#254 Who burned down the Library of Alexandria?

I learned this today. Julius Caesar is supposed to have burned the library of Alexandria down in 48 BC, but it appears that it wasn’t destroyed and probably survived for another three hundred years before fading away.

The city of Alexandria is about 150 km to the Northwest of Cairo, in Egypt, on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It was founded in 331 BC by Alexander the Great. It was a trading post during the time of Rameses the Great but fell into disuse and was a small fishing village when Alexander found it. He wanted to build a large Greek city that would bear his name. Alexander left the city straight after founding it and never returned. He would die 8 years later, at the age of 32. He made Ptolemy, one of his companions, possibly a half-brother, governor of Egypt. After Alexander’s death, this half-brother declared himself Pharaoh. The Ptolemaic dynasty turned Egypt into a center of Greek culture and the center of trade for almost everything going from Arabia and India into Europe. Alexandria was the largest city in the world within one hundred years.

It is to be expected that a city such as this should have monuments to go with its wealth and power. One such monument was the Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the original seven wonders of the world. Another was the Library of Alexandria. The Ptolemies wanted to push Alexandria as the world’s center of learning and culture. They financed the building of a library and used royal agents with blank checks and a sword, if necessary, to purchase as many scrolls as possible. They didn’t care what. Over time, the library amassed the largest collection of scrolls anywhere in the world. When boats arrived in Alexandria, they had to turn any scrolls they had over to the authorities. Scribes would copy the scrolls and the copy would be returned to the ship while the original was stored in the library. The Ptolemies set out to make a display of their power and wealth, but they did end up making a center of learning. At its peak, the library is said to have housed close to half a million scrolls. It had so many that in about 240 BC, a second library, called the Serapeum, was built to hold even more scrolls.

So, what happened to the Library of Alexandria? Three different people are accused of burning the library down. They are Julius Caesar, Bishop Theophilius, and the Moslem Caliph Omar.

Julius Caesar invaded Egypt during a civil war which he fought against Pompey. He was besieged in Alexandria and his troops set fire to their ships in the bay in order to clear away the ships of Ptolemy XIV. The story goes that these burning ships ignited the buildings around the docks and the fire spread. Different accounts say that the library was destroyed, thousands of scrolls were destroyed, or a warehouse of books by the docks was destroyed. There is evidence that the library was still being used after this date, so it obviously wasn’t destroyed.

The second person blamed was Bishop Theophilius. In 391 AD, the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, passed a law allowing for the destruction of pagan temples. Bishop Theophilius was the Bishop of Alexandria, and he took it upon himself to destroy the Serapeum and turn it into a church. Nobody knows how many books were destroyed but the Serapeum was said to hold about 10% of the library’s catalogue.

And the third person was the Moslem Caliph Omar. In 640 AD, the city of Alexandria fell to the Moslems and Caliph Omar is said to have ordered all of the books in the library burned.

However, all of these stories have been exaggerated and there is no real proof. The story of the Caliph Omar wasn’t written down until 300 years later. There is no proof that a library the size of the Library of Alexandria was burned to the ground.

So, what happened? The most recent theory is that the library simply faded away. It became a huge library because of the power and the patronage of the Ptolemies. It disappeared when that was taken away. There was a slow decay that took place over centuries, not a single cataclysmic event.

Some manuscripts were undoubtedly lost in fires and were stolen. But the biggest damage to the city came as Alexandria started to fade. The Ptolemaic dynasty lost its stability and there was a lot of infighting. They stopped funding the library in the way they had before and Ptolemy VIII actually exiled all of the foreign intellectuals from Alexandria in about 160 BC. Under Roman rule, the library faded even further because the Romans wanted to move the center of culture to Rome. On top of this, Rome became less reliant on grain and trade from Alexandria, and the city could no longer afford the monuments that it used to have. The City of Alexandria faded away and so too did the Library of Alexandria. It wasn’t destroyed in a fire. And this is what I learned today.

Photo https://21h007.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/the-library-of-alexandria/

Sources:

https://www.livescience.com/rise-and-fall-of-the-great-alexandria-library

https://www.worldhistory.org/article/207/what-happened-to-the-great-library-at-alexandria/

https://www.mymcpl.org/blogs/historical-libraries-library-alexandria

https://ehistory.osu.edu/articles/burning-library-alexandria

https://historyofyesterday.com/library-of-alexandria-13c1e5c98a18