Ancient Libraries; What are they good for?

Most TLs if their PoD is back far enough and they are in the region make a point of saving the local Ancient Library institutions which had a disturbing habit of burning throughout history. Or if there isn't one handy establishing one.

The general feeling seems to be that with these collections intact civilisations will have better chances at progressing in areas like philosophy, technology, law, medicine, systems of government/ and so on.

But is that actually true?

Do we have any hint that having a library around really proved a benefit to progress or at least that the loss of library proved a disadvantage?
 
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Well I like to keep the libraries there just because of all the wealth of information about the ancient world that was stocked there, specificall Alexandria, that were iotl was lost

I don't think if actually had much practical effect for the time. It was more of a status symbol. Though there some famous head librarians of Alexandria who made some important discoveries.


It could do wonders for the Middle Ages though.
 
The main reason destroyed ancient libraries are mourned (apart from visceral bibliophilia) is the libraries' role in preserving the existence of their books. Books were rare and expensive before printing and mass literacy, and often only a handful of copies ever existed of a given book. It was very easy for a book to be lost to posterity through every copy getting destroyed by misadventure or in order to reuse the parchment. When a major ancient library was destroyed, it usually meant the destruction of the last known surviving copies of many books in its collection.

I suspect modern historians tend to overestimate the practical value of the preservation of these books to the contemporaries of the books' destruction, since those books would have huge value to those same historians (giving additional data about the ancient world, the authors, and how the authors viewed the world around them).

There are a few data points in favor of having old books around having practical value at the time. The two big ones that leap to mind are:

  1. Despite the expense and difficulty of collecting and preserving the books, ancient libraries existed, so clearly people at the time thought there was enough value to make it worthwhile.
  2. A major trigger for the Renaissance was the reintroduction of a number of ancient books that had been lost to Europe, but had been preserved in the Arab world: the books provided a baseline of scientific, mathematical, and logical knowledge from which further progress was possible.
 
A major trigger for the Renaissance was the reintroduction of a number of ancient books that had been lost to Europe, but had been preserved in the Arab (I think you mean Byzantine) world: the books provided a baseline of scientific, mathematical, and logical knowledge from which further progress was possible.

corrected.
 
Well as the Ahmed Baba institue was burned earlier this year the razing of ancient libraries (although a modern building, it was where many ancient manuscripts were kept and were undergoing scanning, ironically, to save them) isnt exclusive to the past it seems anymore...
 
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It's not just the philosophy or practical knowledge. One of the biggest losses from the losses of these ancient libraries was the gigantic hit taken to culture, literature, and art caused by the destruction of these libraries. Consider, for example, a parallel example in the Middle Ages; where Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are widely considered the work of Middle English. And consider that due to Chaucer's death, they are presently slightly less than one quarter done. Now imagine what we would get if we had the complete tales. Now multiply that by ten thousand to measure the impact of the destruction of the ancient libraries.

Plus, if we're changing history, rather than simply preserving culture, then it's worth mentioning that the Sack of Baghdad threw back the development of Mesopotamia by a thousand years.
 
Think about what would happen if all servers in the world (or at least all science based) was wiped simultaneously ... major protential loss in knowledge which could be used to research on moving onwards ...
 
Plus, if we're changing history, rather than simply preserving culture, then it's worth mentioning that the Sack of Baghdad threw back the development of Mesopotamia by a thousand years.

I thought that's because the Mongols destroyed the region's complex irrigation systems on their way out.
 
It should be noted that the most significant way books were lost to posterity is the unwillingness and/or inability to preserve them; books have to be copied by hand by a literate person - often caused by civilization in decline. The books that survive are also less understood by descendants, not only because the technology level is less sophisticated, but because of a different mindset. For example, the scientific disciplines of astronomy and chemistry in the Hellenistic period became astrology and alchemy during the Roman hegemony.
 
I thought that's because the Mongols destroyed the region's complex irrigation systems on their way out.

This was part of the reason I qualified my post as "Sack of Baghdad," rather than "destruction of the House of Wisdom." The destruction of the House of Wisdom was catastrophic, and in some respects arguably halted the progress of Islamic culture; but it wasn't the main reason Mesopotamia was set back so far.
 
The books that survive are also less understood by descendants, not only because the technology level is less sophisticated, but because of a different mindset. For example, the scientific disciplines of astronomy and chemistry in the Hellenistic period became astrology and alchemy during the Roman hegemony.

"Forgotten Revolution. How Science was Born in 300 BC and Why it had to be Reborn" by Lucio Russo makes a compelling argument that the Hellenistic world had developed a Heliocentric model of the Solar system, including an inverse-square law of gravity, that was later lost because Roman-era writers were unable to understand the reasoning behind it. He cites numerous passages from various Roman-era texts quoting earlier works, that seem meaningless at first glance but that can be shown to collectively describe a description of gravity that is similar to early Newtonian explanations.
 
"Forgotten Revolution. How Science was Born in 300 BC and Why it had to be Reborn" by Lucio Russo makes a compelling argument that the Hellenistic world had developed a Heliocentric model of the Solar system, including an inverse-square law of gravity, that was later lost because Roman-era writers were unable to understand the reasoning behind it. He cites numerous passages from various Roman-era texts quoting earlier works, that seem meaningless at first glance but that can be shown to collectively describe a description of gravity that is similar to early Newtonian explanations.

I thought the geeks were the ones who absolutely embraced the geocentric model with the spheres of the universe and all that jazz?
 
I thought the geeks were the ones who absolutely embraced the geocentric model with the spheres of the universe and all that jazz?

From the book I mentioned above:

The loss of the scientifc method led to a "realistic" interpretation of surviving scientifc theses: they were no longer regarded as statements within a model but as absolute statements about nature. In astronomy, decompositions of planetary motions, which had been invented in the early Hellenistic period as mathematical models useful in calculations, were now in the imperial period regarded literally, each component motion having its physical reality. Even the concentric spheres of Eudoxus were interpreted as material. That the theory of epicycles was originally a mathematical model is clear with Apollonius of Perga, who proposed two equivalent models for the same motion. "Realistic" interpretations, though not present in the Almagest, appear in another of Ptolemy's works, the Planetary hypotheses, which describes a complicated mechanical system whereby circular motions are supposed to take place on material spheres embedded in rotating spherical shells. The idea of material planetary spheres was not abandoned again until the modern age.

Ptolemy wrote a work on astrology, something no astronomer from the golden period ever did. In this work, the Tetrabiblos, planets are sorted according to two binary classifcations: male versus female, benefcial versus harmful.
 
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