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Tags: History, Lang:en
Summary
Includes pictures depicting important people, places, and
events.
“When I wrote 'The Alexandria Link,' I discovered that
we are only aware of about 10 percent of the knowledge of the
ancient world. In the ancient world, most of the knowledge was
destroyed.” – Steve Berry In the modern world, libraries are taken for granted by most
people, perhaps because their presence is ubiquitous. Every
school has a library, large libraries can be found in every
major city, and even most small towns have public libraries.
However, the omnipresent nature of libraries is a fairly recent
historical phenomenon, because libraries were still few and far
between before the 19th century. For centuries in the Western
world, during what is known as the Middle Ages, written
knowledge was guarded closely and hidden away in private
repositories, usually by the religious classes, and hidden away
in private repositories. The lack of libraries in the West has helped contribute to
the popular imagination of the ancient Library at Alexandria,
and all the myths and legends that have come to be associated
with it, but the Library of Alexandria deserves its reputation.
Before the Middle Ages, Greek scholars carefully collected and
inventoried books and other written materials in the Library of
Alexandria, which truly made it a sort of precursor to all
modern libraries. In fact, the Library of Alexandria proved to
be one of the greatest institutions created in the ancient
world because it influenced the minds of countless people in
profound ways for centuries. The Library not only inspired the
imaginations of artists but gave birth to new research methods,
which proved to provide the basis for many considered
common-place today. The Library of Alexandria was one of the
few libraries in the ancient Greek world, which helped ensure
that mathematicians, scientists and other scholars from across
the Mediterranean traveled to Egypt to study there, and it was
so impressive in its size and influence that it left an
indelible mark on the world that still reverberates today. While the exact nature of the Library remains murky, it
functioned for at least several centuries and is believed to
have housed hundreds of thousands of books, most written as
scrolls on papyrus, and it essentially became the culmination
of two ancient literary and cultural traditions converging: the
Greek and Egyptian. Of course, the most controversial aspect of
the Library of Alexandria is its destruction, which is still a
topic of debate today. Several ancient historians attributed
its destruction to the Roman conquest of Egypt during the 1st
century B.C., with some like Plutarch specifically citing
Julius Caesar’s soldiers as the ultimate cause of its
destruction. The Roman writer Seneca wrote that 40,000 books
were lost in the fire. However, other ancient historians
claimed to have gone to the Library of Alexandria after Caesar
stayed in the city, and all of these claims might be muddled by
the fact that there was more than one library in the area.
It’s possible that the Library of Alexandria or some
version of it survived until the 7th century A.D., but either
way, the destruction of the library is often viewed as one of
the reasons the Middle Ages were “Dark”. Nobody
knows for sure how much knowledge was lost in the Library, nor
how it affected what Western societies knew and didn’t
during medieval times. The Library of Alexandria: The History and Legacy of the
Ancient World’s Most Famous Library looks at the history
of the library in an attempt to separate fact and fiction.
Along with pictures of important people, places, and events,
you will learn about the Library of Alexandria like never
before. **
Includes ancient accounts about the Library of Alexandria
and its destruction.
*Includes a bibliography for further reading.