If the contents of the Great Library are removed before Alexandria falls...

...how does this impact the Byzantine Empire or the West in general? I presume the contents head for Constantinople but where else might they go? Ireland? Rome? Or somewhere else altogether?
 
...how does this impact the Byzantine Empire or the West in general? I presume the contents head for Constantinople but where else might they go? Ireland? Rome? Or somewhere else altogether?
You men before the purported Muslim destruction?

Given there's major doubt the Great Library (or, more accurately, interconnected set of different libraries) lasted that long? I mean, there's several purported earlier destruction of the collection (e.g. Julius Caeser's capture of Alexandria); multiple wars; several large riots and major changes to both the religious institutions and taxes that had supported the Library's existence... it's rather highly doubtful there was anything approaching a coherent Great Library in existence when the Arabs arrived. It's possible there were some residual remnants they may have wiped out...
 
Personally I follow Socrates of Constantinople's account of the destruction of the Serapeum in 391 as the true destruction of the library.

RIP Hypatia as well.
 
"The" burning of the library of Alexandria is a myth. It's partially enforced by the desire of some authors to demonize Christians, and by others to do the same to Muslims. While these rest on a grain of truth, the Library didn't disappear overnight, but declined as a center of learning over centuries. Different events, like Christian violence and the Muslim conquest, among others like Caesar's conquest, punctuated and certainly accelerated this.
 
I agree with what Nolan had to say. But even if the burning of the Library wasn't a myth, it's not like the destroyed manuscripts stored there would've advanced technology and knowledge further than OTL. Surely copies of them would've existed in many other places around the known world at the time.
 
Right, I think what we are really asking is "what if more of the known lost books of antiquity survived". Which is a different question, and one that goes back into the classical period. My picks: Earlier use of parchment, slower transition to codex, less of a post-roman crash in the west leaving more funds for patronage and copying.

EDIT: Also something with more texts surviving elsewhere. Maybe Pergamum survives, or its collections are transferred elsewhere to centers where there's more funding to copy and translate them? Maybe more translations produced earlier?
 
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We'd have a better window on Antiquity because more books would survive. Including interesting ones like some of the other parts of the Epic Cycle.

Nothing as ridiculous as "we'd be colonising the galaxy if the Great Library survived, damn you Christians/Muslims!"
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Honestly, the Telegony sounded like bad fanfic, so I'm glad it didn't survive the fall of Rome. :p

Sure, but pretty much everyone agrees that it was probably the last and worst addition to the cycle. Even if they aren't exactly on the same level as the Iliad and the Odyssey, I'd really like to see the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Ilioupersis and Nostoi. Unlike the Telegony (which contradicts the Odyssey on several points), those works actually contain events specifically referred to in the Iliad and the Odyssey. If they had been preserved, we'd be able to read 'the full story' of the whole cycle, from beginning to end.

...and if I want a fanfic sequel, I'll just stick with the Aeneid. :cool:
 
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Do we know that anybody destroyed it?

Iirc most of the scrolls were made of papyrus, which is highly perishable and requires continual recopying to perpetuate it. In all likelihood there were many periods when, due to civil war or other cause, the recopying simply wasn't kept up fast enough, and the Library just perished (literally) a scroll at a time?

Parchment was more durable, but for that very reason was apt to get scraped off and re-used, to keep the accounts of a Legion or a city council whose members regarded financial book-keeping as far more important than preserving the writings of some long-dead Greek.

This would be especially true post-235, when Rome was increasingly dominated, both militarily and politically, by Illyrian soldiery who probably hadn't had a classical education.
 
We'd have a better window on Antiquity because more books would survive. Including interesting ones like some of the other parts of the Epic Cycle.

Nothing as ridiculous as "we'd be colonising the galaxy if the Great Library survived, damn you Christians/Muslims!"

We might actually be less advanced if the Scientific Method were delayed on favor of more gradual advancement per the Hellenistic timeframe. On the other hand avoiding the Dark Ages could lead to better mapmaking/cartography/geography and maritime traffic. A Columbian exchange before 1000 AD is not impossible if the Renaissance begins in 800AD (with muriophorio or similar vessels plying the seas?) instead of 1300 AD.
 
Hush! When truth contradicts a legend, print the legend. Where would we get time travel stories from if Alexandria never burned?

How about this:

More documents from Greek philosophers, Roman pornographers and Egyptian mystics means later thinkers have a much clearer view of what ancient society was really like and so can not project their fantasy philosophical theories back in time as easily.

This means that ancient knowledge (in the West and near East) has slightly less status and thinkers are more willing to accept a new idea might have merit.

This helps kick start a sort of scientific/theology mash of philosophy and religion in the 12th-13th century and by the 21st C we ARE colonising the galaxy in the name of the Lord. :)
 
I read an interesting online story a while back where a signifcant quantity of the library's contents are copied out, and stored away in a cave in Egyptian/Sinai desert somewhere. The original plan of the people who did so, was to come back at a later poit to retrieve the stuff, but RL intervened, and nobody did. There they were forgotten for aa few centuries, until a Christian monastery was built next door, they found some of the stuff and added it to their library. Fast forward to the present, and the monastery's on the verge of closing down, when a local village boy helps one of the monks auction a book from the library on ebay. It attracts the attention of a German professor, who purchasesit, and then when the realization is made that it comes from Alexandria originally, a huge archaeological dig is mounted in the surrounding area, which leads to the recovery ofa significant amount of Alexandrine codices/artifacts. Among these artifacts is a text that talks of Atlantis - in far greater detail than Plato - and then the story goes a little off the rails. But I figure if there are Biblical texts that were discovered in a similar manner - Codex Sinaiticus for instance, Nag Hammadi scrolls, Dead Sea scrolls, it makes it sort of plausible, if only as a convenient vehicle for the story.
 
This helps kick start a sort of scientific/theology mash of philosophy and religion in the 12th-13th century and by the 21st C we ARE colonising the galaxy in the name of the Lord. :)

ARISTOTLE IS DEAD AND USELESS TO OUR MODERN EXPERIMENTAL THEOLOGY! DEUS VULT!

More documents from Greek philosophers, Roman pornographers and Egyptian mystics means later thinkers have a much clearer view of what ancient society was really like and so can not project their fantasy philosophical theories back in time as easily.

Maybe they project it onto Babylonians and Egyptians instead? :p
 
We'd have a better window on Antiquity because more books would survive. Including interesting ones like some of the other parts of the Epic Cycle.

Nothing as ridiculous as "we'd be colonising the galaxy if the Great Library survived, damn you Christians/Muslims!"
Those bloody Abrahamics! I should have my own planet by now
 
We would have a greater part of the ancient world's great works intact, which is nothing to sneeze at.

Sure, science may not be advanced too much. But history, philosophy, culture? To have the whole works of Homer, or lost works of Socrates or Aristotle, information and locations for peoples and cultures we've only begun to think of as more than myth today, like Sheba or Tartessos.

Humanity as a whole would be far, far richer.
 
We would have Berossus and Manetho. They are mainly known by quotes from Josephus. We would know much more about Egyptian and Babylonian culture before the Rosetta Stone
 
Nothing as ridiculous as "we'd be colonising the galaxy if the Great Library survived, damn you Christians/Muslims!"
Certainly. That said, there are some potential scientific advances which could be sped up... For instance there's plenty of evidence that Archimedes and possibly other more engineering-inclined philosophers were playing round with a form of proto-calculus. Have entire collections (rather than the odd fragment per OTL) of such work survive until Arab numerals and similar come about and it may be possible to move mathematical developments seen c.1650-1700 in OTL back to 1300-1500. While unlikely to utterly revolutionize things right away, such a development is liable to have significant flow on influences.
 
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