The Library of Alexandria

Alexander the Great founded the city of Alexandria, on the coast of Egypt, in 331 BC. After his death, one of his generals became king of Egypt as Ptolemy I. He and his son, Ptolemy II, wanted their new capital to be the centre of Greek learning. Ancient writers say that Demetrius of Phalerum, a pupil of Aristotle’s school in Athens, advised them.

In the royal quarter of the city they built the Μουσεῖον, the shrine of the Muses. It was not a museum in today’s sense, but a home for scholars. The geographer Strabo describes its covered walk, its seats for discussion and a large hall where the learned men ate together. The kings paid them, so they could spend their time studying.

Next to them stood the βιβλιοθήκη, the library. Its βιβλία, its books, did not look like ours. Each one was a long roll of πάπυρος, papyrus, a paper made from a plant that grows by the Nile. A long work needed many rolls. Ancient writers give very large numbers for the collection, up to 700,000 rolls. Modern historians treat these figures with care: nobody counted them in a way we can check.

The Ptolemies sent agents with plenty of money to buy books all over the Greek world and beyond. According to an ancient tradition, the core of the collection was Aristotle’s own library, which Ptolemy II probably bought. Galen, a doctor of the 2nd century AD, tells a famous story: under Ptolemy III, every book found on a ship in the harbour was taken to the Library. There scribes made an ἀντίγραφον, a copy, of each one.

So many rolls needed order. The first head of the Library, Zenodotus of Ephesus, sorted the rolls by subject and used alphabetical order. The poet Callimachus of Cyrene, who was never officially head librarian, wrote the Πίνακες, the Tables: a guide in 120 books to all Greek authors, sorted by kind of writing, with a short life of each writer and a list of his works. It was a κατάλογος, a catalogue, and much more. It is lost today.

The heads of the Library who followed were famous scholars: Apollonius of Rhodes, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who measured the Earth, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace. They compared old copies of Homer and other poets and corrected their mistakes. The Greek word for such a scholar, φιλόλογος, means a lover of words. This careful work on texts is why philology is said to have been born in Alexandria.

Many books say that the Library burned down in one great fire. The ancient sources tell a slower story, and historians still disagree.

The first blow was not a fire. In 145 BC, in a fight for the throne, King Ptolemy VIII drove many scholars out of the city, among them the head of the Library, Aristarchus. After that, the post lost much of its prestige.

In 48 BC, Julius Caesar, trapped in Alexandria in a war, set fire to ships in the harbour, and the flames spread into the city. Plutarch (Caesar 49) writes that the fire destroyed the great library. Seneca quotes a lost work that speaks of 40,000 rolls burned, while Ammianus, writing four centuries later, says 700,000. Yet about twenty years after the fire, Strabo visited the Μουσεῖον and described it as still working, and scholars kept working there.

The city later suffered sieges under the emperors Aurelian and Diocletian in the late 3rd century AD, and an earthquake and tsunami in 365 AD. In 391 AD, Theophilus, the Christian bishop of Alexandria, had the Serapeum destroyed, a temple that had held a second library; nobody knows how many books it still held. A story that the Arabs burned the books in 642 AD first appears in writers of the 13th century, more than five centuries later, and historians reject it. The Library most likely faded away slowly, through war, neglect and lack of money.

Most of the rolls of Alexandria are lost, but the Library’s work is not. The texts of Homer that students read today come down to us through the editions and notes of Alexandrian scholars, which later copyists used. Zenodotus divided the Iliad and the Odyssey into 24 books each, and Aristophanes and Aristarchus made the first lists of the best authors in each kind of poetry. The authors on these lists were copied and taught most, so they are the ones that survived.

Many ideas we take for granted began there: putting books in alphabetical order, making a catalogue of authors and titles, and comparing several copies of a text to find the best one. Every school library that sorts its shelves and every online catalogue follows the same path.

In 2002, Egypt opened the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a new library built near the place where the old royal quarter stood, which the sea has partly covered. It has room for millions of books. It cannot bring back the lost rolls, but it carries on the old idea: a place where people from many countries come to read and learn together.