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

Good thing..

[rylin]

Good thing it set us back 1000 years, otherwise SCO might actually have a case when it comes to "owning unix"

Proudly pulling random things into context. . .

Oh neato!

[NanoGator]

It's kind of embarrasingly, really. They knew which building it was in for ages, but it took them years to figure out they just had to smash through the big Roman numeral 10 on the floor.

Re:Oh neato!

[Will2k_is_here]

they just had to smash through the big Roman numeral 10 on the floor.

:)

Troy had the same problem. Took us centuries to find it too. There's a lot of ancient mysteries yet to be rediscovered.

Re:Oh neato!

[NanoGator]

"What, In Soviet Poland they don't watch Indiana Jones movies?"

They do, but it was translated a little different. The floor kept smacking Indy in the head.

Re:Oh neato!

[nocomment]

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?

X

[WTFmonkey]

X marks the spot!

Hey, someone had to ruin the joke.

wonder where we be with it.

[pvt_medic]

Imagine where our societies would be if it was still around...

I wonder if these same people could come up with a list of things that we could burn that would actually set us ahead.

Re:wonder where we be with it.

[zloof]

This might be another one of those Airplanes / Computers discussions. Had Computer ideas been patented the way they were, they would have developed faster, as with the Wright Bros. and other people using their basic idea as a jumpstart to technology.

So maybe it's more like this:
The Burning of Alexandria is to the Development of Technology, as licensing is to computing technology.

*whew* I'd hate to live at a time when machines controled my every move, from who and how I interact with people, to the work that I do, to the only thing I see all day.

Re:wonder where we be with it.

[eddy the lip]

Well, we tried, but we left the job half done when we couldn't find any good beer.

Kidding! We love our big lug of a brother to the south. ;)

Re:wonder where we be with it.

[Anonymous Coward]

While the burning of the Library of Alexandria set back science for 1000 years, the Catholic church set back science for another1000 years. Since the Library was burned down about 48 B.C.E., its amazing what only 52 years of science has gotten us (makes me wonder which Greek master first wrote the general theory of relativity)!

Re:wonder where we be with it.

[McCarrum]

Okay.

I'm going to be gerenal here as my SPLUTTERING RAGE is making it hard to type.

The Catholic Church has done these things, and they were the major force in doing these things not because they're wonderful, all-singing, all-dancing modern thinkers. They did it because they wiped out their competition.

We would have vastly more and wider knowledge within collective civilisation if the Church (and not just the Church, true enough, but this is a response) did destroy modes of thinking that clashed with their own. From the crusaides to the witch-hunts.

Oh, one last point .. Arab doctors were busy doing medicine when Christian doctors were busing being butchers. Take your blinkers off. Look around you. And when you've recovered from that, look behind you to see the damage that was done to others in the Churches history.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom. On reading that previous comment, I have a bad taste in my mouth.

Re:wonder where we be with it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to be gerenal here as my SPLUTTERING RAGE is making it hard to type.

ATI fixed that Rage bug a while ago. Download the new drivers, and your Rage Pro won't ever splutter again.

God, that was a fucking lame joke.

Re:wonder where we be with it.

[Vellmont]

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.

As another poster pointed out, they were pretty much the only game in town. The Cathlic church hardly deserves credit for doing the little they did. Also, it's hardly the invention of Christianity to believe the world is understandable. The Cathlolics can't lay claim to that any more than we can.

Re:wonder where we be with it.

[pyrrhonist]

to the witch-hunts.

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.

Re:wonder where we be with it.

[rempelos]

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

Re:wonder where we be with it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Go drink some milk, or have a Martini, or
something. If you want to find someone to hate
and demonize and blame for the evils of the
world, it's all too easy. There are plenty of
myths that can help you blame the Catholic
Church, or the Jews, or the Muslims, or
blacks, or any other group you arbitrarily
decide to go into a sputtering rage about.

A prime example is the myth that crazed
Christian fanatics destroyed the library. That
story has about as much historical credibility
as the Bible.

The fact is, it's pretty hard to make a sound
case that the Christians held back science or
civilization. The Greek scholars went into
decline centuries before Christianity even
existed, and continued without much interference
from the Church. If anything, the Muslim
conquests were more disruptive than any action of
the Church I'm aware of.

Making sense of the contribution of the Church
to civilization is a very complex business.

As for "Arab doctors ... Christian ... butchers,"
yeah, yeah, yeah.

I had a black friend once who was fond of
saying, "The Chinese were inventing civilization
when our ancestors were still running around in
grass skirts." He liked to clump Africa and
Europe together like that. He was a good guy,
but like everyone he had his faults, and he
was a little too obvious about his bitterness.
The fact is, the Chinese did not invent
civilization and don't have a particularly ancient
civilization compared to Europeans. Nor do the
Arabs make Christians look like butchers.
Why don't you go read up a little about exactly
what the Arabs did and what the Europeans and
Christians did. You might stop hating people
if you knew a little more.

backups!

[orn]

It's said by some that the burning of the library set civilization back as much as a thousand years.

Which just goes to show the importance of doing your back-ups!

Re:backups!

[LesFerg]

Actually they have backups, only nobody has the software to access them anymore, its in Word-the-Prequel.

More on the Mouseion

[DrSkwid]

Carl Sagan did some work on the
ancient Library of Alexandria, the Mouseion, for his TV series Cosmos.

Overheard in ancient Alexandria...

[Spoing]

1. PHB in toga:
2. No, Akmed...we can't justify the cost of off-site backups. It's just too expensive!

Afterwards, PHB got a raise for keeping it "reasonably" under budget. Imagine the loss if both copies were destroyed!!!

A thousand years?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

If we hadn't lost that thousand years of Civilization, just think of where Moore's law would have taken processor speeds by now!

Why would that have mattered?

[Eevee]

It's not as if the Romans were on some strange bookburning spree. The library was accidental damage from the attack on the city--given the chance, Caeser would have picked up all the goodies as additional loot.

Re:Why would that have mattered?

[Will2k_is_here]

"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.

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?).

At last!

[AtariAmarok]

At last! They have found it! I have a few overdue books at the place I've been meaning to return. Not looking forward to the fine, though.

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:Likely to have been late 4th-century

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

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?"

Re:Likely to have been late 4th-century

[dublin]

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...

Re:For the rest of time

[nastyphil]

"evidence that the library of Alexandria was burned down my Muslims is slender and in fact Muslims preserved the literature of the ancient world"

Especially true given that islam didn't exist when the library is thought to have been destroyed!

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?

Address of Alexandria library

[rossdee]

A quick google found the library in Alexandria

Douglas County Public Library
720 Fillmore St
Alexandria, MN 56308
(320) 762-3014

Thats about 50 miles from where I live.

Re:julius caesar?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What about the Vatican Library

[Teancum]

Of all of the modern and current libraries that are around, the Vatican Library (yes, the Pope's own book stack) is probabally the most comprehensive collection of medeval and ancient texts that is in existance. For more technical volumes there are other places that are more extensive, but if you are trying to study history or philosophy, this is the place to go.

To suggest that Christians deliberately burn books simply to hide knowledge is totally wrong. That from time to time bullheaded idiots sometimes get control of ecclesiastical authority and abuse that same political and spiritual power to evil ends is not disputed. This happens in most religions (including atheism) or even political movements. (This is in response to the grandpartent article. I agree with you dasunt.)

The problem that happened at Alexandria, and what caused the "Dark Ages" was a total breakdown of the political & social framework of Europe due to the collapse of the Roman Empire. It didn't burn down earlier simply because the Roman Legions would have massacred anybody that tried to challenge Roman authority. By 400 A.D. the Roman government had all but stopped existing in any form, and the citizens of Rome itself were fighting off invaders into the city itself from the Vandals, Goths, and other germanic tribes that routinely sacked Rome for what was left of wealth from being an imperial capital. This was almost like the "Mad Max" movies by Mel Gibson in terms of a total lack of control by governments, except in silly irrelavent symbolism that doesn't keep my neighbor from raping my wife and killing my kids.

Awsome discovery

[kbahey]

Well, it is my home town. I was born and raised there many moons ago.

Anyway, to give some perspective and background:

• Here is a Map of Alexandria.
• The Brucheion would be on the promontary that is just east of where "Raml Station" is marked, facing West.
• Where it says, Qaitbay Fort still stands today, and is said to be on the site of the famous Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the world, and build using the stones from its ruins.
• Just at the base of the promontary, the new library of Alexandria recently opened.
• The original library was most probably burned during the Roman attack of the city.
• The story of the Arabs buring the library is inaccurate and discredited by most historians.
• There was another daughter library at Pompey's pillar (which was not built by Pompey by the way). This one survived for 4 more centuries, but was plundered by Christian fanatic mobs. The same mob dragged the philosopher/mathematician/priestess Hypatia
• Here is another map of underwater artifacts
• Yet another older map from 1855 depicting the battle of Alexandria on 1801 between the French and the British.
• Franck Goddio has done extensive marine archology excavations in the eastern harbor and other places in Egypt (Abu Qir for example). Interesting photos there, including this map of underwater buildings and artifacts, and an artist view of the same.

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!