The Library of Alexandria between Documented History and Myth

No library of antiquity has left a memory comparable to that of Alexandria in Egypt. Founded at the beginning of the third century BC under the first rulers of the Ptolemaic dynasty, probably on the initiative of Ptolemy I and his son Ptolemy II, it was part of the Museum, an institution dedicated to the Muses where scholars lived supported by the king. We know far less of its history than its myth would suggest.

Collecting All the Books in the World

Ancient sources credit Demetrius of Phalerum, an Athenian philosopher who had taken refuge in Egypt, with a role in the foundation, but his involvement is disputed. The ambition was to collect the texts of all peoples. Galen relates that books found on ships arriving in the harbour were copied and that the owners were given back the copies, while the originals stayed in the royal library.

Ancient sources disagree on the number of scrolls: estimates range from a few tens of thousands to seven hundred thousand, figures to be treated with caution. The library was also linked to the legend, told in the so-called Letter of Aristeas, of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible entrusted to seventy-two sages from Jerusalem, hence the name Septuagint.

Librarians and Philologists

Some of the greatest scholars of the Hellenistic age worked in Alexandria. Zenodotus of Ephesus edited the Homeric poems; Eratosthenes of Cyrene, librarian in the third century BC, estimated the circumference of the Earth; Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace laid the foundations of critical philology. The poet Callimachus compiled the Pinakes, an annotated catalogue of Greek authors, now lost.

The library was therefore a place of philological work rather than a mere storehouse. There copies were compared, errors corrected, texts established and commentaries written. Many Greek classics have reached us in the form fixed by the Alexandrian scholars, and the method of that work lies at the root of modern textual criticism.

The End: Fires and Legends

There was no single destruction of the library. Plutarch and other authors recall a fire during Julius Caesar's Alexandrian war in 48 BC, which struck at least part of the books; Seneca speaks of forty thousand scrolls burned. Further damage came from the wars of the third century AD, and in 391 the Serapeum, the temple that housed a daughter library, was destroyed.

The most famous account, according to which the Arab general Amr ibn al-As had the books burned in 642 on the orders of Caliph Omar, appears only in authors writing many centuries later and is regarded by historians as unreliable. The great library probably faded away slowly, through neglect, war and lack of funds, rather than in a single spectacular blaze.

For the history of magical books, Alexandria is also the symbol of a world. In Graeco-Roman Egypt, of which the city was the cultural capital, the Hermetic texts and many Greek magical papyri were written, and the Renaissance looked to that milieu as the homeland of a most ancient wisdom. In 2002 the modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina, opened near the ancient site, took up its symbolic legacy.