Literature Review :
THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA
The story begins before Alexandria itself. Among the Greeks, it is
said, Peisistratus, tyrant of Athens, was the first to found a library –
subsequently taken by Xerxes to Persia, an act which set a fashion for
sovereigns and sovereign cities, to seek out the books of all peoples,
especially those of alien and conquered lands; and by the act of translating, render them, their languages, and their peoples members of
the dominant culture.
I According to Arrian, when Alexander the Great, Aristotle’s most famous pupil, halted during one of his journeys
at the western end of the Nile Delta between Lake Mareotis and the
sea, he noted that ‘the site was the very best in which to found a city,
and that the city would prosper’. Looking to a place remote from the
shrines of Olympus, he commanded that there should be dedicated to
the Muses a ‘library’ in the new city, the most important to bear his
name.
2 Flushed with imperial ambition, Alexander’s successors in
Egypt, the first three Macedonian kings, obeyed his instructions, and
created an institution whose history and influence would reach outward
in space and endure in time, bequeathing a vast legacy to the European intellectual tradition.
3 This legacy survives in the restoration of
the Bibliotheca Alexandrina at the close of the present century.
4
The story of the Great Library at Alexandria is part history, part myth.
Ten years ago, Luciano Canfora published a literary account – perhaps
THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA
‘non-fiction novel’ is a better description – that scanned the cultural
milieu of Hellenic Egypt at a time when the Alexandrian rulers chose to
project power and influence through the encouragement and control of
scholarly research. 5 That project focused upon a community of people,
objects and texts within the palace at the Brucheion, the Greek section of
the city.t’ For the next two thousand years – for linguists, archaeologists,
historians, and scholars of religion, culture, and the book – that commu[1]nity became a place within a place, a constellation of identities, a
heterotopia, in the language of Foucault, where text elides into subtext,
and myth endures long after masonry disappears.
Library of Alexendria
Uruk IV and III tablets, but we shall not be far
off in assigning them a broad time range of c. 3400 to 3000 BC. 10 In
spite of much investigation elsewhere, it still seems true to say that
writing was invented, not broadly in southern Mesopotamia, but very
specifically at the site of Uruk, prompting one Sumerologist to speak of
‘an’ inventor, literatus Sumericus Urukeus, rather than a vague cohort of
anonymous early scribes. 11 As many scholars have emphasized in
recent years, 12 with an estimated size of over 200 ha. by the late fourth
millennium BC, Uruk surpassed all other early urban centres in the
region in areal extent and most probably population concentration,
and it was here that the pre-conditions for the emergence of writing
were most clearly in evidence. The fiction that all land belonged to the
gods; that men and women should work that land on the deity’s behalf;
and that the deity’s ‘house’, in our terms, his temple, but more
realistically his oikos or household, should be managed by his servants –
i.e., a priesthood – created not only social stratification but also generated a massive agricultural sector and a redistributive economy. It was
here, in the nexus between production and redistribution in the form
of rations to household employees, that the need for arithmetic and
algebraic calculation and for the storage of information arose and that
the modus operandi, in the form of writing, was invented. 13
Writing was devised, purely and simply, as a solution to an account[ technical problem, not for the perpetuation of myths, epics, hymns,
historical records, or royal propaganda. All of this followed, but it was
not in the minds of writing’s inventor(s). What did accompany the
earliest economic texts immediately, i.e. in the very first phase of
writing’s development, were lexical texts, word lists containing terms
belonging to discrete semantic domains – titles and professions, names
of metal objects, ceramic vessels, textiles, cities, trees, plants, cattle,
swine, birds, fish, etc. Along with mathematical reckoning, these lexical
lists were undoubtedly the backbone of early scribal education.
With this new technology came, it seems, an associated development
of what we may call ‘archival behaviour’. The vast majority of the c.
4500 Archaic texts from Uruk were found abandoned in lots, in
secondary or even tertiary context (e.g. used as fill beneath new buildings) outside of the temples and other structures which make up the
Eanna complex, the great temple household of Inanna, the city
goddess of Uruk. 14 What is evident is that they had been discarded
some time, perhaps a century or more, after having been written. As
Veenhof has noted, ‘Normally, old records no longer needed by the
administration were thrown away in due time or put to secondary use,
as building material.. etc’. 15 The important point here, however, is
that, for an unspecified period of time which probably exceeded several
20
BEFORE ALEXANDRIA: LIBRARIES IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
generations, texts at Uruk were curated or archived, in spite of the fact
that the economic texts among them were certainly no longer current.
Thus, in tandem with the birth of writing in the Near East we observe
the birth of an archival, curatorial attitude towards written texts.
Second Account
The first extended discussion of the Library that survives is the Letter of Aristeas (cl80-145 BC), by legend written by a Jewish scholar employed at the Library, which chronicles the history of a project to translate the Hebrew scriptures known as the Septuagint into Greek. The name survives from the belief that seventy Jewish scholars were assembled and secluded by the king until the translation was complete. Whilst the story is now not widely believed, this letter and other fragments lend support to the theory that the Library was commissioned by Ptolemy I (Soter), one of Alexander’s successful generals, who after Alexander’s death secured the kingship of conquered Egypt.
Following Alexander’s wishes, Soter (whose dynastic name continued until the XVth of the same), sought out Demetrius of Ph ale ron – a former tyrant of Athens, a man of affairs, and a student of Aristotle – to establish a library. (As the story goes, Ptolemy invited Theophrastus to tutor Ptolemy’s heir, but the Athenian declined the position and recommended Demetrius in his place.) Demetrius, who had helped Theophrastus found a school modelled on Aristotle’s Lyceum and the Academy of Plato, agreed.
Seeking sanctuary from the political turbulence of the metropolis, Demetrius saw the possibilities of a well patronized position at the periphery, and seized the opportunity. The originality, as well as the origin, of the Alexandrian enterprise has been endlessly debated. It is clear that these Hellenes of the 3rd century were neither alone nor the first to grasp the importance of collecting and translating books in many languages as tools of commercial and political intelligence and cultural information. The ancient kingdoms of the Hittites and the Assyrians had impressive archives, reportedly in many languages, and a great library can be dated to Babylonia in the time of Nebuchadnezzar (605-562 BC). H Alexandria, however, promised something different. Moreover, it drew upon an appreciation of both Hellenic and Mesopotamian traditions. Fortunately, rival ‘Greek’ and ‘orientalist’ theories of genesis have been by and large resolved in favour of a view that sees Alexandria as the beneficiary of a mixed inheritance. Conceived after the manner of the Peripatetics, the special character of the Library was informed by
Macedonian rulers who had a vested interest in accumulating oriental knowledge, with the intention of installing a syncretistic Hellenism throughout the imperial world. 9 As it unfolded, this special Alexandrian project was to become, if not unprecedented in kingly purpose, certainly unique in scope and scale. The Library was destined to be a far more ambitious undertaking than a mere repository of scrolls. It was the first to underwrite a programme of cultural imperialism, to become a ‘centre of calculation’, in Bruno Latour’s phrase. 1O For similar reasons, royal libraries were later established in all the Hellenistic centres – for prestige, for cultural intelligence, and for the practical purposes of administration and rule.
II Moreover, unlike its rivals at Pergamun or Ephesus, Alexandria would welcome learned Greeks to come and work together, to pursue mathematics and medicine, literature and poetry, physics and philosophy. Such would be works in whose reflected glory the Ptolemies would shine. Finally, unlike its rivals, the new Library was to be universal. It would aim for complete coverage of everything ever written. In the half century after the Stoa of Zeno and the school of Epicurus, this was to happen in one place, at which all the written works of the world would be assembled. Thus, in this paradigmatic place, at the confluence of Mediterranean trade, was launched an industry of learning. As the king’s consultant, Demetrius began its collections in the manner of Plato, with works of statecraft, on kingship and ruling – for the advancement of government and culture were the twin objectives of a wise ruler.
It was an axiom of Alexander that in order to govern, conquerors must first know whom they govern. By extension, this required the collection and translation of local literatures into Greek. But the Ptolemies found it equally prestigious to collect and conserve the Hellenistic legacy itself. As Alexandria grew and prospered, so the Library would prosper, becoming an epicentre of Hellenism more Hellenic than Greece – where the Peripatetic model would flourish beyond Aristotle’s dreams. In the precinct of the Library were two institutions, the Museum and the Library itself, with overlapping purposes but separate jurisdiction – a billion (or place of books) for scholars and a museum on dedicated to the Muses. The precise location remains uncertain, but circumstantial evidence places it central to the city and its port. Its architectural style is not known, but we have clues suggesting it was built upon the plan of a rameseseum – as such, a combination of palace, museum, and shrine. As a shrine dedicated to the Muses, the Museum had the same legal form as Plato’s school in Athens, where a school required religious status to gain the protection of Athenian law. It was presided over by a priest of the Muses, called an epistates, or director, appointed by analogy with the priests who managed the temples of Egypt.
Under his gaze, and encouraged by Ptolemy II (Philadelphus), as early as 283 Be there came together what Strabo later called a synodos (community) of perhaps 30-50 learned men (there were no women), salaried members of a ‘civil list’ for their services as tutors, granted exemption from taxes, and given free board and lodging in the royal quarter of the city, where in a circular-domed dining hall, they communally dined. 13 Outside, there were classrooms, for the residents were from time to time called upon to teach. Perhaps not all the learned scholars were popular with the local people, as tax-exempt foreigners rarely are, particularly if, as we learn from a Roman papyrus, they are paid from public funds. But the gilded residents of the Museum often made news. Among the earliest invited by Demetrius was Euclid, the mathematician, who is supposed to have told Ptolemy I (Soter), in response to a request for coaching, that ‘there is no Royal Road to Geometry’. Euclid may have compiled his Elements during the reign of Philadelphus; he also influenced Apollonius of Perga (fl.250-220 Be), the ‘great geometer’, who wrote eight books on conic sections, seven of which survive – four in Greek and three in Arabic.
Mathematics and metaphysics seem to have lived in harmony together, alongside natural history and astronomy. Ptolemy Philadelphus, it is said, was interested in zoology; and so the Museum may also have contained a garden, a zoo, and an observatory. From the time of Ptolemy V (205-180 Be), its scholars organized games, festivals and literary competitions. It remained a cult center, directed by a priest. If the principal shrine of Apollo was Delphi, and that of Zeus, Olympus, then surely the shrine of the Muses would be Alexandria. IS Near the Museum was the Library itself, directed by a school librarian, appointed by the king, who also held the post of royal tutor. 16 The Library comprised several wings and porticos, with lines of shelves, or there, arranged along covered walkways (which one can perhaps too easily reconstruct in the mind as cloisters). We are told that separate niches were devoted to different classes of authors, and to different categories of learning.
With an enthusiasm reminiscent of latter-day saints bringing Bibles to Babylon, the agents of Ptolemy III scoured the Mediterranean for books, which swelled the growing collection. That books are a passion, and collecting them, a pathology, should be an Alexandrian saying. The Library had little regard for intellectual property – or even for property rights per se. It is said that Ptolemy III (246-221 Be) wrote to all the world’s sovereigns, asking to borrow their books for copying. When Athens lent him texts of Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles, he had them copied, but kept the originals, cheerfully forfeiting the fortune of fifteen talents he had deposited as bond. Recalling similar treatment accorded medical texts, Galen recounts that customs officials had orders to confiscate from passing ships all books they had, which were then copied. I7 The originals were deposited in the Library, and marked in the catalogue “from the ships” – thus the expression, ‘ship libraries’ for the larger collection. If they were lucky, owners received copies, but one suspects many travelers sailed from Alexandria minus their first editions. The Library and Museum were not linked to any particular philosophical school or doctrine. 18 We are told that resident scholars had a degree of academic freedom, perhaps even tenure. But there were ways to cancel contracts.
The rare birds who scribbled in the muses’ cage, whether philosophers or systematisers, were in the service of the king, and it was wise not to invoke their wrath. A tale is told of Sotades of Maronea who, with possibly more wit than tact, wrote a ribald verse about the marriage of Ptolemy II (Philadelphus) to his sister. When identified, the unhappy poet was jailed; when he escaped, he was recaptured, put in a leaden jar, and dropped into the sea. His experience was recounted widely – perhaps invented – to caution the unruly. Knowledge and control were epigraphic in the Library’s origins, and in its methods. By the time of Callimachus, the Library possessed over 400,000 mixed scrolls with multiple works, plus another 90,000 single scrolls. As the collection grew, so at least one satellite – daughter (some say, branch) library – emerged, the Serapeion, housed in the temple of Serapis, home to a new Greco-Egyptian cult established by Ptolemy III in the southwest of the city, at some distance from the royal quarters. 19 Demetrius was himself a convert of Serapis, and the new library soon held over 40,000 books.
Eventually, many other smaller libraries sprang up throughout the city – foreshadowing the proliferation of bibliotheques and parchemineres in the Latin Quarter of medieval Paris, and the university towns of Bologna and Oxford. Following Demetrius, the first Librarian, in what remains a problematic and incomplete list, was Zenodotus of Ephesus (283-245 Be). Among his most famous assistants was Callimachus of Cyrene, who may never formally have held the position of Librarian,20 but who began for the Library the first subject catalogue in the world – the Pinakes (tablets). This was composed of six sections, and listed some 120,000 scrolls of classical poetry and prose.2I For the seven hundred years, until the 4th century AD, as many as a hundred scholars at a time came to the Library to consult this collection, to read, talk, and write. They wrote first on papyrus, of which Alexandria had a monopoly; and then on parchment, when the Ptolemies stopped exporting papyrus in an attempt to strangle the young library set up by the Selucids in Pergamon. At first they wrote on scrolls, which were stored in linen or leather jackets, and kept in racks in the hall, or in the cloisters. Later,
in Roman times, they wrote manuscripts, in codex form, which were stored in wooden chests (armaria).22 Among the Library’s staff, translators were the most numerous, called scribblers (charakitai) and – because they wrote on papyrus – charta. Their time was spent ‘pecking away’, as Timon of Athens put it, in the cage of the Muses. But the Library’s work was not limited to the classics. About 270 Be, the Librarian’s torch passed to Apollonius of Rhodes, author of the scholarly epic Argonautica, who reputedly made welcome the young Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 Be). Archimedes, the genius of ‘Eureka’, spent some time at the Museum, observing the rise and fall of the Nile and inventing the famous ‘screw’ that bears his name. There he also began the science of hydrostatics, and outlined methods for calculating areas and volumes that 1800 years later formed the basis of calculus. Perhaps impelled by necessity, Archimedes turned his hand to warfare – designing siege engines for the defence of his native city against the Romans, in a contest that was to cost him his life. 2: l At the Museum and the Library, Archimedes was not alone in cultivating the practical arts.
After all, the city was renowned for its Pharos, towering over 100 metres high over Alexandria’s harbour – commissioned by Ptolemy II, designed by the Greek architect Sostratus of Knidos, and considered one of the seven wonders of the world. Fires lit at its top, and focussed by a plane mirror, were visible thirty miles out to sea. Within the Museum, the special demands of a culture based on agriculture and seafaring were abundantly clear. Annual inundations of the Nile altered physical landmarks, and celestial observations could help determine terrestrial property boundaries. Merchants sending ships from port, Alexandria’s essential business, depended upon celestial navigation to navigate once out of sight of land. It was not accidental that men at the Museum turned their minds to the applications of mathematics and geography. Apollonius was succeeded in 235 Be by Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c276-194 Be), the Stoic geographer and mathematician, who delighted in geometry and prime numbers. But he also taught that the oceans were connected, that Africa might be circumnavigated, and that India could be reached by sailing westwards from Spain.
It was he who accurately deduced the length of the year and established the calendar that Julius Caesar appropriated; who posited that the Earth is round, and calculated its circumference based on the measured distance between Aswan and Alexandria; and who worked out the Earth’s diameter to within an error of only eighty kilometres. The Library also gave a home to Timocharis (c290 Be) and his pupil Aristyllus (c260 BC), astronomers who recorded movements of the stars. Their contemporaries at the Museum included Aristarchos of Samos (310-230 BC),
proposed a heliocentric basis for the solar system 1800 years before Copernicus; Hipparchus, who imported the 360-degree circular system from Babylonia, and amassed charts of stars and constellations; and Herophilus and Erasistratus, who pioneered the study of human anatomy, until their efforts were dimmed by protests against the dissection of bodies.
The Library’s unrivalled access to Babylonian and Egyptian knowledge gave it a pivotal position in the civilised world. This ‘golden age’ was not to last forever. After Eratosthenes, the torch of Pharos passed to Aristophanes of Byzantium (c257-180 Be), a capable grammarian (no relation to the dramatist), who introduced the use of accents in the Greek language, but who seems to have exerted less magnetism on scholars around him. After an indifferent period of twenty years, he was succeeded by the last recorded Librarian, Aristarchus of Samothrace, an eminent Homeric scholar, appointed c. 153 Be during the reign of Ptolemy VI. But by that time, as a recent author has put it, Alexandrian scholarship had become dominated by literary criticism. As a centre of knowledge, it resembled the thin neck of a very large bottle – in protecting its precious contents, channelling and letting little new knowledge flow.
If, during the Library’S first three centuries, its early philosophers had delivered major theoretical advances in mathematics and natural knowledge, by the beginning of the Christian Era, it had become better known for custodial scholarship than for innovation. During the first century BeE, moreover, the Museum seems to have been eclipsed by the Library, and by the Library’S emphasis upon the systematic study of Greek literature and the translation of non-Greek works. For this, the Library possessed unrivalled opportunities. The Library’S collections may, for example, have included the Egyptian ‘sacred records’, from which Hecataeus of Abdera (ca. third century Be) wrote the Aegyptiaca. But ‘meddling with prose’, a frequent charge levelled at the staff, was difficult to deflect. And in that reality, lay both the Library’S strength and weakness. At the time of the great fire of Alexandria in 48 Be – by legend, accidentally spread by soldiers of Julius Caesar clearing the wharves to block the fleet of Cleopatra’s brother, Ptolemy XIV – Livy says the Library had over 400,000 scrolls. Of this fact we are not sure; nor are we certain what changes took place in the Library after Strabo the geographer, who lived in Alexandria between 25-20 Be, left hints about the Library in his writings. But reflection suggests that the community he knew was preoccupied not with independent study of an Archimedian kind, but with the enterprise of translation, summarisation, and philological purification that failed to transcend the Museum’s early mandate
In the words of a recent commentator, the Library ‘forged a new way of seeing’ on the part of the reader; its scholarship was attentive to style, to literature, to the readability of classical works.26 On the other hand, its emphasis upon literary craftsmanship lent an overwhelming weight to a textual hegemony that discouraged the exploration of the ‘new’.27 By the beginning of the Common Era,
Alexandria was a place where what could be known of Babylonian, Egyptian, Jewish and Greek thought was strenuously collected, codified, systematised, and contained. Alexandria became the foundation of the text-centred culture of the Western tradition. The disciplined life of collection and classification and an emphasis upon erudition were essential to academic professionalism. But the Library failed to maintain the quest for deeper knowledge that had distinguished its early philosophers. Where the written word conflicted with empirical observation, the life of books could prove misleading and obscure an understanding of the world. This was a lesson to be learned and later demonstrated by the natural philosophers of the Renaissance. An illustration of this survives in the work of the second century CE, Claudius Ptolemaeus (thus Ptolemy – with no known relation to the royal family), the last great astronomer of ancient times. Ptolemy excelled in the highest Alexandrian tradition, albeit one in tension with his innovative predecessors. In his thirteen-volume Almagest, he systematised Alexandrian knowledge of astronomy and catalogued a thousand stars. But his elegant mathematics of epicycles – the system to which he gave his name – was put to the service of the geocentric cosmology derived from the texts of Aristotle, rather than to the service of observational astronomy. Like his monumental Geography, which codified what was known from all the known world, his astronomy remained influential in Europe until the 16th century; in both cases, they bore the mark of the Alexandrian editions produced by dedicated scholar-librarians, who worked systematically through the emendation and collation of classical texts.
Perhaps their greatest achievement was to frame questions that would launch men in the direction of exploration, enquiry, and discovery. * * * * Today, the history of Alexandria’s Library has a universal appeal. Much of this resides in the reverence scholars have for independent scholarship and fundamental research. It is well to remember, however, that for almost all its life, the cloister lay close to the palace. If it was an institute of advanced study, the Library was never an ivory tower. Its intellectuals were public intellectuals, and suffered the contrary imaginations of civil war. Its rituals were interrupted by political unrest,
Scholarly debates, inflamed by visiting exiles. It was a tolerant academy, but within the limits of kingly patronage. Scholars of antiquity are amused when modernists credit Francis Bacon with inventing the phrase ‘knowledge is power’. Bacon may have popularised the tocsin of the scientific revolution, but in Alexandria, eighteen hundred years earlier, the quest for universal knowledge had already inspired kingly enterprise.
The impulse emerged again in the time of Nicholas V and Sixtus IV, in the creation of a library at the centre of the imperial Vatican, and it has reappeared repeatedly in Western history. To attempt to control the diffusion of knowledge is a concept of Ptolemaic ambition – perhaps an achievement impossible until the age of the key-hole satellite and the World Wide Web. Yet, this was the Alexandrian project at its best, and most problematic. Coupled with its history of princes and principalities, information and scholarship, Alexandria affords a composite model – part ‘think tank’, part graduate school; part observatory and part laboratory.
But Alexandria the city was a place at the centre of trade in goods and peoples, as well as ideas. It was a religious site, and a site of religions, a place where all the gods were worshipped, where Jews, pagans and Christians debated theologies influenced by the Zoroastrianism of Persia, and the Buddhism and Hinduism of India. Neoplatonism, some say, was actually invented in Alexandria. But the tensions that gave it life and vitality, also threatened its survival. By the Roman period, following Caesar’s conquest of Egypt, its conditions of existence were shaped by the vexations of overseas dominion, whilst its quotidian routines were distracted by riots between doctrinaires of many persuasions. Ultimately, the Library’s fortunes rose and fell with those of Alexandria itself. By the second century, Rome became less dependent on Alexandrian grain, and less interested in Alexandrian scholarship.
The prosperity of the city declined, and so did the reputation of the Library. Its librarians were thereafter less well known; its scholars – with significant exceptions – less distinguished, or at least, less well known to posterity. Eventually, the word ‘Alexandrian’ became a metonym for the craft of ‘editing’, for the practice of consolidating and correcting scholarship rather than creating it – critical, custodial, preoccupied with the purity of old forms, rather than pursuing the new. Its rivals in Pergamon and elsewhere rose in status and celebrity and contested its leadership. It is not clear what damage was caused to the Library, or what remained of the Museum, when Caracalla sacked the city in the third century AD; nor how much damage was caused by the mob incited by the Emperor Theodosius and the patriarch Theophilus, who encouraged dictators in trying to eradicate ideas by burning books, notably those of the Serapeion, in 391 AD. The last famous figure associated with the Library was
Theon, the mathematician, better known as father of the martyred Hypatia, whose independent studies of geometry and musicology convinced leading Christians that she was a heretic. 28 What remained of the prosperity of Alexandria, and of the Library, fell prey to rivalries between patriarchs, and to the conquest of the Arabs in 641 AD. 29 In that year, the 20th year of the hejira, the Emir Amrou Ibn el-As took the city. It is said, the Library he found was not the place it had been. There seemed few works that Arabs, learned in optics and astronomy, versed in mathematics and geography, found interesting. Its holdings had become chiefly patristic writings, sacred literature, and that crawling with errors, for Greek had become increasingly foreign to their readers. Famously, when asked what to do with the books in the Library, the Caliph Omar sent the reply: If the content of the books is in accordance with the book of Allah, we may do without them, for in that case, the book of Allah more than suffices. If, on the other hand, they contain matter not in accordance with the book of Allah there can be no need to preserve them. Proceed, then, and destroy them. What books were found, were distributed to the public baths, and used to feed the stoves that kept the public warm. It is said that it took six months to burn the mass of words. Only Aristotle’s books, it is said, escaped.
* * * * The story of the Arab burning of the Library is legend; it may also be history.31 If true, it would be a tragedy of suitably Greek proportions. It has been suggested that only the Great Library burned in 48 BC, and that the Museum and Sarapeion survived until the edict of Theodosius in 391 s.c. By one influential account, the Arabs bear no blame for its destruction at all. 32 Whatever the case, in the prolonged moment of its loss, which may have lasted four centuries, we locate an important part of the European past. The vanishing Library spelled the end of one way of learning, and the beginning of the new. In the Library’S reconstruction – an act both historical and literary and, in contemporary Alexandria, in actual fact – we gain a better understanding of that part of our heritage that is Hellenic, and of other traditions which, blended in the alembic of Alexandria, informed the modern European mind. To rediscover some of these forgotten passages, and renew acquaintance with forgotten legacies, is the goal of the following essays.
In the first, Dan Potts, an archaeologist of the Middle East, reminds us that the Library of Alexandria was neither an isolated manifestation of librarianship in the ancient world, nor a precocious example of archival praxis. Archives are found with the first appearance of writing at the site of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia c3400 BC. The archiving of cuneiform economic texts continued into the Roman/Parthian era, while the scholarly curation of canonical literary texts began by c2500 BC. Among the most famous libraries of Near Eastern antiquity was that of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, containing thousands of tablets, many of them brought from other sites. Professor Potts’ essay underlines the historical significance of Alexandria by reviewing the essential points of its ancient Near Eastern antecedents. In the second essay, linguist and traveler Wendy Brazil explores what it was that drew scholars and statesmen from all parts of the world to Alexandria, and goes in search of the attractions of the city and its famous visitors. In the third paper, classicist Robert Barnes describes what ancient sources tell us about the library, its books, its librarians, its scholarly work, and its eventual destruction. He also discusses Luciano Canfora’s best-selling book, The Vanished Library, and considers the author’s claim that, as all public libraries in Alexandria were destroyed, we owe the survival of ancient literature entirely to private collectors. On a different tangent, one requiring the skills of a literary investigator as well as of a classicist, R. Godfrey Tanner, the distinguished Aristotelian scholar, unravels the complex history that accompanied the arrival of Aristotle’s major scientific works in Alexandria. His attempts to solve the puzzle surrounding those works that Ptolemy took, and those that reached the Library around 40 BC, are the stuff of detective drama. In the sixth essay, John Vallance, a teacher of classics and medical historian, challenges the received view that Alexandria dominated the world of medical scholarship, and suggests there is little evidence that doctors (or medical philosophers) enjoyed royal patronage at Alexandria, or even that medical studies were part of the research programme of the Museum.
His essay works through case studies to argue that the existence of the Library enabled earlier work in medical theory to be studied in entirely new ways, but that it also contributed to the rise of one of the most practical and anti-theoretical of all the ancient medical sects. A similar interest in the relationship between theory and practice underlies the essay by Richard Green, ancient historian and theatre historian, who uses his expert knowledge of 4th century Paphos, the Ptolemaic capital of Cyprus, to demonstrate the cultural and stylistic legacy left by Alexandria. The University of Sydney’s excavations at Paphos, now under way for three seasons, are drawn upon to deduce an Alexandrian form, which bears close similarities to the classic Rome
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