20 Myths About The Library Of Alexandria That Just Won’t Die

It’s said that after Caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab’s general Amr ibn al-As captured Alexandria in 642 AD, the caliph had the city’s famed scrolls burned to warm the public baths. But the story was not recorded until the medieval writers Ibn al-Qifti and Bar Hebraeus wrote of it 500 or more years later, and no account of the conquest from the 7th century refers to a library or a burning. Historian Bernard Lewis flagged it as an invented legend.

In 48 BC, during the Alexandrian War, Julius Caesar burned his own ships in the harbor to keep them from falling into Egypt’s hands. The blaze spread to nearby docks, where grain stores and rolls of papyrus were kept, as noted by the Roman historian Cassius Dio. But the inland Mouseion, the royal research complex that housed the library, escaped unscathed. The geographer Strabo mentions using the library there decades later, around 25 BC.

In 415 AD, a Christian mob in Alexandria murdered the Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician Hypatia amid a political rivalry between the Roman governor, Prefect Orestes, and the city’s bishop, Patriarch Cyril. The contemporary historian Socrates Scholasticus recorded her killing, but says nothing about a library being defended or scrolls being burned. The latter claim was first introduced in the 2009 film Agora.

The Roman writers Aulus Gellius and Ammianus Marcellinus both say that there were 700,000 “volumes” in the library. These were papyrus rolls, not what we would now call books, let alone distinct works. Homer’s Iliad was written on 24 scrolls. The classicist Roger Bagnall, along with many other classicists and historians, believes the true size of the core collection lay between 40,000 and 100,000 rolls, including duplicate copies.

Although Alexander the Great founded the city of Alexandria in 331 BC, he didn’t die in Babylon until 323 BC, long before any library was built in Alexandria. It took another two or three decades for the Library and its attached research academy, the Mouseion, to be established around 295 to 280 BC. The work was carried out by Alexander’s general Ptolemy I Soter and his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus, under the guidance of Demetrius of Phalerum, a prominent but exiled Athenian statesman.

The myth that “the loss of the Library of Alexandria set science back a millennium” was promoted by Carl Sagan in his 1980 TV series, Cosmos. Historians reject this as a misrepresentation of history. The decline of classical learning in Western Europe was due to political and economic factors that led to the fragmentation of the Roman Empire over many centuries. There were still plenty of copies of classical texts elsewhere in the Mediterranean world.

The Library formed part of the Mouseion (Μουσεῖον), a “shrine of the Muses”, a royal academy funded by the state and situated in the Bruchion, the royal quarter of Alexandria. It contained scholars, scientists, and poets invited to live there on a royal salary, and was not a public library as we know it today. Only a select few had access to its collection.

Theophilus was the Christian bishop of Alexandria in 391 AD, and he oversaw the destruction of the Serapeum, a pagan temple complex, following an imperial edict by Emperor Theodosius I. Historical accounts by the historians Socrates Scholasticus, Rufinus, and Sozomen mention shattered statues and razed buildings, but no one reports that books were burned. In about 416 AD, the historian Orosius saw the temple’s book chests empty, but he held later looters responsible for their disappearance.

According to the Greek biographer Plutarch, Mark Antony gifted Cleopatra with 200,000 scrolls from the library of Pergamum, Alexandria’s rival in the ancient world. However, Plutarch attributes this claim to a lieutenant named Calvisius, who served under Antony’s rival, Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, in their civil war. Today, the story is generally regarded by modern scholars as anti-Antony propaganda rather than factual evidence.

Leave behind the temple-like building from films and paintings. This library was actually a campus within the Mouseion, Alexandria’s royal research institution. It was composed of lecture halls, stacks of books, gardens, porticoes, and shared living quarters spread across the palace district.

Galen, a doctor in Rome, wrote about the book heist in 180 AD, some 400 years after it supposedly happened. According to Galen, King Ptolemy III left 15 silver talents in Athens to borrow the official manuscripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides for copying, then simply forfeited the silver and kept the originals, sending back only the copies. Modern classicists consider this a story about Alexandria’s reputation for taking books aggressively, rather than a factually reliable account of the transaction.

The Letter of Aristeas, written about 150-100 BC, claims that 72 Jewish scholars independently translated the Hebrew Torah into Greek, each in exactly 72 days, arriving at identical texts, for King Ptolemy II. Historians believe this is a legitimizing religious legend. The real Greek translation, known as the Septuagint, was actually produced over decades.

In 272 AD, the Roman emperor Aurelian retook Alexandria from its queen, Zenobia of Palmyra. Aurelian’s troops looted and burned much of the Bruchion, the royal quarter where the original Mouseion had been. The heart of the institution was badly damaged, but its outlying branches and its scholars survived to continue their work elsewhere in Alexandria.

In 145 BC, King Ptolemy VIII Physcon drove out foreigners from Alexandria. The chief librarian Aristarchus of Samothrace was among those driven out. This act, driven by politics, scattered Greek scholars across the Mediterranean and caused a temporary brain drain for Alexandria’s academic community. But the collection and the institution remained and continued to function.

The earliest known library catalogs date back to 650 BC, when the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in ancient Mesopotamia used cuneiform tablets for cataloging. The next significant milestone in library cataloging was around 245 BC, when the poet and scholar Callimachus of Cyrene put together the Pinakes, a classified catalog of Greek literature in 120 scrolls, which was a remarkable feat in its own right.

There were major libraries in Pergamum, Rome, Antioch, Rhodes, Ephesus, and elsewhere. These all held overlapping and duplicate copies of Greek texts, and so classical literature, mathematics, and philosophy survived largely because works were copied and passed between such centers over centuries. Alexandria was never the only library preserving civilization’s knowledge.

The Serapeum, a temple to the god Serapis, contained another library, a “daughter library,” established in the 3rd century BC, which was independent of the main royal library in the palace quarter. According to the 12th-century Byzantine writer John Tzetzes, relying on now-lost sources, the daughter library’s collection comprised about 42,800 rolls. This figure is also thought to be a rough estimate.

In Alexandria’s salty sea air, papyrus lasted from 40 to 100 years before going soft and crumbling. Preserving a library required paying for scribes to make new copies of books as the old ones disintegrated. Unless there was a continuous source of funds, such as a royal endowment, libraries were slowly ruined. This gradual destruction may have been worse than any one blaze or riot.

Roman lecture halls dating from the 5th century AD have been discovered by Polish-Egyptian archaeologists working at Kom el-Dikka, an archaeological site in Alexandria. But those buildings came centuries after the original Ptolemaic library. The original Ptolemaic site itself has not yet been excavated, possibly because it lies beneath modern-day Alexandria or underwater in the city’s Eastern Harbor.

The Library of Alexandria wasn’t destroyed by a single fire, ruler, or riot. It deteriorated gradually over several hundred years. The expulsion of scholars in 145 BC, the burning of the Bruchion in 272 AD, the destruction of the Serapeum in 391 AD, and papyri decaying naturally along the way all played a part. The 48 BC harbor fire damaged nearby docks and papyrus stores, but not the inland Mouseion itself.

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