The Library of Alexandria

When Alexander the Great died in the year 323 before our era, the dynasty of the Ptolemies began to control Egypt. King Ptolemy I established the capital at Alexandria and began to build the famous library, which held thousands of books. In the year 415 of our era, Cyril of Alexandria, the famous bishop of that time, killed Hypatia, the famous woman philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, who was butchered like an animal in the church of the city. Even if Cyril was not directly the one who killed her, he was responsible for the killing, because Hypatia was an intellectual who sought the truth and was not afraid to say what she thought.

She was the first woman interested in mathematics and philosophy. Let us not forget that without mathematics it is not easy to understand philosophy. Hypatia was a great scholar and gave advice to the rulers, including King Ptolemy, who was not on good terms with Bishop Cyril. Hypatia was a pagan, but most of her pupils were Christians. She had great tolerance for them and had become the symbol of feminism and of 'women's rights'. Bishop Cyril was very jealous of Hypatia because she was more honoured than he in the Eastern Roman Empire. She took this virtue from her father Theon, who was also a professor of philosophy and science in Alexandria.

It was he who predicted the eclipse of the sun and the moon of the year 364. Alexandria had been a very important cultural centre since Alexander the Great, who gave the order to build a centre called the 'Museion', or Sanctuary of the Muses (Muses = fairies of inspiration). It was this sanctuary that became the largest library in the world of those days. It was a centre like a university of today, with dictionaries, encyclopaedias, instruments of science and astronomy and everything a researcher, a seeker after science, could need. When Alexander the Great died, his empire was divided among three commanders: Seleucus, Antigonus and Ptolemy.

Seleucus took the eastern part of the Empire, with Babylon as capital; Antigonus Monophthalmus (one eye) took Macedonia, Greece and Anatolia; and Ptolemy was the governor of Egypt, making Alexandria his capital and bringing the tomb of Alexander the Great to the capital. The city was laid out in a very planned manner. Ptolemy's largest project was the construction of the great library from the year 306 before our era. From the start he gathered immense riches from Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, Rome and Egypt. Until it burned in the year 642 of our era, this library was the sole centre of culture and learning and the sole philosophical and spiritual force behind the world of Judaism and Christianity.

In the first centuries after 306, the library was the centre of influence of the philosophers Aristotle and Plato. In the first 150 years of our era the library was influenced by the famous Jewish philosopher Philo. Afterwards came the influence of what is called the 'School of Alexandria', until it burned, dominating the intellectual world. Ptolemy brought from Athens a professor named 'Demetrius of Phalerum' to direct the project. In this project there was room not only for books but also for a university for studies. A marvellous thing was the library's catalogue, called the 'Pinakes'. The full title of the Pinakes was: 'The Tables of the marvellous works of all Greek civilization'.

In Greek, Pinakes means 'tablet'. This catalogue alone, the Pinakes, was made up of 120 scrolls in which all the work of the library was registered with discipline, with a good description of each work. All the works were identified by their titles, the name of the author, the author's birthplace, the names of those who influenced and taught the author, a short biography and some other works by the same author, and the sources of knowledge of the work. Thus this catalogue was the first in Western civilization, like the Bible that Gutenberg printed in the 15th century. Thus the rules of a good catalogue were fixed for ever. In that period the library had 500,000 books, and 2,000 years ago the books rose to nearly 1 million.

One of the directors of this library was the famous philosopher Eratosthenes, an expert in mathematics, geography, astronomy, philology, history and poetry. He was known as the wise man after Plato. It was he who invented the way to measure the circumference of the earth. Another director of the library was Aristophanes of Byzantium, a brilliant man who could memorize everything he read like a photograph and recite on the spot what he had read. He was invited to become director of the other famous library, at Pergamum (Bergama), and Aristophanes accepted. But out of jealousy King Ptolemy V put him in prison so that he would not go to Pergamum, because there was great rivalry between the two libraries.

Ptolemy, so as always to be the best, did not permit the export of papyrus, the leaves of the plant on which they wrote. But the city of Pergamum, in order to be able to write, invented 'parchment', which is what we call 'parşömen', cow or goat skin worked very fine. The Torah scrolls are also written on parchment. In the last centuries of the Roman Empire and the first centuries of the Byzantine Empire, until the arrival of the Arabs, the political rulers were not at all capable of maintaining the intellectual level that had made the glory of the library, because these later rulers abandoned 'Reason' and plunged deep into 'Religion', even though people like Philo and Hypatia lived in that period.

Philo Judaeus belonged to a very important Jewish family of Alexandria. His brother was the president of the Jewish community of the city. For this reason Philo was able to write many books. We know all this thanks to the Jewish historian Josephus, who lived in the same period. He had great enthusiasm for Greek art and civilization. It is believed that Philo studied in a gymnasium where there was no Jewish education. He was interested in the great writers such as Sophocles and Euripides, and above all in philosophy, mathematics and the theatre. In the debates between Jewish 'Halakha' and Greco-Roman law, he was on the side of the latter.

He supported the Essenes, who lived in solitude and rejected wealth. He was the president of the delegation that carried complaints to the emperor Caligula after the pogrom against the Jews in Alexandria, in which many of the rights they had were abolished. When the Arabs conquered Egypt, and of course Alexandria, the Arab commanders took away most of the books of the Library before burning it. Thus the works of Aristotle, Plato and more were translated... And it was the Crusaders who learned all this from the Arabs and transmitted it to the world.