The Mysterious Fate of the Great Library of Alexandria
The Mysterious Fate of the Great
Library of
Alexandria
Other
articles of
interest:
The
Decline and End of Witch Trials in
Europe
The
Myth of Conflict in the History of Science and
Religion
Medieval
Science and the
Church
Christianity
and the Rise of
Science
Copernicus
and his
Revolutions
Christianity
and the Loss of Pagan
Literature
Contents
Introduction
Julius
Caesar
Theophilus
Omar
A
much more detailed and heavily footnoted paper about the libraries of
Alexandria, their foundation and their fate is available
here.
Note:
When a reference is given in
Green
then holding your mouse over it will cause a note to appear that gives the text
of the reference. Longer references, given in
Red,
will appear in a new window as long as your brower supports Javascript. I
believe that giving ready access to the original sources should be one of the
primary aims of scholarship on the
Internet.
Introduction
What
happened to the Royal Library of Alexandria? We can be certain it was there
once, founded by Ptolomy II Soter, and we can be equally certain it is not there
now. It formed part of the Museum which was located in the Bruchion or palace
quarter of the city of Alexandria. This great ancient city, occupying a spit of
land on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, had been founded by Alexander the
Great in his flying visit to Egypt and became the capital of the last dynasty of
Pharaohs descended from Alexander's general Ptolemy. The Great or more properly
Royal Library formed a part of the Museum but whether or not it was a separate
building is unclear.
Stories about
its demise have been circulating for centuries and date back to at least the
first century AD. These stories continue to be told and embellished today by
those who wish to make a moral attack against the alleged vandals. We find that
three parties are blamed for the destruction and they correspond to the three
occupying powers that ruled Alexandria after it had been lost by the Greeks. Let
me first tell those stories as we hear them today - without references, largely
inaccurate and used as polemic. Then I will try and establish what, if anything
we can know before finally and rather indulgently making my own
suggestions.
The suspects
respectively are a Roman, a Christian and a Moslem - Julius Caesar, Patriarch
Theophilus of Alexandria and Caliph Omar of Damascus. It is clear that the Royal
Library could not have been burnt down or otherwise destroyed by all three of
these characters and so we find we have too many sources for the event of the
destruction rather than a paucity. As scholars of the Gospels will vouch, this
too can be an embarrassment. How we decide to reconcile the stories will depend
almost entirely on how we criticise the sources and which of them we choose to
consider most reliable.
Archaeology
can be a help with ancient history although it tends to be silent about the
things in which we are most interested leading the more foolish archaeologists
to claim they never happened. In the case of Alexandria a series of earthquakes
and floods in the middle ages mean that the entire palace quarter in the North
East of the city is now underwater and largely inaccessible. Recent work in
underwater archaeology has revealed more but we will probably never be able to
dig around in the foundations of the Museum. The Great Temple of Serapis, to
which we will later return, was in the south-western quarter and parts of its
foundations have been
excavated.
Julius
Caesar
First, let us
read the legendary account:
It
is often said that the Romans were civilised but their most famous general was
responsible for the greatest act of vandalism during antiquity. Julius Caesar
was attacking Alexandria in pursuit of his archrival Pompey when he found
himself about to be cut off by the Egyptian fleet. Realising that this would
leave him in a desperate predicament, he took decisive action and sent fire
ships into the harbour. His plan was a success and the enemy fleet was quickly
aflame. But the fire did not stop these and jumped onto the dockside which was
laden with flammable materials ready for export. Next it spread in land and
before anyone could stop it, the Great Library itself was blazing brightly as
400,000 priceless scrolls were reduced to ashes. As for Caesar himself, did not
think it important enough to mention in his
memoirs.
The accused was indeed in
Alexandria in 47 - 48 BC after arriving in pursuit of his rival Pompey. Caesar
was able to occupy the city without any trouble after destroying the Egyptian
fleet and was residing in the palace with Cleopatra when more trouble started.
Some henchmen of the Pharaoh attacked with a sizable force and Caesar suddenly
found himself stuck in a hostile city with very few forces. That he still won
out is a tribute to his luck and powers of leadership. This much is uncontested
but to unravel the fate of the Royal Library we must examine the ancient
sources.
Julius Caesar -
The Civil Wars
The earliest
account we have of this these events is in
The Civil
Wars penned by Caesar (died 44BC) himself.
In it he explains how he had to set the dockyards and Alexandrine fleet alight
for his own safety as he was in dire straits. As to whether the fire spread away
from the shore and also damaged the Royal Library, he is silent. The narrative
in The Civil Wars break off at the start of the campaign in Egypt and the story
is taken up by one of his lieutenant's called Hirtius (died 43BC) in
The Alexandrine
War. It does not include any mention of
setting fire to Alexandria but instead states that in fact the city would not
burn as it was made purely of
stone.
We can log this as a Not
Guilty plea by the accused but note that a reason he might have mentioned that
Alexandria does not burn would be to hide his own action of burning it. Future
history demonstrated many times that Alexandria burns just as well as any other
city. The fire is also not mentioned by Cicero in his philippics against
Caesar's ally Mark Anthony. This is a valuable witness for the defence, as
Cicero did not like Caesar at all. Unfortunately it is also an argument from
silence and it is very possible that Cicero either did not know about everything
that happened, saw no need to mention this particular event or mentioned it in
the quarter of his works no longer
extant.
Strabo -
Geography
The great scholar,
Strabo (died after 24AD) was in Alexandria in 20BC and in all his detailed
description of the palace and Museum does not mention the library at all. This
omission is often explained by scholars claiming that the library was inside the
Museum or annexed to it. But even so, not breathing a word about this famous
institution is very suspicious. Can we conclude that the library was no longer
there but that political constraints meant that its fate still could not be
mentioned?
Modern writer, Mostafa
El-Abbadi, comes up with a more subtle point. He shows how Strabo mentions the
body of research available to one of the earlier librarians was much greater
than Strabo himself had access to. He concludes that this shows that Strabo did
not have access to the wisdom of the Royal Library that his illustrious
predecessor had. The point is small but potentially
significant.
Livy and
Florus - Epitome of the History of
Rome
The first mention of the
fire at Alexandria would seem to come from Livy (died 17AD) in his History of
Rome. The book that it was included in is lost and the surviving Summaries are
too brief to include it. However, a second century
Epitome
written by Florus survives and it says that the fire was started by Caesar to
clear the area around his position so the enemy had no cover from which to fire
arrows. The library itself is not mentioned by Florus although it was in the
same area of the city as Caesar who was occupying the palace at the
time.
The Younger Seneca -
On Tranquillity of the Mind
In
fact we do know that the Royal Library is mentioned by Livy because he is later
quoted by Seneca (died 65AD) in his dialogue
On the Tranquillity of the
Mind where he also says that a great number
of books were destroyed. It has been asserted that Seneca must have got his
knowledge about the destruction of the books from Livy but a close reading of
the dialogue does not bear this out. Seneca actually only states that Livy
thought the library was "the most distinguished achievement of the good taste
and solicitude of kings" and then only so as he can
disagree.
The actual number of books
destroyed that Seneca gives is matter of some controversy that we will need to
briefly address. In ancient manuscripts it is common for large numbers to be
expressed as a dot placed above the numeral for each power of ten. Clearly in
copying it is easy to make a mistake with the number of dots and errors by a
factor of ten are frequent. That may have happened in the case of On the
Tranquillity of the Mind. The manuscript from Monte Cassino actually reads
40,000 books but this is usually corrected to 400,000 by editors as other
sources such as Orosius give this figure for the number of scrolls destroyed. I
have not seen the manuscript, of course, so do not know if this way the number
is expressed. However, even if it was given in words the difference between
40,000 and 400,000 is also pretty small. I propose therefore that the number
given by Seneca, and indeed all other ancient sources, should be ruled as
inadmissible as evidence because we cannot be sure of what it was
originally.
Plutarch and
Dio Cassius - Life of Caesar and Roman
History
After this, the
references become more explicit. Plutarch (died 120AD), in his
Life of
Caesar throws in a reference to the
destruction of the library almost casually. Now Plutarch does not seem to carry
a brief against Caesar, although he is happy to criticise him, so we should take
this reference seriously. Additionally, he had visited Alexandria and presumably
might have noticed if the library was still in existence. Dio Cassius (died
235AD) tells us that warehouses of books near the docks were accidentally burnt
by Caesar's men. His words are difficult to pin down and have led some scholars
to suggest that only books waiting for export were destroyed. This reads far
more into the text than it allows and I do not think that Dio saying that the
books 'happened' to be in the path of the flames means that usually they were
kept somewhere else.
Aulus
Gellius - Attic Nights
Gellius
(died 180 AD) included in his
Attic
Nights contain a brief passage about
libraries where the destruction of the Royal Library is mentioned as taking
place by accident during our first war against Alexandria when auxiliary
soldiers started a fire. This first war was Caesar's campaign and the second was
when Octavian took Egypt from Mark Anthony and Cleopatra. In The Vanished
Library, Luciano Canfora claims that this passage is an interpolation on the
strength that the introduction does not mention it but again the evidence for
this seems flimsy. Gellius claims 700,000 books went up in
smoke.
Ammianus
Marcellinus and Orosius - Roman History and History against the
Pagans
One of the final pagan
Roman historians, Ammianus Marcellinus (died 395AD), tells us about the fate of
the library during an aside about the city of Alexandria in his
Roman
History. He relates the story of the fire
started by Julius Caesar is 'the unanimous belief of the ancient authors' but
confuses the library building with the Serapeum and increases the number of
scrolls destroyed to 700,000 (perhaps Gellius is his source). The story is
repeated with the figure of 400,000 scrolls destroyed by Orosius (died after
415AD), an early Christian historian, in his
History against the
Pagans. Both these writers are far too late
to be accurate sources on their own but they do tell us that by the fourth
century the Royal Library was widely believed to have been destroyed by Julius
Caesar. We will be discussing them further below with regard to the destruction
of the Serapeum which occurred in their own
time.
The verdict on
Caesar
Taken together we can
conclude a number of things from these
sources:
• The earliest
descriptions of the Alexandrine War, written by Caesar or his crony,
deliberately cover up anything that reflects badly on the great man. Their
silence about burning down the world's greatest library, even by accident, is
not surprising.
• The library as a
separate building did not exist by the time of Strabo's visit in
20BC.
• The belief that Caesar had
destroyed the library was widespread by the time his family no longer occupied
the throne of the emperors in the late first century AD. Plutarch, Gellius and
Seneca are all evidence for this. We must therefore assume that the library did
not exist at this time. Plutarch, a Greek, would certainly have known if it
did.
Although we cannot prove his
guilt with first hand evidence, it seems justified to claim that the book stacks
of the Royal Library were burnt down by Julius Caesar. Perhaps the reading
rooms, which in any case were part of the Museum, survived but, as Seneca and
all the other sources tell us, the books themselves perished. That scholarship
continued in Alexandria after this time cannot be doubted but I can find no
explicit mention of the Royal Library after Caesar's ill-fated visit. Indeed as
Athenaeus of Naucratis (died after 200AD) mournfully wrote in the
Deipnosophistai "And concerning the number of books and the establishment of
libraries and the collection in the Museum, why need I even speak when they are
all the the memory of
men."
Theophilus
Again,
the legendary story
first:
Theophilus, Patriarch of
Alexandria, is also the patron saint of arsonists. As Christianity slowly
strangled the life out of classical culture in the forth century it became more
and more difficult to be a pagan. There stood in Alexandria the great temple of
Serapis called the Serapeum and attached to it was the Great Library of
Alexandria where all the wisdom of the ancients was preserved. Now Theophilus
knew that as long as this knowledge existed people would be less inclined to
believe the bible so he set about destroying the pagan temples. But the
Serapeum was a huge structure, high on a mound and beyond the abilities of the
raging Christian fanatics to assault. Faced with this edifice, the Patriarch
sent word to Rome. There the Emperor Theodosius the Great, who had ordered that
paganism be annihilated, gave his permission for the destruction of the
Serapeum. Realising they had no chance, the priests and priestesses fled their
temple and the mob moved in. The vast structure was razed to it foundations and
the scrolls from the library were burnt in huge pyres in the streets of
Alexandria.
Theophilus was indeed the
Patriarch of Alexandria at the time that the Serapeum was converted in a
Christian church although he has never been made a saint! The date for the
events recorded is usually given as 391AD when Theodosius was emperor and
energetically converting all his subjects to Christianity. The contention made
is that there was another library in the Serapeum temple that a Christian mob
destroyed during their sacking of the temple. We need to establish if there
really was a library there and also if Theophilus destroyed
it.
The intervening
years
About the library the
sources are reasonably silent but this is not a surprise because we know already
that we cannot be talking about the Royal Library itself. However, Alexandria
remained a centre of scholarship and other libraries existed. The Emperor
Claudius set up the eponymous named Claudian to be a centre for the study of
history and Hadrian founded a library at the Caesarean temple during his visit.
Less reliably, Plutarch informs us that Mark Anthony gave Cleopatra the entire
contents - some 200,000 rolls - of the Pergamon library as a
gift.
The 12th century Byzantine
scholar, John Tzetzes, in his Prolegomena to Aristophanes preserves some details
about the catalogue of the poet Callimachus (died after 250BC) who said there
were nearly 500,000 scrolls in the Royal Library and another 42,000 odd in the
outer or public library. Note that Callimachus is not known to have referred to
the Serapeum Library although he is often assumed to be doing so. The fourth
century Bishop Epiphanius of Cyprus (died 402AD) in his
Weights and
Measures (actually a biblical commentary!)
says that there were over 50,000 volumes in the 'daughter' library that he
places in the Serapeum. Our previous observations about numbers fully apply here
even if it seems fair to say that there were many fewer scrolls in the daughter
than in the Royal Library. Epiphanius also tells us that by his day the entire
Bruchion quarter of Alexandria was laid waste, no doubt doe the the actions of
Aurelian or Diocletian. There is a detailed report of the acropolis of
Alexandria in a
Progymnasmata
by Aphthonius of Ephesus (died after 400AD) which he presents as an example of
how to give a description. He speaks of book repositories open to the public and
we can assume this refers to the Serapeum. Unfortunately the date of the
description is impossible to determine and nor can we tell if it is an
eyewitness account. However, we do have enough evidence in total to assert that
there was once a library at the Serapeum even if it is not the same as the
'outer library' attached to the Royal
Library.
Despite the continuation of
academic activity, Alexandria suffered much in the years up to 391AD. Augustus
reduced it, Caracalla massacred many of its citizens over a perceived insult and
Aurelian also sacked the city and the palace quarter in which the Museum was
situated. Finally, the city was taken with great destruction by Diocletian at
the start of the fourth
century.
Ammianus
Marcellinus - Roman History
In
the Roman
History, Ammianus waxes lyrical about the
Serapeum but he then gets a bit confused and says that the libraries it held
were those burnt by Caesar in the Alexandrine War. The point is perhaps vital
though because he had visited Alexandria and yet says of the Serapeum "in it
have been valuable libraries" in the perfect tense. This was before 391AD when
Theophilus and his gang set to work and very strongly suggests there were no
books present in the temple at the time of its
destruction.
Rufinus
Tyrannius - Ecclesiastical
History
The earliest description
of the sack of the Serapeum was almost certainly one by Sophronius, a Christian
scholar, called On the Overthrow of Serapis and now lost. Rufinus (died 410AD)
was an orthodox Latin Christian who spent many years of his life in Alexandria.
He arrived in 372AD and whether or not he was actually present when the Serapeum
was demolished, he was certainly there at around the same time. He rather freely
translated Eusebius's History of the Church into Latin and then added his own
books X and XI taking the narrative up to his own time. It is in book XI that we
find the best source for the events at the Serapeum which he describes in
detail. His account largely agrees with the one given above except that he makes
no mention of any library or books at all. He seems to regret the passing of the
Serapeum but puts the blame squarely on the local pagans for inciting the
Christian mob. The only English translation of his work is still very much in
copyright so until I have produced another myself the reader will just have to
take my word for
it.
Eunapius - Lives of
the Philosophers
The pagan writer
Eunapius of Antioch (died after 400AD) included an account of the sack of the
Serapeum in his Life of
Antonius who, before he died in 390AD, had
prophesied that all the pagan temples in Alexandria would be destroyed (not a
desperately surprising contingency at the time). Eunapius wants to show how
right he was. As well as being a pagan, Eunapius is vehemently anti-Christian
and spares no effort in making Theophilus and his followers look as foolish as
possible. His narrative is laced with venom and sarcasm as he describes the sack
of the temple as a battle without an enemy. If a great library had been
destroyed then Eunapius, the pagan scholar, would surely have mentioned it. He
does not.
Socrates
Scholasticus, Hermias Sozomen and
Theodoret
Socrates (died after
450AD) also wrote a History of
the Church that continued on from that of
Eusebius. His was more detailed and in Greek rather than Latin. It contains a
chapter about the destruction of the Serapeum which acknowledges that the deed
was ordered by the Emperor, that the building was demolished and that it was
later converted to a church. Again, no mention is made of any books that might
have been in the Serapeum or what could have happened to them. His passage about
the cross-shaped hieroglyphics found in the temple gives us some idea of how
Christianity turned various pagan symbols to its
advantage.
The histories of
Sozomen
(died 443AD) and
Theodoret
(died after 457AD) cover a similar period. Despite being pleased to report in
detail the Serapeum's destruction they also make mention no books at all
although Theodoret says that the wooden idols of Serapis were burnt. Both of
these histories are heavily dependent on Socrates but do include details from
other sources.
Paulus
Orosius - History against the
Pagans
Orosius (died after 415AD)
was a friend of Saint Augustine who wrote a
History against the
Pagans that was fully intended to paint all
non-Christians in a bad light. So as a historian he is useless but when he says
something that suggests that his fellow Christians were not whiter than white,
that is to say, against the grain of his usual bias, we have to take it
seriously. In his aside on the Great Library, he says something of significance
which is both an eyewitness detail and suggests that his fellow Christians are
in the wrong. He says "...there exist in temples book chests which we ourselves
have seen and when these temples were plundered these, we are told, were emptied
by our own men in our own time." His statement that there was no other major
library in Alexandria at the time of Caesar's expedition is interesting and
would seem to count against there being a Serapeum library at that time.
However, Orosius is too late a source to carry much weight in this
matter.
From Orosius we can deduce
that Christians did empty some temples of books but we cannot go much further.
We cannot say the books were destroyed as this is not stated nor can we say
which temples he is talking about or who was responsible. However, we can be
sure he was not talking about the Serapeum as all sources agree it was razed to
the ground and the temples Orosius visited are not only still standing but even
have their internal furninshings. The most likely explanation is that the books
were removed to Christian libraries or
sold.
The verdict on
Theophilus
It is hard enough to
establish beyond doubt that there was a library in the Serapeum at all but if
there was, Ammianus makes clear that it was no longer there by the mid fourth
century. This is confirmed by the silence of all the sources, including one that
would be keen to report Christian atrocities, for the destruction of the temple
in 391AD. Note that this is not an 'argument from silence' because there is no
reason at all to expect a mention of books in the Serapeum when it was
demolished. An invalid 'argument from silence' is when we claim something that
is not mentioned did not happen, even though other evidence suggests it did.
There is no positive evidence for the existence of the library and instead near
conclusive eye witness evidence
against.
The story that Theophilus
destroyed a library is clearly a fiction that we can very precisely lay at the
door of Edward Gibbon. It is in his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire that we first find the allegation made. Gibbon seems mainly concerned to
clear the Arabs of the responsibility of destroying the library and allows his
marked anti-Christian prejudice to cloud his better judgement. His excellent
footnotes show he had exactly the same sources as we do but drew the wrong
conclusions. The story has recently been popularised by Carl Sagan who
includes it in
Cosmos.
He spices the story up with a role for the murdered philosopher Hypatia, even
though there is no evidence connecting her to the library at
all.
Caliph
Omar
First the legendary
account:
The Moslems invaded
Egypt during the seventh century as their fanaticism carried them on conquests
that would take form an empire stretching from Spain to India. There was not
much of a struggle in Egypt and the locals found the rule of the Caliph to be
more tolerant than that of the Byzantines before them. However, when a
Christian called John informed the local Arab general that there existed in
Alexandria a great Library preserving all the knowledge in the world he was
perturbed. Eventually he sent word to Damascus where Caliph Omar ordered that
all the books in the library should be destroyed because, as he said "they will
either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree
with it, so they are superfluous." Therefore, the books and scrolls were taken
out of the library and distributed as fuel to the many bathhouses of the city.
So enormous was the volume of literature that it took six months for it all to
be burnt to ashes heating the saunas of the
conquerors.
The leader of the Moslem
forces that took Egypt in 640AD was called 'Amr and it was he who was supposed
to have asked Omar what to do about the fabled library that he found himself in
control of.
There are only a few
sources that we need to examine. They are very late The first of the two late
sources dates from the 12th century and is written by Abd al Latif (died 1231)
who, in his Account of
Egypt while describing Alexandria, mentions
of the ruins of the Serapeum. The problems with this as historical evidence are
enormous and insurmountable. He admits that the source of his information was
rumour and the fantasy about Aristotle does not bode well for the veracity of
the rest of the piece.
In the
thirteenth century the great Jacobite Christian Bishop Gregory Bar Hebræus
(died 1286), called Abû 'l Faraj in Arabic, fleshes the story out and
includes the famous epigram about the Koran. Again there is no clue as to where
he found the story but it seems to have been one doing the rounds among
Christians living under the dominion of the Moslems. Gregory is happy to record
plenty of far fetched tales about omens and monstrosities so we must treat this
story with the greatest suspicion. As it is not even included in the original
version of his history but only in the Arabic version that he translated and
abridged himself very late in life, he may not have known the story when he
first put pen to parchment. In The Vanished Library, Canfora mentions a Syriac
manuscript published in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century by
François Nau. It was written by a Christian monk in the ninth century and
details the conversation between John and Caliph Omar. After help from email
correspondents, I have finally been able to find this elusive document in its
French translation and ascertained that it makes no mention of any library and
appears to be an example of a theological dialogue between two representative
individuals. In other words it is not historical and has no pretensions to
be.
The verdict on
Omar
The errors in the sources
are obvious and the story itself is almost wholly incredible. In the first
place, Gregory Bar Hebræus represents the Christian in his story as being
one John of Byzantium and that John was certainly dead by the time of the Moslem
invasion of Egypt. Also, the prospect of the library taking six months to burn
is simply fantastic and just the sort of exaggeration one might expect to find
in Arab legends such as the Arabian Nights. However Alfred Butler's famous
observation that the books of the library were made of vellum which does not
burn is not true. The very late dates of the source material are also suspect as
there is no hint of this atrocity in any early literature - even in the Coptic
Christian chronicle of John of
Nikiou (died after 640AD) who detailed the Arab
invasion. Finally, the story comes from the hand of a Christian intellectual who
would have been more than happy to show the religion of his rulers in a bad
light. Agreeing with Gibbon this time, we can dismiss it as a
legend.
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From: The Mysterious
Fate of the Great Library of
Alexandria
http://www.bede.org.uk/library.htm
Posted: Sun - April 25, 2004 at 03:14 PM