The boring truth about the Library of Alexandria

Modern writers make different claims about who destroyed the Library of Alexandria. Some blame Julius Caesar while others blame a Christian mob or the invading Arabs. But who is really responsible for the Library's demise?

0:00 Introduction
1:56 Two libraries
3:49 The Museum
4:25 Peaked in the 200s BC
5:15 Decline
8:55 Papyrus
10:36 Julius Caesar
16:05 The Serapeum
20:46 Muslims
21:08 Three points

FOOTNOTES

[1] For a reality check on what we do and don't know about the Library of Alexandria, see Roger S. Bagnall, “Alexandria: Library of Dreams,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 146, no. 4 (December 2002), 348–62. On the methods of acquiring books, see also S. Johnstone, “A New History of Libraries and Books in the Hellenistic Period,” Classical Antiquity 33, no. 2 (October 2014), 364–65.

[2] Bagnall, “Alexandria: Library of Dreams,” 351–56; Diana Delia, “From Romance to Rhetoric: The Alexandrian Library in Classical and Islamic Traditions,” American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (December 1992), 1458–59.

[3] The location of the Museum is not known for certain, other than that it was part of the palace complex and close to the harbor: P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 1:15; Delia, “From Romance to Rhetoric,” 1450. On ancient museums as temples to the Muses: Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 1:312–13.

[4] Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 1:315.

[5] Johnstone, “A New History of Libraries.”

[6] Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 1:318–19, 333–35.

[7] Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 1:86.

[8] Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 1:85.

[9] Bagnall, “Alexandria: Library of Dreams,” 358–59.

[10] The view that Caesar's fire did not affect the Museum Library is based in part on the phrase “storerooms of books” in Cassius Dio (42.38). However, see Hendrickson's comments in “The Serapeum: Dreams of the Daughter Library,” Classical Philology 111, no. 4 (2016), 460–61.

[11] Plutarch, Caesar 49.3; Gellius, Attic Nights 7.17.3.

[12] Strabo describes the Museum at 17.1.8.

[13] Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 47; Bagnall, “Alexandria: Library of Dreams,” 357–58; Hendrickson, “The Serapeum,” 461.

[14] For an introduction to the Serapeum, see Hendrickson, “The Serapeum.”

[15] Orosius says the book chests were emptied but doesn't say what happened to the books (Histories against the Pagans 6.15.32).

[not]

This video format is so refreshing. No unnecessary, overly-dramatic music, just straight facts

[etsequentia]

Don't fall for the title folks, the title is totally fake. There's really nothing boring about this video. It's superbly presented, well articulated and informative all the way through.

[joofbing]

Boring history is good history. People tend to remember history in highlight reels but most of the actual history is just like the time we experience daily, continuous, detailed, nuanced and contains a lot of small causalities.

[pompey]

Studying history, you really get to know how many grains of salt you need when reading ancient peoples recounting of events.

[bicivelo]

Even “boring” truth is FAR more interesting than fiction! Great video!!!

[AvengerAtIlipa]

A personal theory of mine is that all these ancient scholars kept reading about how awesome this library in Alexandria was, but were incredibly disappointed when they actually went to see it. Then there was some bitter old person at the library who said stuff like "kids these days can't appreciate a good book. Back in my day this library was great! Any female born after 193 can't cook..." and the scholars just believed them in order to save face.

[thedrunkenrebel]

People should value more these kinds of videos edited for people with competent attention span, fluff-less, and where narrator doesn`t take 20 minutes to get to the point.

This is actual content worth watching

[fabiangold]

The timeline visualization was super helpful. And love the structured way of your explanations.

[chaddubois]

Someone didn't want to pay their late fees.

[on_spikes]

but... but... someone on social media told me the great burning of the library of alexandria set humanity back 1000 years.

[TheYuccaPlant]

Pretty much every "This one specific thing happened that changed the course of history!" claims are never as dramatic and usually was just a gradual decline or regular change of whatever that thing is that got romanticized through history.

[thattimestampguy]

Points from the video
• The Library of Alexandria was 1 of 2 Libraries 📕📗
• The Library 2 was A Library at The Museum of Alexandria nearby.📗

4:43 Modern articles name people who lived in the Early Ptolemaic period.
• Zenodotus, Callimachus, Apollonius, Eratosthenes, Aristophanes,

4th Century BC
300 BC - 200 BC

3rd Century BC
200 - 100 BC
• Aristarchus lived into 150 BC approximately

5:15 Decline
- Extremely little records of the library itself
- limited information

6:00 Egypt was prosperous in the 3rd century under Ptolemy II and Ptolemy III

7:40 The Legendary Library was not the only library in existence
8:13 Library of Pergamum, Asia Minor, existed and some Greek talents went there.

9:00 Papyrus documents were found in a dry condition, but Alexandria Greece is a humid place.

10:42 Julius Ceasar set fire to the land, and that fire 🔥 may have burnt some of the Library of Alexandria’s Books. 📕

11:21 Plutarch and Gellius both say Julius Ceaser burned down the entire Library of Alexandria📕
12:22 They saw the Library of Alexandria as a declined Library as something of the past.

13:38 Strabo notes that Alexandria’s Library was large in the 4th Century.
15:00 The Library was in decline before Julius Ceaser came along and set fire 🔥 to it.

16:06 Serapeum Library had the largest library in the city, but it was not The Legendary Library of Alexandria.

19:18 Serapeum Temple Structure. Maybe the Christians sacked this Serapeum Library.

20:50 Musli

21:07
1. The Library’s ending did not cause a dark age
2. 1 library destroyed does not cause the catalysmic loss in hunan inowledge
3. Complex Causes, this has several different factors

[LiveFreeOrDieA]

Wow I find this very relieving to learn. I’ve always heard it described as one of the most tragic events in human history that the knowledge lost “set humanity back 1, 000 years”.

[Tinil]

I absolutely love the format of your videos. Just a sit down talk, no stupid editing tricks, no filler, just a discussion of history where you present what you have synthesized from your readings. It's refreshing.

[kellykramer]

This was excellent. My next question would be…when did the ‘story’ of the library of Alexandria become fictionalized and popularized?

[remilenoir]

The main problem with the theory that there were tens of thousands of books in Alexandria is that these figures are often given in scrolls _Volumina_ and tablets _Tabulae._

However, our modern minds tend to equate a single scroll with a single book _Codex, _ which couldn't be farther from the truth.

An individual codex can hold the contents of many, many, scrolls. Caesar's Bella Gallica, or the entirety of Plato, or even the Bible could fit into a single codex, while many dozens of scrolls would barely be enough to house the same amount.

Some of the biggest medieval codexes could hold the entire Bible, famous commentaries, pertaining philosophical works, zodiacs, calendars, and lengthy hagiographies. All of which would have easily taken the space of a single scroll shelf in a 1st century library, as opposed to a single 13th century book.

As such, even if we were to take these numbers seriously, the actual quantity of literature these scrolls represent (and the loss of knowledge their neglect/destruction supposedly brought) is dramatically less than what we are often led to believe, or, at the very least, way more comparable to the litterary production of subsequent eras such as the XIth to XIVth century period (which we are often led to think were less litteraly prolific, because of such confusions and the general culturo-historical bias that led the glorious works of antiquity to be better preserved and passed along by the so-called "humanists" and "enlightened", than the lowly and superstitious scribbles of the brutish medievals, whose work was ironically the only reason those same humanists, who coined the "Dark Ages", were able to marvel at Cicero, Vitrivius, Caesar and such).

Furthermore, I find it strange that most historians would take the claims of a library holding tens of thousands of scrolls at face value while dismissing equally dubious claims of battles fielding hundreds of thousands of soldiers as unrealistic, while both could be the exact same kind of propaganda.
Books/scrolls historically had value, and it wouldn't be strange for a powerful city such as Alexandria to brag about how much knowledge they physically owned.

Give it a few hundred years, and you end up with rumours of a fabled library that housed hundreds of thousands of books, while the reality is far less remarkable.

[HundredDaysMusic]

It's so weird to me to see a video without an intro that I assumed the guy talking at the start was some other historian being quoted beforw the REAL video starts.

It's very refreshing. You've earned a sub from me.

[hananas]

Knowing there probably wasn't a single terrible event that put us back hundreds of years in knowledge is surprisingly comfortable

[leedoss]

It's like you keep hearing about this wonderful Scottish restaurant that has everything imaginable to eat.
Then when you get there it's a McDonald's.

[TheBlazingMonkey]

i really hope you get big one day on youtube. i am a big history lover and i think your way of explaining things, not just objectively but in complete absence of assumptions that most people, even historians, tend to make. just a really phenomenal way of explaining things!