#i spent sooooooo long writing this instead of my dissertation thank you damian <3

[pinktinselmonstrosity]

asking u abt the library of alexandria joining the war on procrastination on the side of procrastination

hehe thank you i just got back from a walk and i was looking for another way to procrastinate

TL;DR: everything you think you know about the library of Alexandria is wrong. The two main ideas about the library in popular culture are that it was an unparalleled depository of knowledge and that this knowledge was destroyed by a fire started by Julius Caesar in 48 BC; however neither of these ideas are substantially supported by literary or material evidence and are most likely completely false.

(putting the rest under the cut)

Let's address these myths one by one. The easiest to debunk is that of the Caesarian destruction. The earliest account of the destruction of the library by Caesar is in Plutarch's Life of Caesar, written in the 2nd century AD. Earlier accounts of the Battle of Alexandria, including that written by Caesar himself, do not mention the destruction of the library, only that ships in the harbour were burned. The account given by the generally anti-Caesar Lucan in Pharsalia would surely have mentioned the destruction of the library, but only describes the burning of ships and grain stores by the harbour. There are also numerous accounts from after 48 BC attesting to Alexandria as a centre of knowledge; for example, in 80 AD the emperor Domitian sent scholars to Alexandria to replace manuscripts which had been destroyed in a fire in Rome, and Tertullian attested in the 2nd century AD that the books collected by Ptolemy I were still on display in the city in his own time. Clearly there was still a substantial library in Alexandria after 48 BC, and therefore it cannot have been destroyed so dramatically by Caesar.

Archaeological evidence only attests to a serious fire in the city in the late 3rd century AD, which is incidentally when Ammianus Marcellinus claimed the library had been destroyed by the emperor Aurelian. Other accounts claim that the library was destroyed in religious protests in 391, or even as late as the 7th century AD by Muslim invaders. It is far more likely, however, that the library was never 'destroyed' in one fell swoop, but rather fell into decline due to imperial neglect. One scholar has even estimated that if the original scrolls collected by Ptolemy I in the fourth century BC were never copied onto new papyrus (and there are no accounts of this practice, despite a rich corpus of Alexandrine scholarship) they would have decayed irreparably by 48 BC anyway; the climate in Alexandria is unsuitable for the preservation of papyrus, and alternatives were difficult and expensive to produce. While it is likely they acquired new copies of these texts, the idea of one great library surviving from its foundation by Ptolemy I in the fourth century to its destruction in 48 BC is unfounded.

Secondly, the idea that the library of Alexandria contained unparalleled amounts of knowledge is equally difficult to verify. Ancient and medieval estimates of the library's contents range from 40,000 to 700,000 books. These books would have been stored in scrolls, which could contain around 10,000 words each. Based on the number of extant Greek texts and those which don't survive but are attested to, it has been estimated that the maximum number of scrolls contained in the library was....... 10,000 scrolls (that's scrolls, not books - the number of books would be lower). Additionally, any structure which could store as many books as the sources attest to would surely leave some archaeological mark, but as of yet none has been found, even with recent advances in marine archaeology.

The idea of the 'dark ages' has often been pointed to as proof of the significance of the contents of the library of Alexandria; however, modern scholarship contests that such a decline in knowledge ever took place, and even if the library had been destroyed in 48 BC libraries persisted in Rome, Athens, Pergamon, and Constantinople for centuries after 48 BC which would have preserved the same knowledge. The scholarship techniques developed in Alexandria (such as the creation of definitive editions of earlier texts, the standardization of grammar, the writing of commentaries and the invention of glossaries) which were arguably the library's most significant contributions also persisted despite whatever happened to the library.

"But Pinkie!" I hear you cry, "how can historians have got it so wrong?" The truth is, the myth of the library is a powerful one, and it's easy to fall prey to. Many scholars ignore contradictions between the texts they use as evidence, or even blame medieval transcription errors or mistranslations for accounts they disagree with. Although it's true that in ancient history (or indeed, history more generally) there is never one authoritative source that you can trust to tell you the whole truth, the degree of nuance with which scholars usually approach ancient sources is often forgotten in studies of the library. Personally, while I find these misinterpretations annoying when I come across them on my dash, I can understand that they're not actively harmful; the idea of the 'destruction of the library of Alexandria' has taken on a life of its own outside the bounds of historical fact which is significant in its own right. I still won't reblog those posts though :)

For more on this see Bagnall (2002) 'Alexandria: Library of Dreams' and Hatzimichali (2013) 'Ashes to ashes? The library of Alexandria after 48 BC'

#i spent sooooooo long writing this instead of my dissertation thank you damian <3 #i wrote an essay on this once can you tell lmao #🧃