The Library of Alexandria

Among so much lost knowledge, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, which was a gradual event lasting several successive centuries, was not as disastrous as popular culture leads us to believe. It seems we have many mistaken notions about this library, such as that the loss of many works of antiquity was due to the burning of the Library. Because the Library of Alexandria was not the only library of antiquity; many others, like that of Pergamon (Bergama) and those of the great cities of the Hellenistic world, were already known at the time. Certainly the Library of Alexandria was the most prestigious and the largest of them all. But that of Pergamon was very important because it was there that what we call parchment, or parşömen, was created. The Pharaoh Ptolemy V did not allow the export of papyrus outside Egypt, to prevent the other libraries from being better than Alexandria's. So they came up with parchment, which comes from the skin of the cow, the sheep or the goat, and of other animals too. The skin, after removing the hair and the fat with the flesh, is worked so that it is much finer and cleaner for writing on. It is known that ink can last many centuries on it, compared with papyrus, which is destroyed much faster.

We believe that most of the texts of the Library of Alexandria were copied by scribes writing on parchment, and these copies must have been found in many other libraries beyond Pergamon. What happens is that as the ink disappears, the writing is lost. What they did in the Christian monasteries was to copy these texts by hand, until the way of printing was invented thanks to Gutenberg. Since copying by hand takes a lot of time, few texts of antiquity have survived to this day.

Another thing we forget is that although it is said that the Library burned or was destroyed suddenly, in reality its fall lasted many centuries. It all began in the year 145 BCE when Ptolemy VIII, the fat one — because he ate a lot — gave the order to expel all the foreign intellectuals, who were Greeks, and with them the director of the library, Aristarchus of Samothrace (Semadirek, a Greek island between İmroz and Dedeağaç), an intellectual of world fame. In his place the king put one of his guards, Kydas, who did not know how to run a library. Alongside ignorance, the lack of funds to maintain the building was another reason for the decline. Finally, the lack of interest in Alexandria as a city was added to these reasons for the library to lose its fame. The fire that broke out while Julius Caesar was trying to take Alexandria burned very few documents, says Strabo, the geographer who passed through there.

The final destruction of the library happened in the year 272 CE, when Queen Zenobia of Palmyra and the Roman emperor Aurelian made war before Alexandria.