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."

Comments

Other Great Ancient Libraries

[angst_ridden_hipster]

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!

Likely to have been late 4th-century

[waterbear]

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 ........

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-

Re:For the rest of time

[Aardpig]

and among them we have the burning of the library of Alexandria by the Muslim invaders.

Erm, Muhammad was born in 570 AD. For it to have happened as you claim, he would have had to have gone back in time to before the birth of Christ, founded a new religion, and then compelled his new followers to burn down the library. Occam's razor suggest instead that you're talking out of your arse.

While we're on this note, let's not forget the contributions made to Mathematics and Science, over the centuries, by countless Muslims. To name but one: Al Khwarizmi, from whose name we get the word 'algorithm', and from whose work on mathematics (Hisab al-jabr wa al-muqabala) we get the word 'algebra'. Tell me, AC, what have you contributed?

Re:Why would that have mattered?

[Skjellifetti]

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?).