What Was Really in the Library of Alexandria?

It is no secret that I spend a lot of time debunking popular misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria. I do this because modern people are absolutely obsessed with the Library of Alexandria and all the amazing documents they believe it must have contained. Today I’m going to revisit the Library of Alexandria yet again to debunk some ideas about what was in it.

Lots of people like to imagine that the Library of Alexandria was filled with amazing scientific information that has been lost. They like to imagine that it could have housed all sorts of breathtaking secrets about the universe that even modern scientists might not know. These ideas, though, are wrong.

I’ve addressed this subject before, but today I want to address it in-depth, debunking some specific claims about the Library of Alexandria’s contents and bringing people’s expectations more down to Earth.

Ancient Pseudoscience

Honestly, I think that, of all the things that were in the Library of Alexandria, modern audiences would probably be most shocked by bizarre pseudoscience like this:

“The person called the mother’s not the parent.
She only nourishes the embryo
planted by mounting her, and for a stranger
she keeps the shoot alive—if no god blights it.
And I can prove my claim: without a mother
there can be fatherhood. For this we have
proof here, the offspring of Olympian Zeus [i.e. the goddess Athena],
not nurtured in the darkness of the womb.
No goddess could give birth to such a child.”

This is an excerpt from Sarah Ruden’s translation of the tragedy The Eumenides, which was written by the Athenian playwright Aischylos (lived c. 525 – c. 456 BC). We know for certain that there was at least one copy of this play in the Library of Alexandria.

Here, in this passage, the god Apollon is portrayed as arguing that the mother contributes absolutely nothing to a child and that the mother is nothing more than a receptacle for the father’s sperm. He claims that the mother merely keeps the father’s seed warm and alive, allowing it to grow, and that the mother of a child is therefore not a true parent because the child is the product of the father alone.

This is an idea that is attested in other ancient sources as well, including medical texts written by the very best ancient Greek medical experts. This seems to show that the idea expressed in the passage above was evidently not seen as a ridiculous idea at the time the passage was written at all, but that it was, in fact, an idea that was fairly widely accepted among Greek medical experts in the fifth century BC.

ABOVE: Detail of a Paestan red-figure bell-krater dating to c. 330 BC depicting Orestes, Athena, and Apollon before the oracle at Delphoi

Passages from surviving ancient texts like the one quoted above, reveal just how in the dark that ancient people could really be when it came to subjects like science and medicine.

Of course, ancient peoples were not always as clueless about medicine as some people have imagined. For instance, as I discuss in this article from August 2019, contrary to popular belief, educated people in ancient Greece and Rome were actually perfectly aware of the fact that lead is poisonous.

Nonetheless, the idea that the ancients had amazing scientific knowledge that was lost when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed that we still haven’t recovered today is a pure fantasy. In truth, ancient peoples generally had extremely limited knowledge of science and medicine—knowledge which modern peoples long ago surpassed.

Debunking the myth of the Library of Alexandria’s destruction

As I discuss in this article I wrote in July 2019 and this article I wrote in February 2020, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria was nowhere near as significant as it has been portrayed in popular culture. For one thing, the Library of Alexandria was just one of countless libraries that existed in the ancient world.

Nearly every city in the ancient Mediterranean world had at least one library. Many upper-class citizens in the ancient world also had private collections of scrolls. The Library of Alexandria even had a rival: the Library of Pergamon, which held a massive collection of scrolls.

We should think of the Library of Alexandria as being in some sense similar to the Library of Congress; it was the largest and most prestigious library in the ancient world, but it was far from the only one. If the Library of Congress spontaneously caught fire and most its collections were destroyed, that would be tragic, but very little knowledge would actually be lost, since copies of most of the books that would be destroyed are held in other libraries across the world.

Finally, it cannot be emphasized enough that it is the nature of the universe for knowledge to be destroyed. If you just leave a book sitting on a shelf, the pages will slowly decay, it will gather dust and insects, and, eventually, the book will disintegrate. The only way to preserve a text is by copying it. In other words, it takes real effort to save a text from destruction.

Unfortunately, in the ancient world, the only way to copy a text was by hand, which was a very long, tedious, and often expensive process. Consequently, many texts were not copied. The reason why so many texts have been lost from antiquity is not because one library burned, but rather because the texts that have not survived were not copied.

ABOVE: Photograph of the main reading room of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

It is also worth noting that the Library of Alexandria’s decline was a much more gradual process than many people imagine. It is true that, in 48 BC, during the Siege of Alexandria by Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar’s men did accidentally set fire to the docks of Alexandria. The fire spread throughout the city and it is recorded to have destroyed a portion of the Library of Alexandria’s collection.

By the time this fire took place, though, the Library of Alexandria had been in decline for about a century. The early Ptolemies had provided the Library of Alexandria with extensive funding and patronage, but the later Ptolemies didn’t do as much to support it and even made many decisions that directly harmed the Library.

Furthermore, the Library of Alexandria itself seems to have survived the fire of 48 BC in some form or at least been quickly rebuilt, since we have references to it from later centuries. It is unclear exactly when the Library of Alexandria finally ceased to exist, but it couldn’t have survived any later than 272 AD, since that is the year when the forces of the emperor Aurelian inadvertently destroyed the entire Brouchion quarter where the Library was located as part of the emperor’s campaign to recapture Alexandria from the Palmyrene Empire.

ABOVE: Imaginative modern illustration showing what the artist imagined the fire of Alexandria in 48 BC might have looked

What was really in the Library of Alexandria

The Library of Alexandria was built during the early Hellenistic Period (lasted c. 323 – c. 31 BC) to serve the needs of Greek scholars. As such, its collection mainly focused on Greek literary works. We actually have a pretty good idea of what kinds of works it contained because the scholar Kallimachos of Kyrene (lived c. 310 – c. 240 BC) compiled a massive catalogue of all the works in the Library of Alexandria’s collection known as the Pinakes, which has often been described as the first library catalogue.

Only fragments of the Pinakes have been preserved, but the main categories of works seem to have been oratory, history, laws, philosophy, medicine, lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, and epic poetry. The lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, and epic poetry categories seem to have been quite large judging from surviving fragments. The medicine category, by contrast, is barely attested by a single fragment. Nonetheless, it seems to have existed.

ABOVE: Surviving portion of a papyrus scroll bearing a portion of the Aitia, a poem written by Kallimachos of Kyrene, the scholar and poet who also created the Pinakes

A debunking of what people think was in the Library of Alexandria

Unfortunately, modern people can’t resist the urge to engage in fanciful speculation about what sorts of works might have been included in the Library of Alexandria’s collection and many of the things they speculate that the Library might have contained are wildly implausible.

For instance, one person left a comment under an answer I wrote on Quora listing all the amazing things that he thought must have been included in the Library of Alexandria’s collection. His list is fairly typical of what most people seem to think the Library of Alexandria contained. Below, I have responded to all the items on his list, assessing how plausible it is that Library of Alexandria could have contained such works. The items on his list are written in quotation marks and my responses are written in italics:

  • “Alexander’s original plan and expansion of Alexandria the City itself” —Unlikely. For one thing, Alexander the Great probably didn’t design the city of Alexandria himself because he was a king and commander, not an architect or professional city-planner. For another thing, city-planning in the ancient world tended not to be very systematic and it is unclear whether there would have been a written “plan” for the whole city; it is more likely, in my view, that the city would have been built in a rather piecemeal fashion, with different buildings and parts of the city being planned independently. Even if someone did draw out a “plan” for the city, it is unlikely that it would have been preserved in the Library of Alexandria, which mainly housed literary works.
  • “More data on Persian Rule over Egypt before Alexander’s Time” —Highly probable. In the early third century BC, the Egyptian writer Manethon wrote a book about the history of Egypt in Greek titled Egyptika. Substantial portions of this work have survived, but much of it has been lost. It is likely that the Library of Alexandria did contain a complete copy of Manethon’s Egyptika. There were, however, undoubtedly many copies of Manethon’s Egyptika outside of Alexandria.
  • “Egyptian Records [sic] of its interaction with neighboring Carthage before its destruction by Republican Rome” —Entirely plausible. We don’t have much evidence to suggest that the Library of Alexandria held much information about Carthage, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t have had some records.
  • “Minoan society Records [sic], translations of Minoan Language, Kings list, trade receipts etc., Before the destruction of Knossos In [sic] Crete. I don’t think we even know what the Minoans really called themselves” —Totally implausible. The Library of Alexandria was founded in the Hellenistic Period, by which point the Greeks and Egyptians had only vague knowledge of the Minoan civilization. The Greek historian Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c.  400 BC) records basically everything the ancient Greeks knew about the Minoans in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 1.4–8. It is very underwhelming. Furthermore, part of what Thoukydides knew about the Minoans came from oral traditions and the other part came from the excavation of the burials on the island of Delos by the Athenians; none of it came from reading actual Minoan records.
  • “Corroborating records and more evidence of the Israelite migrations into and out of Egypt, trade records, treaties and wars” —Totally implausible. The story of the Exodus from the Hebrew Bible is almost certainly not historical. Archaeologists have been searching for centuries for evidence to support the story of the Exodus and, so far, no one has found even the slightest scrap of evidence. The Exodus is never even hinted at in any surviving Egyptian record or inscription. In fact, all the evidence we have suggests that the peoples of Israel and Judah actually originated as Canaanites.

ABOVE: The Departure of the Israelites, painted in 1829 by David Roberts. The Exodus is a mythical event, not a historical one.

  • “Jesus the Christ was supposed to have spent his childhood some time in Egypt, someone wrote this down somewhere and stored this knowledge in the Library”—Totally implausible. The story about Jesus having allegedly spent part of his childhood in Egypt comes from the Gospel of Matthew 2:13–15, but this story was almost certainly made up to parallel the story of God calling the nation of Israel out of Egypt in the Book of Exodus. Even if Jesus did spend time in Egypt (which he probably didn’t), we have no reason to think that anyone would have written about him there or that any such records would have made their way into the Library of Alexandria.
  • “Records of Egyptian Explorers, Exploration and expeditions to Inner Africa, Europe and even the Americas and Beyond” —The part about Egyptian explorations into inner Africa is certainly correct, since we know the Greek geographer Eratosthenes of Kyrene (lived c. 280 – c. 194 BC), who was a head librarian at the Library of Alexandria, had access to information about inner Africa, which he probably got from records of Ptolemaic elephant-hunting expeditions. The part about Egyptian explorations in the Americas is certainly wrong, since we have absolutely no evidence to suggest the ancient Egyptians ever visited the Americas or had any knowledge whatsoever about the Americas.
  • “Interaction with China and India, records of this would have had to have been in Alexandria” —The part about interactions with India is certainly correct, since we know the ancient Greek diplomat Megasthenes (lived c. 350 – c. 290 BC) spent extensive time at the court of Chandragupta Maurya and wrote a book about India titled Indika. There was almost certainly at least one copy of this book in the Library of Alexandria, but only fragments of it have survived. We know that there were other copies of this book outside of Alexandria in antiquity, though. It is less likely that there was extensive accurate information about China in the Library of Alexandria, since the Hellenistic Greeks had only limited contact with China. Any information about China in the Library of Alexandria probably would have been mostly rumors and hearsay.
  • “A more complete understanding of Egyptian Religion, Practices, Gods, origins, Pantheons” —The part about a “more complete understanding” of Egyptian religion, practices, and deities is probably correct, but we already have a lot of surviving sources about ancient Egyptian religion. The part about more information about Egyptian origins is probably incorrect, since it is unlikely that people in Hellenistic times would have had access to any detailed or accurate records about the earliest history of Egypt.
  • “Buddha, the Indian Prince predated the Roman Empires Rule over Egypt by at least 500? Years. Records of his teachings would have reached the Mediterranean and stored in the Library of Alexandria.” —Somewhat plausible. The Hellenistic Greeks were aware of Buddhists living in India, but their knowledge of them was quite limited. It is unlikely that there would have been extensive information about the Buddha’s teachings in the Library of Alexandria. Any information about the Buddha would have probably been limited to brief mentions, probably mostly based on rumors and hearsay.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a first-century AD Greco-Buddhist statue of Siddhartha Gautama from Gandhara

  • “Early Christian writings, books and histories would have been stored in the library. (After it’s [sic] destruction by Octavian? Caesar? and rebuilding)” —Almost totally implausible. The Library of Alexandria was not a Christian library; it was primarily meant to serve Greek scholars, who really weren’t interested in early Christian texts. Also, we don’t know how substantial the Library of Alexandria’s collection would have been after the fire of Alexandria in 48 BC destroyed part of its collection.
  • “Records of ancient inventions – the steam engine? Invention of the Lens [sic] ? Batteries? Algebra and Calculus [sic]?” —The inventor Heron of Alexandria (lived c. 10 – c. 70 AD) did invent a very primitive steam engine called an aeolipile, which he wrote about in his Pneumatika. It is possible that a copy of this work may have been held in the Library of Alexandria in late antiquity, but his own description from this treatise of how to make an aeolipile has actually survived, which is how we know about it. It is totally implausible that there would have been anything about batteries in the Library of Alexandria, since ancient peoples did not have batteries. The idea that they had batteries comes from an egregious misinterpretation of an object that was once held in the Iraq Museum, which, as I explain in this article from March 2020, is actually a Sassanian scroll container, not a battery. It is possible that there may have been some texts dealing with some very rudimentary elements of calculus, since we know the Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (lived c. 287 – c. 212 BC) explored this area. Many of Archimedes’s treatises have survived, though.
  • “Shipbuilding records, constructions plans, port locations, lighthouse of Alexandria construction plans” —Unlikely. There probably were records of shipbuilding, construction plans, and so forth in the ancient world, but it is unlikely that these would have been kept in the Library of Alexandria. In fact, it is unclear whether people in the ancient world would have held onto construction plans for very long at all.
  • “Celestial events from Comets [sic] to Supernovas [sic] to Asteroid Strikes [sic] would have been painstakingly recorded” —Unlikely. It is likely that Greek astronomers did record some astronomical events, but it is unlikely that these records would be considered “painstaking” by modern standards.
  • “Maps and Records [sic] of the Territory [sic] next to Egypt, Arabia. For some reason this is a massive hole when it comes to knowledge of the people and cities that inhabited the region before the Roman Imperial era.” —It is certainly correct that the Library of Alexandria would have contained some information about Arabia, since the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BC) wrote a little bit about Arabia in his book The Histories and it is almost certain that the Library of Alexandria contained at least one copy of Herodotos’s Histories. Herodotos’s Histories has survived in its entirety, though; you can pick up a copy of it any time you like at your local bookstore. There may have been copies of other works that talked about Arabia in the Library of Alexandria, but it is doubtful that these records would have been particularly extensive, since Greek writers generally weren’t very interested in writing about Arabia and often their information about Arabia wasn’t very accurate anyways.
  • “Data on the Mediterranean Societies [sic] general collapse around 1200 BCE. Why? Who? When? How? Who were the Sea People?” —Totally implausible. As I noted above, the Library of Alexandria was built in the Hellenistic Period, by which time people in general had very little knowledge of Bronze Age civilizations. The most information you would probably find would be myths and legends about the Bronze Age that might contain very hazy remembrances of what the Bronze Age was really like.
  • “More records on how they built the Pyramids and no it won’t be Aliens [sic].” —It is certainly correct that there would have been accounts of how the pyramids were built in the Library of Alexandria. As I discuss in this article I wrote in January 2020, Herodotos gives a fairly detailed account of the pyramids’ construction in his Histories 2.125. The problem is that Herodotos’s account has actually survived in its entirety; it was never lost at all. Herodotos was writing long after the pyramids were built, so his account is necessarily based on a lot of guesswork, but it is not all that far off from how modern scholars think the pyramids were really built.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Pyramids of Giza. We actually have a pretty good idea of how the pyramids were built.

  • “Flood records of the Nile and flood records in General [sic] including the Legendary [sic] Great Deluge stories that is recorded by a lot of ancient cultures” —Unlikely. People in ancient times did not generally keep detailed records of floods. It is possible that some specific floods may have been recorded in copies of historical texts that might have been housed in the Library of Alexandria, but there probably was not a detailed record of all floods that took place in a given area. Meanwhile, the so-called “Great Deluge” is a myth; it would be physically impossible for the whole world to suddenly be flooded and then all the water vanish into thin air. Furthermore, if that did somehow happen, it would leave behind mountains of archaeological and geological evidence, but we have no archaeological or geological evidence of any kind of global flood. There may have been accounts of a global flood in some texts in the Library of Alexandria’s collection, but these accounts would have been mythological ones, not historical ones.
  • “Nabatean History, Hittite Culture, Babylonian [sic], The People’s [sic] of Hispania before Roman subjugation, the list goes on” —It is totally implausible that there would have been extensive reliable information about the Hittites or the Bronze Age Babylonians in the Library of Alexandria. The Library of Alexandria was built during the Hellenistic Period, during which time people had very little knowledge of the Bronze Age. The most information you would probably find in the Library about the Hittites would be unreliable legends. There were certainly records in the Library of Alexandria about the Neo-Babylonians, since Herodotos wrote about the Neo-Babylonians in his Histories and there were other ancient writers who wrote about them as well. You probably wouldn’t find extensive records about the Nabataeans or the peoples of pre-Roman Spain, since Greek writers weren’t very interested in those peoples.
  • “Records of the Gradual conversion through the Centuries of the Roman Empire to Christianity and the massive Riots, Destruction and Pogroms that destroyed the old Roman/Greek Religions that also eventually destroyed the Library itself.” —Totally implausible. The Library of Alexandria was not destroyed by Christians and it did not survive long enough to have ever contained any kind of records about the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. The latest that the Library of Alexandria could have possibly survived is 272 AD, since that is the year when the forces of the emperor Aurelian completely destroyed the entire Brouchion quarter of Alexandria where the Library was located. There is no way the Library could have survived past the third century AD.
  • “Corroborating records of the lives of the early Saints And [sic] Popes, records of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.” —Totally implausible. As I mentioned before, the Library of Alexandria was built to serve Greek scholars, who weren’t interested in Christianity at all. Furthermore, the Library of Alexandria certainly ceased to exist in the third century AD, when Christianity was still widely seen as no more than a strange cult. Greek scholars, even in the later part of the Library’s history, would have had almost no interest whatsoever in Christian saints or bishops.
  • “Weather records, rainfall and general knowledge that can confirm when and where climates changed around the mediterranean [sic] and the fertile crescent” —Unlikely. Ancient peoples don’t seem to have kept particularly detailed records of specific weather phenomena like rainfall. Any records of the climate would have been anecdotal.
  • “Anecdotal and Historical Records [sic] of VERY ANCIENT cultures and civilizations, Who made the Temples [sic] of Gobekli Tepe? Sumerian Interaction Records [sic]? Lost Records [sic] of Atlantis anyone?” —Totally implausible. As I keep having to repeat, the Library of Alexandria was founded in the Hellenistic Period to serve Greek scholars. By the time the Library was founded, people had very little knowledge about the Bronze Age and virtually no knowledge whatsoever about prehistoric cultures. They knew nothing about the people who built Göbekli Tepe and very little, if anything at all, about the Sumerians. Meanwhile, if there really were “lost records” of Atlantis in the Library of Alexandria, they would have been fictional, since the whole story of Atlantis is a work of fiction. As I discuss in this article I wrote in March 2019, the whole story of Atlantis was made up by the Greek philosopher Plato (lived c. 427 – c. 347 BC) as a philosophical allegory.

Many other people have given similarly unlikely suggestions:

  • For instance, here’s a comment from one person who claims, “The Ancient Egyptians knew the value of Pi and also had the measurement for the metre, among other things.” He says that knowledge of both these things was totally lost “until we rediscovered them several millenia [sic] later.” In reality, the value of pi was never lost; it has been continuously known to mathematicians ever since antiquity. Archimedes of Syracuse wrote about the value of pi in his treatise On the Measurement of the Circle, which has survived. The Greek astronomer Klaudios Ptolemaios (lived c. 100 – c. 170 AD) also wrote about the value of pi in his Almagest, which has also survived. Meanwhile, the metric system as we know it today is a human creation that was not invented until the late eighteenth century. The ancient Egyptians had their own systems of measurement and they got along just fine with the systems they had. If they had used the metric system, that would be remarkable not because it would show knowledge had been gained and then lost, but rather because it would show that the metric system is apparently thousands of years older than we previously thought.
  • Here is a comment from a person who says, “According to Plato the Egyptians held more knowledge of the ancient world than we think. What about Antikythera mechanism and other inventions that we have lost the memory. You seems to be a person that thinks that we are the must of the human knowledge with all the machines and computers that surround us. Like the Saís priest said: you, Greeks are children with no memory.” The passage from Plato that he is referring to here is from Plato’s dialogue Timaios 22b, in which an Egyptian priest tells the fable of Atlantis to the Athenian lawgiver Solon. As I have pointed out above, though, this story is clearly a fictional one made up by Plato to serve a philosophical purpose. Meanwhile, as I talk about in this article I published in December 2019, knowledge of devices like the Antikythera mechanism has never really been lost.

ABOVE: Map by Athanasius Kircher showing the alleged location of Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The story of Atlantis is certainly fiction.

Author: Spencer McDaniel

Hello! I am an aspiring historian mainly interested in ancient Greek cultural and social history. Some of my main historical interests include ancient religion, mythology, and folklore; gender and sexuality; ethnicity; and interactions between Greek cultures and cultures they viewed as foreign. I graduated with high distinction from Indiana University Bloomington in May 2022 with a BA in history and classical studies (Ancient Greek and Latin languages), with departmental honors in history. I am currently a student in the MA program in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at Brandeis University.

7 thoughts on “What Was Really in the Library of Alexandria?”

  1. Aristole’s works. It is a major loss. Reading through his works, you will find him referencing his earlier works, which is nowhere to be found. We have many fragments of his works. We have works pieced from his students’ notes. It is a shame that not more of it has survived.

    1. First of all, an extremely large number works written by Aristotle have actually survived. His works were widely studied throughout the Middle Ages and they continued to be studied during the Early Modern Period.

      Moreover, the works of Aristotle that have been lost were not lost because the Library of Alexandria was destroyed. Many of Aristotle’s works were probably lost within a generation of his death. For instance, the only ancient writer who ever references the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics in a way that makes it sound like that author had access to it is Aristotle himself, which strongly indicates that the work was lost very soon after Aristotle’s death.

      1. All the ‘surving’ works are in fragments. Also they are manuscripts, not meant for publication. Many are outright written by students. That is why so many of it is so hard to follow. His contempories claimed that his style is fluid and beautiful, but what we got are anything but.

        As for the time of their destruction, it is anyone’s guess. But it is conceivable that Alexander, who desired to spread Hellenist culture, would want his former teacher’s works be preserved, being the embodiment of Greek thoughts and all.

  2. Hi
    I am keen to find out complete work of Herophilus The father of human Anatomy .who established the Alexandria School of Anatomy .Was this school attached to the Temple of Muses and the famous Library of Alexandria? His complete work was destroyed by the great fire of library. He was first to dissect human body,recognised Liver Pancreas Duodenum heart and brain.

  3. I think the speech you quote from the Eumenides is possibly a little out of context. It is part of a speech delivered by Apollo who is defending Orestes against the charge of matricide. My memory of studying this play is that Apollo’s arguments are dodgy and contradictory. The reason I think is that Aeschylus’s focus here is trial by jury, and he is trying to show that the prosecution and defence may have terrible arguments but somehow thanks to the jury system something like justice can prevail. I believe that an audience of fifth century Athenians would have found that particular passage wanting, just as we do now. Personally I wouldn’t use Greek tragedy as a source for ancient science. The rest of your article is very solid.

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