; instead, most texts that have been lost have been lost due to a much more boring reason: entropy.
In ancient times, people wrote on papyrus scrolls, which usually had about the same life expectancy as modern acid paper books. Under normal conditions of continuous wear and use, a papyrus scroll typically only survives for about fifty years or so before it breaks down into a condition where it is no longer readable.
There are, of course, cases of papyrus scrolls surviving for much longer. There are, for instance, some relatively intact papyrus scrolls that have been found in Egyptian tombs. These scrolls, however, represent exceptions to the norm and they have only survived in their present condition because they were sealed away in tombs in the extremely dry Egyptian climate.
Generally speaking, the only way a person could prevent a text written on papyrus from being inevitably lost to time was by copying the whole thing out by hand, which was an unbelievably tedious, time-consuming, and expensive task. In order for a text to be lost forever, you did not need to burn it; you just needed to decide not to copy it and, within a few decades, it would probably be gone.
This meant that, in order for a text to be preserved from antiquity, roughly every fifty years or so, some rich person had to read it and say, “Huh, you know, I’d really like a copy of this text” and either pay someone an exorbitant amount of money to copy it or order a literate slave to devote countless hours of their time to the task of copying the manuscript. Copying a single manuscript could take months or even years, depending on the length. Many of the texts that have survived from antiquity have done so because they were commonly used in schools, where they were read and studied by students.
ABOVE: Nineteenth-century fictional illustration by the German artist O. Van Corven depicting how he imagined the Library of Alexandria might have looked in its heyday
On top of all this, there were also a couple concurrent format shifts in late antiquity that resulted in many ancient texts being lost. The slightly earlier of these shifts was the shift from writing on scrolls to writing on codices, which occurred roughly between the late first century AD and the fifth century AD.
The codex provided a huge advantage over the scroll, because it saved a massive amount of storage space. The problem is that, when people switched over to using codices, texts written on scrolls became seen as archaic and obsolete, in the same way that, today, printed books are becoming seen as archaic and obsolete. At a certain point, probably around 600 AD or thereabouts, any texts that had not already been copied over onto parchment were seen as not worth bothering with and so were lost.
There was also another format shift; over the course of late antiquity, people began gradually switching over from writing on papyrus to writing on parchment. Parchment is much more durable than papyrus and can last several times longer.
The problem is that the same thing that happened when people switched over to codices happened when they switched over to parchment. Papyrus became looked upon as obsolete and archaic and not worth bothering with. If a text had not been copied over to parchment by around 800 AD, chances were it was not going to get copied. So, ironically, switching over to a more durable medium actually may have resulted in even greater loss of texts.
More ancient Greek and Roman texts were gradually lost over the course of the later Middle Ages, albeit at a slower rate. It is worth noting that not a single one of the great public libraries of classical antiquity survived intact past the Early Middle Ages. Many of the texts housed in them certainly did, but the libraries themselves did not, so the Library of Alexandria was far from unique in this regard. Instead, as the old libraries died out, newer, often smaller ones—many of them in monasteries—replaced them.
ABOVE: Illustration from the Codex Amiatinus dating to c. 700 AD depicting an early medieval bookshelf containing around ten codices
As I discuss in this other article I wrote, the vast majority of surviving ancient texts written in the Greek language have survived because they were copied by Greek-speaking people in the Byzantine Empire. Consequently, the surviving corpus of classical Greek texts tends to reflect the kinds of texts that Byzantine scholars were interested in reading.
For instance, the Byzantines were obsessed with Platonic philosophy and, as a result, every work that is known to have ever been credibly attributed to Plato in ancient times has survived to the present day. Many texts that Plato almost certainly did not actually write have also survived, simply because they were falsely attributed to Plato. On the other hand, the Byzantines were less interested in archaic Greek lyric poetry. Consequently, the vast majority of archaic Greek lyric poems have been lost because they were not copied.
Manuscripts had to be copied exclusively by hand until the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. This means that, in order to survive, a manuscript of a text originally written in the fifth century BC had to be copied, not once or twice, but dozens of times. In point of fact, we are truly unbelievably fortunate that anything has survived from the classical world at all.
ABOVE: Mid-tenth century Byzantine manuscript illustration of Matthew the Apostle with Byzantine-era scribal equipment
Misconception #3: The Library of Alexandria was cataclysmically burned to the ground one time and everything in it was destroyed.
Another very important thing everyone needs to understand about the Library of Alexandria is that, even though people always seem to talk about how it “burned” or “was destroyed,” it actually suffered a very long, gradual decline over the course of many centuries.
This decline began in around 145 or 144 BC, when Ptolemaios VIII Physkon (ruled c. 145 – c. 116 BC) seized control of Egypt from his older brother Ptolemaios VI Philometor and swiftly instigated a series of purges in which he forcibly and permanently exiled vast numbers of citizens of Alexandria who had publicly supported his brother’s reign. This apparently included an enormous number of scholars who were working at the Library of Alexandria at the time.
The scholars whom Ptolemaios VIII banished fled as refugees to other cities throughout the Hellenistic world, taking all their knowledge with them. Notably, Aristarchos of Samothrake, the head librarian at the time, who was also a world-renowned literary scholar, reportedly fled to the island of Kypros. As a result of this, from this point onward, Hellenistic scholarship became less concentrated in Alexandria.
The main primary sources for this information are the Hellenistic Greek historians Menekles of Barka (FGrHist 270 F 9) and Andron of Alexandria (FGrHist 246 F 1), who both wrote in around the second century BC within living memory of Ptolemaios VIII’s expulsions. Although neither Menekles’s nor Andron’s original writings have survived to the present day, the much later Greek writer Athenaios of Naukratis, who flourished in around the late second and early third centuries AD, cites them by name and summarizes their accounts as follows in his Deipnosophistai or Wise Men at Dinner 4.184b–d:
“οὐ γὰρ οἶδας ἱστοροῦντα Μενεκλέα τὸν Βαρκαῖον συγγραφέα ἔτι τε Ἄνδρωνα ἐν τοῖς Χρονικοῖς τὸν Ἀλεξανδρέα, ὅτι Ἀλεξανδρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ παιδεύσαντες πάντας τοὺς Ἕλληνας καὶ τοὺς βαρβάρους, ἐκλειπούσης ἤδη τῆς ἐγκυκλίου παιδείας διὰ τὰς γενομένας συνεχεῖς κινήσεις ἐν τοῖς κατὰ τοὺς Ἀλεξάνδρου διαδόχους χρόνοις.”
“ἐγένετο οὖν ἀνανέωσις πάλιν παιδείας ἁπάσης κατὰ τὸν ἕβδομον βασιλεύσαντα Αἰγύπτου Πτολεμαῖον, τὸν κυρίως ὑπὸ τῶν Ἀλεξανδρέων καλούμενον Κακεργέτην. οὗτος γὰρ πολλοὺς τῶν Ἀλεξανδρέων ἀποσφάξας, οὐκ ὀλίγους δὲ καὶ φυγαδεύσας τῶν κατὰ τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ ἐφηβησάντων ἐποίησε, πλήρεις τάς τε νήσους καὶ πόλεις ἀνδρῶν γραμματικῶν, φιλοσόφων, γεωμετρῶν, μουσικῶν, ζωγράφων, παιδοτριβῶν τε καὶ ἰατρῶν καὶ ἄλλων πολλῶν τεχνιτῶν· οἳ διὰ τὸ πένεσθαι διδάσκοντες ἃ ἠπίσταντο πολλοὺς κατεσκεύασαν ἄνδρας ἐλλογίμους.”
This means, in my own translation:
“For you do not know that the prose writer Menekles of Barka and also Andron of Alexandria in his Chronicles record together that the Alexandrians are the ones who taught all the Hellenes and all the barbarians when encyclical education had already disappeared because of the constant disturbances that took place in the time of the Successors of Alexander.”
“There was therefore a reorganization back of all education during the reign of the seventh ruling Ptolemaios of Egypt [i.e., Ptolemaios VIII Physkon], the one who is authoritatively called by the Alexandrians Kakergétēs [‘Malefactor’]. For this man slaughtered many of the Alexandrians, and he also made not a few of the men who had been ephebes during the reign of his brother [i.e., Ptolemaios VI Philometor] into exiles, filling the islands and cities with grammarians, philosophers, geometers, musicians, painters, athletic trainers, physicians, and many other professionals, who, because they were impoverished, taught the things which they knew and produced many eminent men.”
From c. 145 BC onwards, the history of the Library of Alexandria is one of inadequate funding and patronage, persistent mismanagement, and general decline.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a silver didrachm minted by the Ptolemaic Kingdom in around 138 or 137 BC, bearing the portrait of Ptolemaios VIII Physkon, who is said to have forcibly exiled large numbers of scholars from Egypt who had supported his brother’s reign
What really killed the Library was most likely primarily the lack of patronage and funding. The early Ptolemies had taken great pride in the reputation of Alexandrian scholarship and had done everything they could to incentivize reputable scholars to come study in Alexandria. They had been willing to go to extraordinary lengths to procure the earliest possible manuscripts of texts (because earlier texts had undergone less copying and were therefore less likely to contain errors).
The later Ptolemies, and eventually the Romans, however, did very little to promote the Library and even used the position of head librarian as a political plum—the ideal meaningless but prestigious position for political supporters. As a result of this, while scholars continued to teach, conduct research, and write important treatises, they no longer felt the pressure to do so in Alexandria. Instead, they more often taught and conducted research elsewhere throughout the eastern Mediterranean.
In 48 BC, Julius Caesar found himself besieged in the waterfront portion of the city of Alexandria, with a fleet of Egyptian ships loyal to Cleopatra VII’s brother Ptolemaios XIV. During the siege, Caesar’s men set fire to some of the Egyptian ships in the harbor. Unfortunately, the fire quickly spread to the city’s docks and then to the city itself.
The ancient sources unanimously agreed that Caesar’s fire destroyed at least a large portion of the Great Library of Alexandria’s collection. Nonetheless, the significance of this burning is often overstated. While some ancient authors do claim that the fire destroyed the Great Library itself in its entirety, the Greek historian Kassios Dion (lived c. 155 – c. 235 AD) says something slightly different in his Roman History XLII.38.2. He writes, as translated by Lionel Casson:
“Many places were set on fire, with the result that, along with other buildings, the dockyards and the storehouses of grain and books, said to be great in number and of the finest, were burned.”
Kassios Dion’s description makes it sound as though the Great Library itself was not destroyed, but rather merely a portion of the library’s collection housed in warehouses near the docks.
ABOVE: Imaginative modern illustration showing how the artist imagined the fire of Alexandria in 48 BC might have looked
Regardless of how much of the Great Library’s collection was actually destroyed in Caesar’s fire in 48 BC, it is clear that the library continued to function in some form or another. The Greek geographer Strabon of Amaseia (lived c. 64 BC – c. 24 AD) is known to have lived and worked in the city of Alexandria from around 25 BC until around 20 BC. He describes in his Geographika XVII.8.47–49 how the Mouseion, the larger research institution that included the famous library, was operating during the time he was living in Alexandria. He writes, as translated by Horace Leonard Jones:
“The Mouseion is also a part of the royal palaces; it has a public walk, an Exedra with seats, and a large house, in which is the common mess-hall of the men of learning who share the Mouseion This group of men not only hold property in common, but also have a priest in charge of the Mouseion, who formerly was appointed by the kings, but is now appointed by Caesar.”
It is hard to imagine how the Mouseion could have continued operating unless the scholars who worked there had access to a very large library. The fact that Strabon describes the Mouseion as still being a functional research institution in the late 20s BC therefore strongly indicates that the Great Library of Alexandria survived the famous fire in 48 BC in some form or another.
ABOVE: Illustration from 1584 by the French engraver André Thevet, depicting how he imagined the geographer Strabon of Amaseia might have looked
There are other indications that there was still a major library in Alexandria in the late first century BC that scholars associated with the Mouseion had access to. Notably, the scholar Didymos Chalkenteros (lived c. 63 BC – c. 10 AD) lived and worked in the city of Alexandria during this time and is said to have written somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 treatises and commentaries on various subjects. It is highly implausible to think that he could have produced such an extraordinarily large body of scholarly writings without access to the collection of a very large library.
Rather than there being a single cataclysmic event that destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria, the decline of the library seems to have been closely linked with the more general decline in prominence of the city of Alexandria itself. Under Roman rule, Alexandria was not nearly as important nor as culturally prominent as it had been under Ptolemaic rule. By the second century AD, Alexandria, though still a thriving city, was only a shadow of the cultural capital it had once been.
Another important point to add is that the decline of the Great Library of Alexandria corresponded with the growth and expansion of other libraries, both within the city of Alexandria and throughout the Mediterranean world. Once scholars had access to texts and manuscripts in their hometowns, they no longer felt the pressure to travel all the way to Alexandria. Likewise, many scrolls from the Library of Alexandria were removed and used to fill up other libraries, such as the one in the Serapeion, a temple to the god Serapis. In other words, part of what killed the Library of Alexandria may have actually been the expansion of knowledge.
By the third century AD, contemporary Alexandrian scholarship was looked upon by many as the paragon of obsolescence; the scholars there were associated with the monotonous editing and correction of minute textual errors and the compiling of composite commentaries based on those of earlier scholars, not for cutting-edge original insight as they once had been. The last references to scholars having been members of the Mouseion date to the 260s AD. It is unclear what was left of the Library’s collection by this time, but it does not seem to have been anything to get people excited about. Most of the scrolls had probably already either rotted away or been transferred elsewhere.
For the city of Alexandria, the second half of the third century AD was filled with bloodshed and destruction. In the early 270s AD, Queen Zenobia of the Palmyrene Empire captured the city and, in around 272 AD, the forces of the emperor Aurelian fought to recapture it. This resulted in a fierce battle, in which the entire Broucheion quarter of Alexandria in which the Great Library was located was demolished. If there was anything left of the Great Library at that time, it would have been utterly destroyed.
If, by some strange miracle, some part of the Great Library managed to survive the destruction of the Broucheion quarter by Aurelian’s troops, it would have been destroyed in 297 AD, when the armies of the emperor Diocletian sacked the city of Alexandria, destroying most of the Broucheion quarter again.
ABOVE: Gold aureus dated to between 270 and 275 AD depicting the emperor Aurelian, whose forces destroyed the Brouchion quarter of Alexandria in 272 AD
Misconception #4: The Library of Alexandria could have contained all kinds of information about amazing technologies that have been lost or the history of lost civilizations we do not know even existed.
It is frankly rather bizarre reading online about all the different kinds of things that so many people seem to think could have been housed in the Library of Alexandria. This one library has attained a quite literally mythic status in our society. You can find all sorts of people online claiming that the Library might have contained the lost history of Atlantis or books about the histories of other lost civilizations. Other people are claiming that the Library could have contained information about amazing lost ancient technologies that modern people do not have any knowledge of.
Although we do not know everything that was in the Library of Alexandria, we do know some of the works it contained and, more importantly, we know what sorts of works the Library generally collected. The Pinakes, the catalogue for the Library of Alexandria created by the great Greek scholar Kallimachos of Kyrene (lived c. 310 – c. 240 BC), which is the oldest known library catalogue in history, has been mostly lost, but several fragmentary portions of it have survived. Based on the available evidence, none of this wild speculation about the Library of Alexandria supposedly containing information about lost civilizations or lost ancient technologies that are currently unknown is plausible.
While it is certainly possible that there could be other major ancient civilizations out there that have not yet been discovered, this prospect does grow less and less likely every year due to the advancement of the field of modern archaeology. Furthermore, if there are any major ancient civilizations that have not been discovered, it is highly unlikely that such civilizations would be advanced to a degree that would be abnormal for a civilization that existed in antiquity. In other words, there were almost certainly no ancient civilizations with anything even remotely approaching the level of technological sophistication we have today.
Finally, it is highly improbable that the Library of Alexandria ever contained significant information about an ancient civilization that is currently completely unknown because we know that the Library of Alexandria mainly collected works of ancient Greek literature. While it is true that many works of ancient Greek literature have been lost, the number of surviving works is substantial enough that we can say with a high degree of certainty that, if the ancient Greeks knew of an older civilization that we do not, they would have most likely made some reference to it somewhere in the surviving corpus of Greek literature.
The Library of Alexandria almost certainly did not contain a true history of Atlantis because, as I explain in this article from March 2019, all available evidence clearly indicates that the story of Atlantis is fiction and that it was invented by Plato to illustrate a philosophical point. There is currently no compelling evidence that would lead us to believe that Atlantis ever existed. Indeed, there is actually a great deal of evidence indicating that it did not exist. All the evidence that is currently available indicates that Atlantis is just as fictional as Westeros, Middle Earth, or Narnia. If the Library of Alexandria did contain a history of Atlantis, it would just be some ancient Greek writer’s fanfiction based on Plato and not an actual history of a real lost continent.
ABOVE: Map by Athanasius Kircher showing the alleged location of Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The story of Atlantis is almost certainly fiction.
So what do we know was in the Library of Alexandria that we do not have anymore? Well, the ancient Greek medical writer Galenos of Pergamon (lived 129 – c. 216 AD) records in his Commentary on Hippokrates’s Epidemics 17a.607 that the Library of Alexandria at one point included the oldest manuscripts of all the tragedies of Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides. He writes, as translated in this extract on the website Attalus:
“This Ptolemaios [i.e., Ptolemaios II Philadelphos] is said to have given sufficient proof of his eagerness to collect old books, by his behaviour towards the Athenians. After giving them fifteen talents of silver as a surety, he received from them the manuscripts of Sophokles and Euripides and Aischylos, on the understanding that he would simply make new copies from the manuscripts, and then promptly return them intact.”
“But after he had produced magnificent new copies on the finest writing material, he kept the books that the Athenians had sent to him, and sent back to them the copies that he had made. He urged them to keep the fifteen talents, and at the same time to receive new copies instead of the old books that they had sent to him. The Athenians would have had no other option, even if he had kept the old books without sending new copies to them, because when they accepted the money, they had agreed that if he kept the books, then they would keep the money; and so they accepted the new copies and kept the money.”
The manuscripts of which Galenos speaks, however, had probably already deteriorated into nothing or been destroyed by the time of Caesar’s fire in 48 BC and they almost certainly did not exist by the third century AD. The chances that texts written on papyrus and kept in the Library of Alexandria could have survived from the fifth century BC until the third century AD are extremely low.
If the Library of Alexandria had survived longer, would we still have all those texts that were in it but are now lost? Perhaps some of them would have survived, but it is highly doubtful that all of them—or even most of them—would have survived. As I mentioned earlier, any texts that were held in the Library would have almost certainly been held in other libraries as well in different manuscripts and, if the other manuscripts of those texts were lost, we have no reason to believe the manuscripts from the Library of Alexandria would have fared any better. It was during the period of the Early Middle Ages (c. 476 – c. 800 AD), long after the Library of Alexandria was no longer in existence, when few people were copying ancient texts, that a large portion of ancient texts were lost.
ABOVE: Eighteenth-century engraving by Georg P. Busch depicting how he imagined Galenos of Pergamon might have looked
Misconception #5: Hypatia of Alexandria was the last librarian of the Library of Alexandria.
Even though I previously debunked this misconception in the article I wrote back in August 2018 about Hypatia, I will address it here as well because it is a particularly common one. Unlike all the other misconceptions on this list, this last one can be definitively traced back to a single source: the thirteenth and final episode of the 1980 PBS miniseries Cosmos, written and presented by the astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan was a great scientist and popularizer of science, but he was not a good historian.
The account of the death of Hypatia and the destruction of the Library of Alexandria given in Cosmos is wildly inaccurate and contains numerous errors, omissions, and anachronisms. Hypatia of Alexandria was born sometime between c. 350 and c. 370 AD. By the time she was born, the Library of Alexandria had no longer existed for at least a century. Carl Sagan apparently conflated the destruction of the Library of Alexandria with the destruction of the Serapeion, a temple in Alexandria dedicated to the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis that was destroyed in 391 AD by a mob of Christians led by Bishop Theophilos I of Alexandria.
ABOVE: Color illumination from the Alexandrian World Chronicle, dating to the fifth or sixth century AD, illustrating the destruction of the Serapeion in 391 AD. The man on the left is Bishop Theophilos of Alexandria, the bishop of Alexandria from 384 until 412.
The Serapeion had, at one point, housed a daughter collection of books from the Library of Alexandria, but there is evidence that this collection probably no longer existed at the time of the Serapeion’s destruction in 391. For one thing, none of the accounts of the Serapeion’s destruction mention anything about it containing any scrolls. For another thing, the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who wrote prior the Serapeion’s destruction in 391, already speaks of the Serapeion’s collection of scrolls in the past tense, indicating that the collection no longer existed at the time he was writing.
Finally, we have no evidence that Hypatia was in any way affiliated with the Serapeion. Although Hypatia was a Neoplatonist and the Serapeion was used as something of a school by certain Neoplatonist philosophers, the Neoplatonists affiliated with the Serapeion appear to have been adherents to the particular brand of esoteric Neoplatonism articulated by the Syrian philosopher Iamblichos (lived c. 245 – c. 325 AD); whereas Hypatia’s school seems to have been more conservative, based on the older teachings of the philosopher Plotinos of Lykopolis (lived c. 204/5 – 270 AD).
In other words, there is no truth whatsoever to the notion that Hypatia was ever a librarian at the Library of Alexandria. She was a scholar who lived in Alexandria, but she never worked at the famous library that once existed in that city. Saying that Hypatia was a librarian at the Library of Alexandria is about as historically accurate as saying that Barack Obama served as an officer for the Union army during the American Civil War. It just is not true.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the ruins of the Serapeion in Alexandria today
Misconception #6: The Library of Alexandria was destroyed by Caliph Omar during the Islamic conquest of Alexandria in 642 AD.
A very popular story that has circulated on the internet claims that the Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed by Caliph Omar (lived c. 584 – 644 AD) during the Islamic conquest of Alexandria in 642 AD. This story is certainly not accurate. As I have repeatedly mentioned above, we do not know exactly when the famous Library of Alexandria ceased to exist, but it certainly could not have survived any later than 272 AD because that is the year when the emperor Aurelian’s forces demolished the entire Brouchion quarter of Alexandria.
There were no Muslims on earth in 272 AD because the religion of Islam had not yet been founded. That means that the famous Library of Alexandria—the one that flourished during the reign of the Ptolemies—certainly did not exist by the time that Muslims were in any sort of position where they could have destroyed it had it existed. Indeed, by the time Islam came into existence in the 600s AD, the Great Library of Alexandria had already not existed for nearly four hundred years.
ABOVE: Fictional illustration from 1905 depicting how the artist imagined Caliph Omar’s conquest of Jerusalem in 638 AD might looked
The Arabs definitely could not have destroyed the famous Library of Alexandria that everyone hears stories about, because it did not exist at the time of the Arab conquest of Alexandria. All that being said, however, there were other libraries in Alexandria aside from the famous one and it is possible that the Arabs could have potentially destroyed a different library. This is unlikely, however, because we have other very good reasons to doubt the claim that they burned any libraries at all.
The Arabs under Caliph Omar conquered Alexandria in 642 AD, but the whole story about Caliph Omar having allegedly ordered the destruction of the Library of Alexandria comes from the Syrian Orthodox bishop Gregory bar Hebraeus (lived 1226 – 1286), who was writing in the thirteenth century, around seven hundred years later. The fact that Bar Hebraeus was writing so long after the event he describes allegedly took place and the fact that he was a Christian who had an axe to grind against Muslims both give us good reason to doubt the veracity of his account.
Furthermore, Gregory bar Hebraeus’s account contains yet another obvious anachronism aside from the association of the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria with the Arab conquest. Bar Hebraeus tells us that the Christian scholar Ioannes Philoponos (lived c. 490 – c. 570 AD) begged Caliph Omar to spare the books, but that Caliph Omar ordered for all the books that contradicted the Quran to be destroyed anyways.
The problem is that Ioannes Philoponos was born in around 490 AD and died sometime around 570 AD; whereas the Arab conquest of Alexandria took place in 642 AD. In other words, Ioannes Philoponos could not have possibly been there when Caliph Omar conquered Alexandria because he had been dead for over half a century.
ABOVE: Remains of the western tower, part of the fortifications of the city of Alexandria at the time of the Islamic conquest in 642 AD
All evidence seems to indicate that the story about the Arabs having destroyed the Library of Alexandria is simply a canard against Muslims made up by Christians. Gregory bar Hebraeus may or may not have made up the story himself, since it could easily be a story that was popular among Christians at the time when he lived. Gregory bar Hebraeus may have simply been recording the story that he had heard from someone else. In any case, the story is not historically true.
Conclusion
I know this article has been full of information, so here is a brief summary of my main points from above:
- The Library of Alexandria was not the first library; there were countless libraries before it.
- The destruction of the Library of Alexandria is not the primary reason why so many classical texts have been lost; most texts were lost simply because they were not copied—not because one library happened to be destroyed.
- The Library of Alexandria actually suffered a long, gradual decline that spanned the course of many centuries. The golden age of the Library ended with Ptolemy VIII Physkon’s expulsion of foreign scholars from Alexandria. The Library’s decline was largely due to long-term neglect and mismanagement rather than a single catastrophic fire. A portion of the Library’s collection was burned in 48 BC during the fire of Alexandria accidentally started by Julius Caesar’s men, but the Library continued to exist thereafter. It is unclear when the Library was finally destroyed, but it certainly did not survive the destruction of Brouchion quarter by Aurelian in 272 AD.
- The Library of Alexandria mostly contained works of Greek literature; it almost certainly did not contain detailed information about any ancient civilizations or ancient technologies that are completely unknown today.
- The Great Library of Alexandria had already ceased to exist in any recognizable form at least a century before Hypatia of Alexandria was even born; Hypatia certainly never worked as a librarian there.
- The Great Library of Alexandria was not destroyed by Caliph Omar during the Islamic conquest of Alexandria in 642 AD. By that time, the Library of Alexandria had not existed in any recognizable form for nearly four hundred years. Furthermore, the story is probably a canard invented by Christians to make Muslims look bad.
