averilburystedmunds: The Great Library of Alexandria.

Since writing about the proposed extension to the British Library, I seem to have been besieged by the word ‘Library’.First of all I had already bought a magnificent volume, The Library. A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree & Arthur der Weduwen, which is devoted to books and the concept of libraries. It is, in effect, an astonishingly detailed history of libraries which obviously and inevitably included the history of the book as it developed. Interestingly, the very earliest libraries preceded the invention of the book as we know it! The rulers of the Assyrian Empire of Mesopotamia [present day Iraq] gathered considerable quantities of documents, all carefully inscribed in their distinctive cuneiform script on to clay tablets. Such a library could survive, was impervious to heat or damp but with the major problem of storage and transport, being bulky and heavily awkward to move. These libraries were situated in royal palaces or temples, intended for the exclusive use of royals and scholars. On one surviving clay tablet are the instructions, “One who is competent (or knowledgeable) should show this only to one who is also competent, but may not show it to the uninitiated.”

Papyrus letter in Greek.

All of these rare “monuments of written culture”, while often extensive, [the royal libraries of Nineveh reputedly stored 35,000 tablets] were destroyed when the Assyrian Empire was conquered by the Babylonians in 614-612 BC. In their turn, the Babylonians were gradually overtaken by more functional alphabetical writing systems and importantly, by the discovery of parchment and of the papyrus plant with its excellence as a writing medium. The emerging Greek

Papyrus plant

culture moved gradually, over centuries, from an oral to a written form and papyrus grew abundantly in the Nile delta while the techniques of splitting the reed stalks of the papyrus plant and weaving them together, were easily learned. Papyrus quickly became the pre-eminent writing medium of the ancient world, exported from Egypt to Greece and later, to Rome and contributed importantly to a huge capacity for, and urge to accumulate, knowledge.

Aristotle.
Roman copy of Greek bust.

By the fourth century B.C. Greece was a highly literate society at the elite level. There developed a flourishing commercial book trade which ensured that literature and texts taught in schools were relatively widely available though the word ‘books’ always refers to the universal and uniform, papyrus scrolls. There developed much writing and copying of texts on to papyrus and by 338 BC the authorities in Athens had become so concerned with the poor quality of some of the writing and copying, that an official archive of authoritative texts was established. The philosopher Aristotle, tutor to the young
Alexander the Great, gathered a personal collection of scrolls of considerable size while also imbuing a love of books in the young Alexander. Aristotle’s own remarkable collection of books eventually found themselves in Rome, removed in 84 B.C from the conquered city of Athens by the victorious general S
ulla and helping to inspire the subsequent formation of the world-famous Library at Alexandria.

Ptolemy 1. 323-285 B.C.
Gold pentadrachma Alexandria.

Although Alexander began to develop this important Greek city on the northern coast of Egypt in 331 B.C. the idea of a grand Museum may have been part of Alexander’s original imperial plan but one he did not live to see. The establishment of Alexandria became a major achievement of the first two Ptolemaic kings, Ptolemy the First having obtained Egypt on Alexander’s death during the power grab among Alexander’s top generals, of his huge empire. With the birth of this new city began the rapid growth of an important research institution called the Mouseion, a scholarly research academy dedicated to the Muses of which the library became a spectacular part. The library grew exponentially in size under the Ptolemaic regime’s aggressive and well-funded search to procure texts, with generous benefits to tempt researchers and philosophers to commit to this exciting project. Scientists like Strabo, Euclid and Archimedes were among those attracted particularly by the academic quality and range of subjects offered including mathematics, geography, physics and medicine. Acquisitions on a huge scale were effected with high status scholars, in effect missionary ‘librarians’, fanning out across the Greek territories, well-financed, to buy the classics of literature and serious subject texts. The extent of this famous Great Library cannot now be ascertained but estimates range from 200,000 to half a million scrolls. Both in volume and quality, this tour de force was not equalled until, perhaps, the nineteenth century and the almost unimaginable scope of the scrolls, physically demanded sophisticated and extensive storage. It is believed that organisation was by alphabet and genre and the sheer size of the ever-growing collection demanded systematic cataloguing with many rooms in use to house branches of the collection. An impressive parade of Head Librarians was appointed over the next century from among the ancient scholars such as Aristophanes (257-185/0 BC), appointed when he was sixty. Unsurprisingly, Alexandria itself, because of the Great Library, became known as the capital of knowledge.

Great Library of Alexandria.
Roman depiction.

The Great Library functioned as a hub of scholarship and knowledge for around 300 years surviving the Ptolemaic line of Egyptian rulers but Plutarch reported that in 54 A.D. Julius Caesar, pursuing a campaign to regain Egypt for his lover, Cleopatra, in attempting to burn the Egyptian navy in Alexandria harbour, accidentally burned an adjacent dockside storehouse where there were many books awaiting transfer and the fire spread to at least part of the Library and its contents. This is the most popular version of the demise of the Great Library though there are others. Nothing is really known of what happened to the extensive contents but the name and fame of this wonderful library of the ancient world lives on!