Alexandria and Alexandrian Library

Alexandria and Alexandrian Library

City of Alexandria

The city of Alexandria was constructed on a lavish scale, to be the world center of commerce, culture and learning.The city was graced with broad avenues thirty meters wide, elegant architecture and statuary. There was an enormous light-house, the Pharos there, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, as well as Alexander’s monument tomb.

But the greatest marvel of Alexandria was its library and its associated museum (an institution devoted to the specialties of the Nine Muses). Of that legendary library, the most that survives is a dank a forgotten cellar of the Serapeum, the library annex, once a temple, later reconsecrated to knowledge. A few moldering shelves may be its only physical remains.

Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the Universe. But  the Egyptians used it as well. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Yet this place was once the brain and glory of the greatest city on the planet, the first true research institute in the history of the world.

The scholars of the library studied the entire Cosmos.

The Alexandrian Library

There is no record, in the entire history of the Alexandrian Library, that any of its illustrious scientists and scholars ever seriously challenged the political, economic and religious assumptions of their society. The permanence of the stars was questioned, the justice of slavery was not. Science and learning in general were the preserve of a privileged few. The vast population on the city had not the vaguest notion of the great discoveries taking place within the Alexandrian Library. New findings were not explained or popularized. The research benefited them little. Discoveries in mechanics and steam technology were applied mainly to the perfection of weapons, the encouragement of superstition, the amusement of kings.

The scientists never grasped the potential of machines to free people (with the single exception of Archimedes, who during his stay at the Alexandria Library invented the water screw, which is used in Egypt to this day for the irrigation of cultivated fields. But even he considered such mechanical contrivances far beneath the dignity of science. The great intellectual achievements of antiquity had few immediate practical applications. Science never captured the imagination of the multitude. There was no counterbalance to stagnation, to pessimism, to the most abject surrenders to mysticism. When, at long last, the mob came to burn the Alexandrian Library down, there was nobody to stop them.

Alexandrian Library. Photo by Elena

Collection of books of the Alexandrian Library

The heart of the Alexandrian Library was its collection of books. The organizers combed all the cultures and languages of the world. They sent agents abroad to buy up libraries. Commercial ships docking in Alexandria were searched by the police – not for contraband, but for books. The scrolls were borrowed, copied and then returned to their owners.

Accurate numbers are difficult to estimate, but it seems probable that the Library contained half a million volumes, each a handwritten papyrus scroll. What happened to all those books? The classical civilisation that created them disintegrated as the library itself was deliberately destroyed. Only a small fraction of its works survived, along with a few pathetic scattered fragments. And how tantalizing those bits and pieces are!

We know, for example, that there was on the library shelves a book by the astronomer Aristarchus of Samos who argued that the Earth is one of the planets, which like them orbit the Sun, and that the stars are enormously far away. Each of these conclusions is entirely correct, but we had to wait nearly two thousand years for their rediscovery. If we multiply by a hundred thousand our sense of loss for this work of Aristarchus, we begin to appreciate the grandeur of the achievement of classical civilization and the tragedy of its destruction.

There are irreparable gaps in our historical knowledge. Imagine what mysteries about our past could be solved with a borrowers’ card to the Alexandrian Library:

We know of a three-volume history of the world, now lost, by a Babylonian priest named Berossus. The first volume dealt with the interval from the Creation to the Flood, a period he took to be 432,000 years of about a hundred times longer than the Old Testament chronology. I wonder what was in it.

Hypatia

The last scientist who worked in the Library was a mathematician, astronomer, physicist and the head of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy – an extraordinary range of accomplishments for any individual in any age. Her name was Hypatia. She was born in Alexandria in 370. At a time when women had few options and were treated as property, Hypatia moved freely and unselfconsciously through traditional male domains. By all accounts she was a great beauty. She had many suitors but rejected all offers of marriage.

The Alexandria of Hypatia’s time – by then long under Roman rule – was a city under grave strain. Slavery had sapped classical civilization of its vitality. The growing Christian Church was consolidating its power and attempting to eradicate pagan influence and culture. Hypatia stood at the epicenter of theses mighty social forces.

Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor, and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger, she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril’s parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.