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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."
ya like the cuneiform tablet that refers to soddom. Cool stuff.
As for the library they should have had an offsite backup. Or maybe this is the reason we know that?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
If we hadn't lost that thousand years of Civilization, just think of where Moore's law would have taken processor speeds by now!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
There was a great library at Pergamum. It was a competitor to Alexandria, and may have had around 200,000 volumes. Supposedly, the contents of the library at Pergamum were given as a gift to Cleopatra by Mark Antony. I'm not sure where this was chronologically with respect to the destruction of the library at Alexandria.
Then, even before, there was King Assurbanipal of Assyria, who in 650 BC created a great library. He had copies made of thousands of years worth of Sumerian tablets. In fact, it's unlikely we'd have even a tiny fraction of the surviving Sumerian information if he hadn't done that. His library had 22,000 volumes (clay tablets). I don't know what number of those are still extant and intact.
That's why I back up all my CDROMs onto clay tablets. As the marketroids tell me, it's a robust archival medium for assuring SOHO data persistence!
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
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A substantial body of opinion dates the major destruction of the Alexandrian library/museum to the late 4th century AD, i.e. a time when Christians were in charge and very concerned to discourage pagan things, which included the learning of the ancients ........
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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
-wb-
"Accidental"?
This kind of stuff happened many times throughout history. Conquering civ's tried to erase the history of the conquered by destroying it's traces and replacing history to begin with the conquerors.
It wasn't about burning books, it was about destroying inferior history.
Every culture and civilization has a moment of shame that will soil their memory for the rest of time. The erradication of the natives in the USA, holocaust by the Germans, the Algerian war of independence by the French, the Armenian holocaust by the Turkish.... and among them we have the burning of the library of Alexandria by the Muslim invaders.
Sounds handy, but the library WAS burned three times: once by Romans, once by Christians, and once by Muslims.
Maybe your history of math course should focus on math.
That was more of Protestant thing.
The Catholic church was burning witches long before Protestants even existed.
In fact, one of the charges brought against Joan of Arc in 1431 was witchcraft. This was before the Protestant reformation.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Except for a few volumes on geometry, the library likely contained masses of CRAP about gods, goddesses, thaumaturgy, alchemy, inaccurate histories, &c.
You're missing the point. The people who regret the burning argue that all that nonsense being burned just meant that people had to waste hundreds of years thinking it up and writing it all down again again before they could move on to more scientific matters: if the library hadn't been burned, people would have got on with "important" things much sooner.
Really? Why don't you try telling that to Bruno, Copernicus or Galileo? How many heretics did the church burn at the stake? How long did they try to suppress the heliocentric theory of the universe?
This is pretty much an open-and-shut case.
and why did these three individuals exist in Europe and not in Araby? Maybe having the mentality the Christian relgion (not being a synonom with the Catholic Church) instilled in them made them look to search and explore the universe. Very little of this has happened in Islamic society by comparison.
Except in this case it probably was accidental. Caeser got into a major fight in Alexandria and the docks where much of the library material was stored caught fire. Here is one scholars attempt to uncover who was guilty of destroying the library.
Although you are right that many conquerers did deliberately destroy the writings of the conquered (e.g. the Spanish in Mesoamerica), I suspect that more often such libraries were destroyed because the conquerers didn't know or care what a library was (e.g. the Mongol destruction of Baghdad's library or, more recently, Rumsfeld's neglect in Baghdad -- I wonder what librarian Laura Bush thought about the untidiness of U.S. forces standing by while an ancient library burned?).
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