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Library at Alexandria Discovered?
dustmote writes "According to the BBC, a Polish-Egyptian team believes they may have discovered the Library at Alexandria, including ancient lecture halls or auditoria, in the Bruchion region of the city. It's said by some that the burning of the library set civilization back as much as a thousand years."
Carl Sagan did some work on the
ancient Library of Alexandria, the Mouseion, for his TV series Cosmos.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
the Catholic church set back science for another1000 years
Without the Catholic Church, there would be no science today.
First, who was more interested in preserving the knowledge of the past, the Catholic Church or the barbarians who ruled Europe during the Middle Ages? Obviously, it was the Church. Without the Church, there wouldn't have been much writing at all in Europe. The first encyclopedia was compiled by St. Isidore of Seville. So if the loss of the Library of Alexandria set back science, the absence of the Catholic Church would have done the same thing.
Second, the whole philosophical basis of science derives from Catholic theology. Here's a quote from an article linked to in a recent Slashdot story:
"[T]o be a scientist you have to have two fundamental assumptions, so fundamental you don't even think about it. You assume that the universe makes sense, that there really is an objective reality; there really is a logic to this; it's not just chaos; there really are laws to be found. We're so used to that assumption, you don't realize it. A lot of cultures don't have that.
"And the other assumption you have to make is that it's worth doing. If your idea, if your religion is to meditate and rise above the physical universe, this corrupting physical universe, you might say, you're not going to be a scientist, you're not going to be interested in Mars. So it's a religious statement to say the physical universe is worth devoting my life to. [...]
"By religious I mean that it is based on certain fundamental assumptions you have about how the universe works and what your place in the universe is. And ultimately, that's a religious assumption. Whether it's my religion or somebody else's religion, lots of people with lots of religions are looking at science. I'm not saying it's only one religion that has that assumption. But I'm saying that there are religions that don't. There are brilliant cultures throughout history who have had fabulous mathematics and glorious ethical systems - and no science."
And lots of the early science was done by Catholic priests and monks. Another quote from the same article:
"The whole scientific enterprise really does coincide well with Christian theology. The whole idea that the universe is worth studying is a Christian idea. The whole mechanism for studying the physical universe comes straight out of the whole logic of the scholastic age. Who was the first geologist? Albert the Great, who was a monk. Who was the first Chemist? Roger Bacon, who was a monk. Who was the first guy to come up with spectroscopy? Angelo Secchi, who was a priest. Who was the guy who invented genetics? Gregor Mendel, who was a monk. Who was the guy who came up with the Big Bang theory? Georges Lemaître, who was a priest. There is this long tradition; most scientists before the 19th century were clerics."
Yup. This is a half decent book on the subject I read a few years back. The $64,000,000 question is of course "who burned it down?"
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Well, most of the world wasn't Catholic, so they were free to develop science without any interference from the Church... Did they? No.
Well, the first christian Roman emperors (way before the separation of the Church to Catholic and Orthodox, when the roman empire was practically the whole world), closed the University of Athens and suppressed any ideas of that time that would question the beliefs of their religion (and not just in greece but in alexandria too). Just to mention that greek philoshophers and mathematicians had formulated theories about material, earth and space that are very close to todays most accepted theories. Plus that they had developed science of medicine, had compute the perimeter of the earth etc.
The point I was making was that science derives from the Catholic "mode of thinking". So a lack of Catholicism wouldn't have improved the situation.
When Catholism was created, the world was already towards dark ages. The way that the christians were enforcing their beliefs is to take the blame for that. And... oh, yes, it would
So you have a problem with the defense of Christian pilgrims who were being attacked by the Turks?
Read your history books again. The crusaides were made to recapture the holy lands and in the mean time butcher, loot and impose their religion.
First, there wouldn't have been any such (Muslim) Arab doctors if there were no Catholic Church, since Islam is a Christian heresy (based on Arianism and Docetism, if I'm not mistaken).
You are mistaken. Islam is not straightly related to christianity, maybe Mohammed borrowed things from christians or jesus but it didn't have any relation with what christianity had evolved to in Europe
The legend of the destruction of the library by
Muslims blames invaders in the 7th century.
There's no doubt there was such an invasion.
What's very doubtful is whether they destroyed the
library.
As for contributions to Mathematics and Science
by "countless Muslims," I think that's a bit of
an exaggeration. It's fashionable in some circles
to exalt this or that civilization at the
expense of the Europeans. The Muslims deserve
some credit, but I wouldn't go overboard.
The Muslims were tolerant in some places, but
destroyed intellectual communities in others.
The majority of scholars in the Muslim empires
were actually non-Muslims. They were tolerated,
but many were not happy.
As for Al Khwarizmi, his most lasting
contribution to mathematics is surely the two
words you cite. He treated some quadratic
equations, but the basic quadratic equation
was already known to the Babylonians thousands
of years earlier. He could not solve the
cubic. The Italians were the first to solve
cubic and fourth degree equations.
The Greeks, building on contributions of
Babylonians and Egyptians, made phenomenal
contributions of mathematics. The Europeans
began to make progress again in mathematics in
the second millenium. Over the past 1000 years,
they've contributed many times over to science and
mathematics the contributions of the entire rest
of the world. The Europeans have outrun, by a
very wide distance, the rest of the world in
almost every aspect of civilization.
It is also worth remembering that much of what did survive out of the destruction of classical learning was eventually preserved and re-transmitted to a deeply ignorant and religiously hidebound Europe several hundred years later through the hands of the relatively liberal and learned muslim arabs...
Your bigotry is showing.
There is no doubt that learning was lost after the fall of Rome. Knowledge was preserved through intervening centuries in several unlikely places far afield. Before you blast the Christians for this, perhaps you should know that much of the ancient knowledge that was saved was in fact preserved by the chirch itself. This included much from Arab and other eastern sources that was lost even in the east when the far-from-civilized Mohammedans deliberately destroyed anything they judged heretical, which by definition is pretty much anything other than the Koran and the Hadith.)
You might want to read How the Irish Saved Civilization to get an understanding of how the church in Irelend was actually instrumental in maintaining a library of this information through the turbulent times of the incorrectly-named "dark ages", and then re-seeding that information throughout Europe. A good book, worth a read...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Well, it is my home town. I was born and raised there many moons ago.
Anyway, to give some perspective and background:
Egypt is floating on archeology, literally. It is very common to find amphorae and stuff when digging foundations for buildings.
Oh, and by the way, here are some pictures from the city today, focusing on the electric tramways, two types, narrow carriage for downtown, and a wider one for the eastern parts.
I miss it!
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Pope Urban VIII was his long time friend and sponsor. He was encouraged to write what would become the Dialog on the Two World Systems. He was cautioned that he could state his theory, but not claim it as established fact, as it was improvable at the time. So naturally he claimed the helio-centric view as established fact (despite the fact that he could not explain several contradictory effects, such as the lack of parallax in the stars as the Earth orbits the Sun), and having the character Simplicio (the simpleton) express some of Urban's private discussions with Galileo.
The helio-centric view was actually invented by Nicolas Copernicus (a Catholic Priest)in De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. Galileo merely borrowed the credit.
raged to write what would become the Dialog on the Two World Systems. He was cautioned that he could state his theory, but not claim it as established fact, as it was unprovable at the time. So naturally he claimed the helio-centric view as established fact (despite the fact that he could not explain several contradictory effects, such as the lack of paralax in the stars as the Earth orbits the Sun), and having the character Simplicio (the simpleton) express some of Urbans private discussions with Galileo.
The helio-centric view was actually invented by Nicolas Copernicus (a Catholic Priest)in De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. Galileo merely borrowed the credit.
Huh.
The library(ies) at Alexandria have been burned a number of times inadvertently. The final burning or dismantling was ordered by the Caliph of Baghdad in the 600s, because the codices and scrolls "either contradicted the Quran and are heresy, or affirmed it and are superfluous."
I think that the burnings in the 300s had more to do with the character and volatility of the Alexandrine people, long known before and after these times for their tendency to riot, than to the character of Catholics or Monophysites.
The source blaming Muslims comes a few centuries afterwards and is anti-Muslim; the source blaming Christians comes more than a millenium later, and is anti-Christian. So infer whatever bias you want on it.
Uhh.. it was the Arabs who preserved the knowledge of the ancient world through the dark ages. The Cathlolic church was too busy persecuting people like Galileo for finding truth to preserve much of anything.
Firstly, the dark ages in which the Arabs were preservers and Galileo's period lie about one thousand years apart, so comparing the two situations is necessarily specious.
Secondly, it was the Caliph of Baghdad, a Muslim, who had the Library of Alexandria "preserved" to the ground in 641, not the Christian (monophysite?) caretakers of the library.