How might the Library of Alexandria avoid its decline? What would be the effects on history?

BlondieBC

Banned
IIRC the main issue with the Canal was that it silted up very easily. Maybe it is eventually deepened?

Just a guess. It probably is wind blown sand silting it up. You probably need what we would now identify as concrete wind breaks to keep the sand out. And probably a concrete channel so the workers know which level to clear out to each year.
 
Ah the Library of Alexandria, constantly subject to pop history overexaggeration and nonsense...
According to Socrates of Constantinople, Coptic Pope Theophilus destroyed the Serapeum in AD 391, although it is not certain what it contained or if it contained any significant fraction of the documents
By 391 A.D the library probably didn't even exist anymore within the Serapeum. The closest eyewitness to the Serapeum's existence in the 4th Century notes that it "used to contain a library", specifically in the past tense. The reason it was attacked in 391 was because it was used as a citadel and shrine for the remaining Pagans in Alexandria, who locked themselves inside the temple complex following mob violence between the Christians and Pagans.

If there were any books in the Serapeum in 391, they can't have been that important and the destruction could not have been that significant. Even the most anti-Christian sources recalling the destruction of the Serapeum do not even mention the destruction of any literature, which makes the pop history claims seem rather suspect considering any openly anti-Christian Pagan would jump at the opportunity to blame the Christians for the destruction of the Great Library.

The library may have finally been destroyed during (or after) the Muslim conquest of Egypt in AD 642.

This story is often repeated but I have no clue why considering it's extremely unreliable. For one there is only one source that blames the destruction of the Great Library on the Muslims, and that one source was an openly anti-Muslim source from centuries after the Muslim Conquest of Egypt. It's absolutely unreliable on almost every single level and appears to have only gained so much traction from repetition by Islamophobes and people who don't know any better.

The Serapeum wasn't destroyed, only sacked. A church was built in its main structure.
Didn't the Christian mob supposedly tear down the Serapeum to it's foundations? Or is that another overexaggeration?
 

Maoistic

Banned
Didn't the Christian mob supposedly tear down the Serapeum to it's foundations? Or is that another overexaggeration?
No, it was only sacked with some statues (and probably some books) destroyed. Other than that the main structure was fine and used as a church. Also, pretty sure it was troops sent by the emperor that looted it when "pagan" insurrectionists barricaded inside the temple, though it may have been the troops letting Christians looting the temple.
 
No, it was only sacked with some statues (and probably some books) destroyed. Other than that the main structure was fine and used as a church. Also, pretty sure it was troops sent by the emperor that looted it when "pagan" insurrectionists barricaded inside the temple, though it may have been the troops letting Christians looting the temple.
I've never really heard this claim before as alot of pro-Christian sources at the time portray Theophilus as victorious over the Pagans and idolaters by removing the sacred shrine of the Pagans from the face of the city. Do you happen to have a source on hand?
 
Seems to me the Library is one of those “ancient people were, like, so advanced” historical quirks that is exaggerated in pop history. The biggest change if the Library remained a vibrant, thriving institution would probably be a greater cultural continuity with the ancient world, not any great technological advancement. Maybe the knowledge of how to make Roman concrete would be retained?
The thing about scientific progress is that concentration of knowledge and people discussing it tends to drive knowledge much more than isolated geniuses or lone insights. For example, Chrysippos of Soli, the founded of propositional calculus, was said to have written 300 books on linguistics and logic—and we get barely anything.

To balance the attitude you express, the notion that the ancients knew diddly-squat is far more pervasive. Until about three decades ago, the prevailing scholarly consensus was that the Greeks had no non-trivial combinatorics whatsoever. That is, until in the 1990s some cryptic lines of Plutarch were decoded to refer to Hipparkhos' calculation of the 10th Schröder number in critiquing the Chrysippos' claim about the number of molecular propositions that can be constructed from ten atomic propositions. This is not a trivial thing, yet Plutarch claimed that it is well-known to all arithmeticians.

That's an entire branch of mathematics that was previously thought to be completely unknown to the ancient Greeks, yet it has existed, but was lost. Along with Archimedean protocalculus, which was rediscovered very early in the XX century. And scholars of Greek antiquities made all kinds of just-so stories why the Greeks were totally dumb about combinatorics.

Again, the value of such a library is not that would necessarily that it is full of correct revolutionary insights to drive science and technology, but that a record of arguments and critiques, as long as it is available (and so exists as an institution rather than a tomb) is itself a driver of such development. Even primitive and wrong things can be very valuable to that end, as long as people think about and discuss it.

A very good example of that is Newtonian physics, which through Galileo owes a lot to medieval scholastic commentaries on Aristotelian physics.
 

Maoistic

Banned
The thing about scientific progress is that concentration of knowledge and people discussing it tends to drive knowledge much more than isolated geniuses or lone insights. For example, Chrysippos of Soli, the founded of propositional calculus, was said to have written 300 books on linguistics and logic—and we get barely anything.

To balance the attitude you express, the notion that the ancients knew diddly-squat is far more pervasive. Until about three decades ago, the prevailing scholarly consensus was that the Greeks had no non-trivial combinatorics whatsoever. That is, until in the 1990s some cryptic lines of Plutarch were decoded to refer to Hipparkhos' calculation of the 10th Schröder number in critiquing the Chrysippos' claim about the number of molecular propositions that can be constructed from ten atomic propositions. This is not a trivial thing, yet Plutarch claimed that it is well-known to all arithmeticians.

That's an entire branch of mathematics that was previously thought to be completely unknown to the ancient Greeks, yet it has existed, but was lost. Along with Archimedean protocalculus, which was rediscovered very early in the XX century. And scholars of Greek antiquities made all kinds of just-so stories why the Greeks were totally dumb about combinatorics.

Again, the value of such a library is not that would necessarily that it is full of correct revolutionary insights to drive science and technology, but that a record of arguments and critiques, as long as it is available (and so exists as an institution rather than a tomb) is itself a driver of such development. Even primitive and wrong things can be very valuable to that end, as long as people think about and discuss it.

A very good example of that is Newtonian physics, which through Galileo owes a lot to medieval scholastic commentaries on Aristotelian physics.

You make it sound as if the Greeks could have developed Newtonian physics a millennia earlier had the library survived, which is an incredible belief that shouldn't be taken seriously.
 
You make it sound as if the Greeks could have developed Newtonian physics a millennia earlier had the library survived, which is an incredible belief that shouldn't be taken seriously.
With sufficient straw, anything can be made ridiculous.
 
Sure, if I actually built a strawman, too bad I didn't. You sound even worse than Lucio Russo and his ridiculous idea of a "Hellenistic Revolution".
In reality, nothing I've said implies that at all. It is from the start explicitly about trying to balance this thread's earlier claims that the library does nothing at all of any historical significance.

Edit: removed for less confrontationism.
 

Maoistic

Banned
upload_2017-12-27_16-57-47.png


Here are the Romans violently "arresting" the "scientific" development of the Greeks:



dome-inside-pantheon-rome-on-segway-94b5892324.jpg


950.jpg


MitreoSantaPrisca.jpg



G11-baalbek-2.jpg


1200px-Pont_du_Gard_Oct_2007.jpg
 

Maoistic

Banned
In reality, nothing I've said implies that at all. It is from the start explicitly about trying to balance this thread's earlier claims that the library does nothing at all of any historical significance.

Edit: removed for less confrontationism.

It certainly implies something of the sort with how you reference mathematical achievements, Galileo and Newton. And yes, the library's historical significance is vastly overrated and its survival wouldn't have led to any tangible improvement in science and technology.
 

Artaxerxes

Banned
I'm not going to wade into this but I'll link into two excellent articles on why the great library wasn't the Panacea that it's become a short meme for.

https://historyforatheists.com/2017/07/the-destruction-of-the-great-library-of-alexandria/

https://historyforatheists.com/2017/11/review-catherine-nixey-the-darkening-age/

Tl:dr it declined long before it's final destruction and both Christians and Pagans no longer valued the works it held a lot of which were more poetic in nature than new theories of mathematics.
 

Maoistic

Banned
I'm not going to wade into this but I'll link into two excellent articles on why the great library wasn't the Panacea that it's become a short meme for.

https://historyforatheists.com/2017/07/the-destruction-of-the-great-library-of-alexandria/

https://historyforatheists.com/2017/11/review-catherine-nixey-the-darkening-age/

Tl:dr it declined long before it's final destruction and both Christians and Pagans no longer valued the works it held a lot of which were more poetic in nature than new theories of mathematics.

This is something that can't be emphasised enough. Most books were either poems or theological commentaries on poets like Homer and Hesiod by Platonists, Stoics, etc. The idea that the writings of such figures like Heron, Hipparchus and Ptolemy were the rule is one that has to die.
 
In reality, nothing I've said implies that at all. It is from the start explicitly about trying to balance this thread's earlier claims that the library does nothing at all of any historical significance.

Edit: removed for less confrontationism.

My main point was more technological; that no matter how advanced the ancient world was in these ideological fields it almost never seemed to apply these ideas to practical technology. The most important medieval technological developments according to arguments I’ve seen were things like improved plows and stirrups—practical advances that are highly unlikely to spring out of an ancient science institution IMO as these things were not their focus.

In other words, the Library would have been huge for cultural preservation and probably important for theoretical science—but probably not actually that important for technological advancement.
 
It certainly implies something of the sort with how you reference mathematical achievements, Galileo and Newton. And yes, the library's historical significance is vastly overrated and its survival wouldn't have led to any tangible improvement in science and technology.
And? I gave an explicit example of a branch of mathematics that would have very plausibly survived and the beginning of another one that could have went further.

It's a historical fact that Galilean physics borrows very heavily from scholastic critiques of Aristotelian physics. I've made no claims about the Greeks inventing Newtonian physics, especially not a ridiculous thousand-year shortening of such developments. That's just your own invention. But that increased availability of knowledge inspires new knowledge through exploration and critique is how things work—however, if you were to force me to guess, I wouldn't bet on the Greeks, but would consider Arabs and Persians as more plausible.

In other words, the Library would have been huge for cultural preservation and probably important for theoretical science—but probably not actually that important for technological advancement.
Oh. Yeah, I agree.
 
Top