Library of Alexandria

Given that the Library of Alexandria was the largest of the ancient world, what changes would occur if it had not been burnt down? Surely the great loss of knowledge must have impacted society.
 
Given that the Library of Alexandria was the largest of the ancient world, what changes would occur if it had not been burnt down? Surely the great loss of knowledge must have impacted society.
Was a lot of knowledge lost? Or was it that some-place where it was collected and could be studied.
 
If we don't know what was in the library (due to its destruction), how can we know how it would have affected the world if its contents were not destroyed?
 
Was a lot of knowledge lost? Or was it that some-place where it was collected and could be studied.

Both. The fire was just one event in the neglect and destruction/dispersal of a very large document collection. Kings gave them away as gifts, scholars borrowed them and lost or failed to return them, vermin ate many.

The 'library' was the center piece of what we might call a research university these days, or a group of research/education institutions. Some historians connect its decline to a stagnation of the government & economy of the era.

A alternate WI might be the invention of printing there when the Alexandrian Library was growing. The huge expense of copying documents by hand limited acess and dissemination. Printing, even Block style as the Chinese used would have helped preserve the knowledge through cheaper reproduction, and made it acessable to a larger number of scholars.
 
Were the Chinese already printing at that time?

Also, didn't the Library have the "secret" of how to make that firewater thing used in Antiquity?
 
Both. The fire was just one event in the neglect and destruction/dispersal of a very large document collection. Kings gave them away as gifts, scholars borrowed them and lost or failed to return them, vermin ate many.

The 'library' was the center piece of what we might call a research university these days, or a group of research/education institutions. Some historians connect its decline to a stagnation of the government & economy of the era.

A alternate WI might be the invention of printing there when the Alexandrian Library was growing. The huge expense of copying documents by hand limited acess and dissemination. Printing, even Block style as the Chinese used would have helped preserve the knowledge through cheaper reproduction, and made it acessable to a larger number of scholars.

A question that ought to be asked right about now is how much of that collection was unique. To put it another way, how many documents/copies survived elsewhere?
 
Were the Chinese already printing at that time?

Also, didn't the Library have the "secret" of how to make that firewater thing used in Antiquity?

Not sure about the Chinese. Ur thinking of Greek fire and I think the knowledge had been lost before the library was destroyed. Then again the library was destoryed/damaged several times so I'm not sure.
 
Not sure about the Chinese. Ur thinking of Greek fire and I think the knowledge had been lost before the library was destroyed. Then again the library was destoryed/damaged several times so I'm not sure.

Greek Fire was developed (or at least is most prominent) after the destruction of the Library - it's a Byzantine era thing.
 
The Library did flourish for two or three centuries, but I don't know of any innovations or enlightenment that traces its origins back to it.
 
A question that ought to be asked right about now is how much of that collection was unique. To put it another way, how many documents/copies survived elsewhere?

This appears impossible to judge. 'Modern' historians of the past two centuries have tried to trace that. They claim they are unable to locate any surviving catalog. Contempory descriptions have some utility is estimating the size, but I've not seen anyone claim a useful inventory of what it held. Since the library operated for several centuries a single inventory would only present a snapshot of the content. Best anyone claims are a few hundred titles gleaned from picking through other documents refering to this or that title being in the Alexandrian library.

Similarly there is difficulty in grasping what was carried away. The largest batch may have been a large load sent to a library in Constantinople in the late Roman or early Byzantine era. ..but as usual there is no useful inventory presented, only descriptions of the size.

Documents in those days were technicaly all unique. The cost of copy meant only a few thousand of the most popular were copied in their entirety. Even then the odds of a 'true' copy were low. Both the person paying for the copy, the supervisor, and the several scribes inserted accidental & intentional changes. Usually when a scholar paid for a copy he held the cost down by having only the section/s of interest copied. Kings, priests, and others caused changes in the copies for political & theological reasons. On that note the "Seraphrim" library in Alexandria, a independant facility from the famous location, was deliberately burned during the early Byzantine era to destroy the "pagan" texts store there. The Christian Church leaders of the region were determined to eradicate the remaining pagan & non mainstream Christian sects. The control of the Seraphrim library by a non Christian religious group was judged to be a essential step. In a way that was similar to several of the Chinese emperors destroying documents from previous emperors or dynastys in order to suppress political or other views contrary to their own.
 
The Library did flourish for two or three centuries, but I don't know of any innovations or enlightenment that traces its origins back to it.

For that one would have to dig out descriptions of what scholars, engineers, or others were actually doing there. It might be tough. The modern concept of open research, peer review, public publication of R & D was not much followed back then. Professional & craft guilds protected their economic interests by hoarding information away from the competition. Whatever was 'discovered' picking through the text was often not bragged about. Only a few scholars doing academic research or teaching had a interest in publishing their findings.

One also has to consider how little modern discoveries or knowledge is commonly understood these days. We have the internet & large prolific publishing organizations. Until mass printing started verbal instruction and maybe a chalk board were the limit of mass communication. As someone who is involved in renovation of older buildings I've seen frequent examples of engeneering techniques of only a century ago being more or less forgotten after a generation or two. Without a array of refrences at hand I'd be hard pressed to understand what some builder of 1904 was up to in his wall structure.
 
So which was the worst book-burning ever carried out in history? I can think of several very bad ones, including:

1) The burnings associated with the Library of Alexandria and its annexes.

2) The burnings of almost all Mayan writings by the Spanish. Out of many thousands of codices, only three (and one of disputed authenticity) are thought to have survived.

3) The burnings of most Chinese writings by the first Qin emperor.

4) The burnings of the libraries of Baghdad by the Mongols, including the House of Wisdom, which by its description on Wikipedia sounds like another Library of Alexandria in size and importance.

Out of these, the most devastating in my opinion must be the near-total destruction of the Mayan written heritage, since almost all of the lost knowledge was never recovered and is lost forever. The other burnings, while terrible, at least left enough behind that the associated civilization could reconstruct much of what was lost.
 
So which was the worst book-burning ever carried out in history? I can think of several very bad ones, including:

1) The burnings associated with the Library of Alexandria and its annexes.

2) The burnings of almost all Mayan writings by the Spanish. Out of many thousands of codices, only three (and one of disputed authenticity) are thought to have survived.

3) The burnings of most Chinese writings by the first Qin emperor.

4) The burnings of the libraries of Baghdad by the Mongols, including the House of Wisdom, which by its description on Wikipedia sounds like another Library of Alexandria in size and importance.

Out of these, the most devastating in my opinion must be the near-total destruction of the Mayan written heritage, since almost all of the lost knowledge was never recovered and is lost forever. The other burnings, while terrible, at least left enough behind that the associated civilization could reconstruct much of what was lost.

I don't know enough about #3 to comapre it, but I'd say #2 and #4 are overwhelmingly the most devastating, and #1 exaggerated.
 
I'd agree, the destruction of the Mayan documents is the worst single event of those in the list. We could probably dig deeper & quibble over many other literary destructions. The Mongol conquest of China caused a great deal to be lost through collateral destruction, the long running elimination of 'pagan' text by the Christian church in the Mediterranean late/post Roman times. compared to these the nazi book burnings of the 1930s were fairly minor.

Another less organized destruction of knowledge occurs when a culture & it language is rapidly lost. In the latter 20th Century Yiddish has abruptly faded from extensive regions. Despite well intention efforts at preservation millions of books written in Yiddish have gone to the landfill and paper mills. Many other examples of the same can be found for other languages. Similarly in the 20th century the proliferation of printed books forced libraries to discard older volumes to make way for new. That caused a fair amount of useful technical & historical text to be discarded along with the cheap novels, the information they contained is much harder to locate through the remaining volumes rarity.
 
I don't know enough about #3 to comapre it, but I'd say #2 and #4 are overwhelmingly the most devastating, and #1 exaggerated.
Its certainly exaggerated hugely, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people educated by Hollywood thinking goes Burning Library of Alexandria = Fall into the Dark Ages.

But OTOH disregarding the hype the Library was a hell of a thing and was as far as I can find out the most aggressive out of all those listed in collecting works from across the known world instead of just focusing down to the more local selection.
 
Its certainly exaggerated hugely, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people educated by Hollywood thinking goes Burning Library of Alexandria = Fall into the Dark Ages.

But OTOH disregarding the hype the Library was a hell of a thing and was as far as I can find out the most aggressive out of all those listed in collecting works from across the known world instead of just focusing down to the more local selection.

The Islamic world is rather broader than 'local", though. Even if that's all it contained, which I doubt.
 
To be fair to the Mongols, when they destroyed Baghdad the library of the House of Wisdom and many other local centres of knowledge like the Nizamiyya had been largely depleted already through donation, accidental losses, intentional discardings and so on.
The loss is still major, but, unlike Alexandria, we have a reasonable grasp of what was lost there through preserved catalogues like the Fihrist and other lists.
Honestly, I'd put it almost on par with the destructions in Cordova in early eleventh century, that led to the almost complete loss of the Caliphal library (estimated at 400,000 books, a fairly enurmous number for the time's standards).
In general, in the Islamic world copying activity was not quite as centralized as it was in hellenistic/roman times, and copies of a lot of stuff survived elsewhere.
OTOH, our current understanding of Greek literature, especially theatre, is based upon a very limited choice of integrally surviving works due to somewhat of a fluke. I don't know whether Alexandria had a larger corpus (probably it did) but in this area at least, we can guess the extent of what's lost.

Losses of Mayan and Mexica books are actually more serious in our perspective since we lack critical context information to locate the surviving texts. Arguably, like there are much more dead people than living ones, lost books might be more than extant books, printing press notwithstanding.
 
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