Alexandria Library Quotes

They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff.

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

I’m up for the Julius Caesar Author of the Year Award this year. I’m tremendously proud, considering Caesar is the guy who burned down the Library of Alexandria.

Perhaps the various burnings of the Alexandria Library were necessary, like those Australian Forest Fires without which the new seeds cannot burst their shells and make a young, healthy forest.

Marco could not have known about the mystical effect of a full moon on cats and books left on their own in the library. Not until he saw the lines breathe, the words unveiled.

THOMASINA: But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!

Now we can travel with more books stored in our telephones than the ancient Egyptians kept in their vast library at Alexandria.

The Library of Alexandria?" I ask. "Didn't that burn down?" Mrs Philipoulus scoffs. "Damn fool Hypatia. Athena tried to convince her to install a sprinkler system. But no-o-o, no one was going to tell the librarianatrix how to run her library.

How DARE you and the rest of your barbarians set fire to my library? Play conqueror all you want, Mighty Caesar! Rape, murder, pillage thousands, even millions of human beings! But neither you nor any other barbarian has the right to destroy one human thought!

THOMASINA: ....the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library!....How can we sleep for grief? SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

The destruction of Dan's Star Wars collectibles would have been mourned with more intensity by their owner than the burning of the library at Alexandria.

You know you're a history fan when you still get upset thinking about the library of Alexandria

Merlin had, according to legend, created the White Council of Wizards from the chaos of the fall of the Roman Empire. He plunged into the flames of the burning Library of Alexandria to save the most critical texts, helped engineer the Catholic Church as a vessel to preserve knowledge and culture during Europe's Dark Ages, and leapt tall cathedrals in a single bound.

Let no one reduce to tears or reproach This statement of the mastery of God, Who, with magnificent irony, gave Me at once both books and night Of this city of books He pronounced rulers These lightless eyes, who can only Peruse in libraries of dreams The insensible paragraphs that yield With every new dawn. Vainly does the day Lavish on them its infinite books, Arduous as the arduous manuscripts Which at Alexandria did perish. Of hunger and thirst (a Greek story tells us) Dies a king amidst fountains and gardens; I aimlessly weary at the confines Of this tall and deep blind library. Encyclopedias, atlases, the East And the West, centuries, dynasties Symbols, cosmos and cosmogonies Do walls proffer, but pointlessly. Slow in my shadow, I the hollow shade Explore with my indecisive cane; To think I had imagined Paradise In the form of such a library. Something, certainly not termed Fate, rules on such things; Another had received in blurry Afternoons both books and shadow. Wandering through these slow corridors I often feel with a vague and sacred dread That I am another, the dead one, who must Have trodden the same steps at the same time. Which of the two is now writing this poem Of a plural I and of a single shadow? How important is the word that names me If the anathema is one and indivisible? Groussac or Borges, I see this darling World deform and extinguish To a pale, uncertain ash Resembling sleep and oblivion

To all those who face change without fear. Go forward. To the ever-transforming glory of the public library, without which we would all be diminished. No one with a book is ever alone, even in the darkest moments. We are all book lovers. And we all chase the Great Library of Alexandria, one book at a time.

But God, the ruler of the universe, takes his stand upon it, regulating it and directing everything in a saving manner by the helm of his wisdom, using, in truth, neither hands nor feet, nor any other part whatever such as belongs to created objects.

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once...

What if there was a disease in Alexandria, she thought, and everybody died but me? I’d go live at the library, she told herself. The notion was cheering. She saw herself reading by candlelight, shadows flickering on the ceiling above the labyrinth of shelves. She could take a suitcase from home–peanut butter and crackers, a blanket, a change of clothes–and pull together two of the big armchairs in the Reading Room to sleep on…

Most historians agree that the decline of the Great Library of Alexandria was due to what endangers libraries of the present day--general indifference and bureaucratic neglect.

Have any sheep been seen walking out of the Library with seagoing adventurers clinging to their wool?

We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but also that much of it can be collected again; we can learn from its splendid ambition that what was one man’s experience can become, through the alchemy of words, the experience of all, and how that experience, distilled once again into words, can serve each singular reader for some secret, singular purpose.

Alexandria and its scholars […] never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

All was not lost when the Library at Alexandria was burned

Thank you.” Her mouth curled upward, as though she enjoyed the compliment, and he wanted to give her a million more. Scribble them in the fucking burning Library of Alexandria.

The existence of any library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present. It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here for their perusal. Above all, it tells readers that their craft consist of the power to remember, actively, through the prompt of the page, selected moments of the human experience. This was the great practice established by the Library of Alexandria.

Or written anew. Every spell that exists was once spoken for the first time, by a witch who needed it.” Bella actually claps her hands together. “Then the library could be . . . oh, but it would take so much work.” The Crone huffs. “It always does.” “Always?” “Avalon wasn’t the first library. Alexandria, Antioch, Avicenna . . . They keep burning us. We keep rising again.

Well, when it became obvious that magic was going to wreck the computer networks, people tried to preserve portions of the Internet. They took snapshots of their servers and sent the data to a central database at the Library of Congress. The project became known as the Library of Alexandria, because in ancient times Alexandria's library was said to contain all the human knowledge, before some jackass burned it to the ground.

I don’t think that the definition of library has changed. Libraries have never been repositories solely of books. In Alexandria for instance, the model of the ideal library perhaps, there was a will to collect every book in the world, but at the same time they had maps and objects and there was a sense that this was a world of study and communication. The technology changes, and so electronic media should enter the library as long as we don’t forget that there are also books. I don’t believe in technologies that want to exclude one another. A new technology comes into the world and believes that it can bill itself on the corpse of the previous technology, but that never happens. Photography did not eliminate painting. Film did not eliminate theater and so on. One technology feeds on the vocabulary of the other, and I believe that the electronic technology has taught us to value the reading on the page, and the reading on the page has taught us what we can do on the screen. They are alternatives, but they’re certainly not synonymous.

If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the Creator has an idea of a man, so long shall I be sure that no uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.... but we may agree that, in reading, it is not quantity so much that tells, as quality and thoroughness of digestion.

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once ... The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a midden of man's ashes. He coasted them, walking warily. A porterbottle stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells. He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara's. Am I not going there? Seems not.

…Because every ruler celebrated his conquests by setting torch to the nearest library. Did not Julius Caesar incinerate the scrolls in the great library at Alexandria during his campaign against the republicans in Africa? Or General Stilicho, leader of the Vandals, order the burning of the Sybillene prophecies in Rome?

Hypatia’s case then was this. She lived in a time when her intellectual heritage, a seven-hundred-year-old tradition, was crumbling. The supports that had once seemed so secure—the Museum and the libraries—had all been swept away by the swell of ignorant dogmatism. Almost alone, virtually the last academic, she stood for the intellectual values, for rigorous mathematics, ascetic Neoplatonism, the crucial role of the mind, and the voice of temperance and moderation in civic life.

From the first days of Alexandria, the mission of libraries hasn’t been simply books. They are a safety net for civilization.

The intelligent man should see to it that his friends are immortal, his enemies mortal.

They got the Library of Alexandria. They’re not getting mine. Bumper sticker (with quote flanked by silhouettes of pistol and rifle)

But only at Antquarium did I feel a sense of what the library at Alexandria might have been: an accumulation of evidence and suggestions.

I love you," Kenneth said, with terrible dispassion, "but I would not burn the Library of Alexandria for you"; and Anita, drily sobbing, cried, "You son of a bitch.

Do you know what happened when they tried to upgrade SCROLL?” said Bradshaw. “The system conflict wiped out the entire library at Alexandria—they had to torch the lot to stop it spreading.

Do you know why we will win this war?” Vosch asks us after we’re locked inside. “Why we cannot lose? Because we know how you think. We’ve been watching you for six thousand years. When the pyramids rose in the Egyptian desert, we were watching you. When Caesar burned the library at Alexandria, we were watching you. When you crucified that first-century Jewish peasant, we were watching. When Columbus set foot in the New World…when you fought a war to free millions of your fellow humans from bondage…when you learned how to split the atom…when you first ventured beyond your atmosphere…What

Alexandria was "the single place on earth where all the knowledge in the entire world was gathered together -- every great play and poem, every book of physics and philosophy, the key to understanding ... simply everything," as the historians Justin Pollard and Howard Reid wrote. "Most of the knowledge of the first thousand years of Western civilization is missing. These were the books that formed the library of Alexandria.

That's what we've been taught, this is the underpinning of all European culture-this firm belief that there are no secrets that won't sooner or later come to light. Who was it that said it? Jesus? No, Pascal, I think it was… so naïve. But this faith has been nurtured for centuries; it has sprouted its own mythology: the cranes of Ibycus, manuscripts don't burn. An ontological faith in the fundamental knowability of every human deed. The certainty that, as they now teach journalism majors, you can find everything on the Internet. As if the Library of Alexandria never existed. Or the Pogruzhalsky arson, when the whole historical section of the Academy of Sciences' Public Library, more than six-hundred thousand volumes, including the Central Council archives from 1918, went up in flames. That was in the summer of 1964; Mom was pregnant with me already, and almost for an entire month afterward, as she made her way to work at the Lavra, she would get off the trolleybus when it got close to the university and take the subway the rest of the way: above ground, the stench from the site of the fire made her nauseous. Artem said there were early printed volumes and even chronicles in that section-our entire Middle Ages went up in smoke, almost all of the pre-Muscovite era. The arsonist was convicted after a widely publicized trial, and then was sent to work in Moldova's State Archives: the war went on. And we comforted ourselves with "manuscripts don't burn." Oh, but they do burn. And cannot be restored.

The Romans' contribution to science was mostly limited to butchering antiquity's greatest mathematician, burning the Library of Alexandria, and slowly stifling the sciences that flourished in the colonies of their Empire.

(The Romans have set fire to the Library of Alexandria) THEODOTUS: —What is burning there is the memory of mankind. CAESAR: —A shameful memory. Let it burn. THEODOTUS (wildly): —Will you destroy the past? CAESAR: —Ay, and build the future with its ruins.

I told my ducks that The Great Library of Alexandria was torched by arsonists in 275 AD, and their only response was, "Quack." They weren't upset, not because they don't read, but because they probably realized the building was burnt after all the books were secreted away.

I only pinch books nobody is using. And I do good works, too. I rescued quite a lot of manuscripts from the library of Alexandria before it burned down. And I had a lovely chat with the librarian. She wasn’t even worried when I walked out of a black spot in the wall. People in ancient times were much more open to magic.

Perhaps it was a tired thing, all references the world had already made to the Ptolemaic Royal Library of Alexandria. History had proven the library to be an endlessly fascinating as a subject, either because the obsession with what it might have contained was bound only be the imagination or because humanity longs for things most ardently as a collective. All men can love a forbidden thing, generally speaking, and in most cases knowledge is precisely that; lost knowledge even more so. Tired or not, there is something for everyone to long for when it comes to the Library of Alexandria, and we have always been a species highly susceptible to the call of the distant unknown.

What we face is not a loss of books but the loss of a world. As in Alexandria after Aristotle’s time, or the universities and monasteries of the early Renaissance, or the cluttered-up research libraries of the nineteenth century, the Word shifts again in its modes, tending more and more to dwell in pixels and bits instead of paper and ink. It seems to disappear thereby, as it must have for the ancient Peripatetics, who considered writing a spectral shibboleth of living speech; or the princely collectors of manuscripts in the Renaissance, who saw the newly recovered world of antiquity endangered by the brute force of the press; or the lovers of handmade books in the early nineteenth century, to whom the penny dreadful represented the final dilution of the power of literature. And yet, the very fact that the library has endured these cycles seems to offer hope. In its custody of books and the words they contain, the library has confronted and tamed technology, the forces of change, and the power of princes time and again.

Alexandria's first librarian, Zenodotus, attempted to put this mass of scrolls in order. The first scrolls were inventoried and then organized alphabetically, with a tag affixed to the end of each scroll indicating the author, title, and subject. These three categories came to define the traditional card catalog and are still the cornerstone of library cataloging.

The entire corpus of Sappho’s work burned with the great Library of Alexandria, so today we know her only through the bits other writers quoted, shadows of Sappho cast on our cave wall. Time marbled silence throughout the texts, and those gaps, those cavities, beg readers to wonder them full, to complete the poet’s circuits of cognition – twenty-six centuries after they were made.

It appears that the charts must have originated with a people unknown; that they were passed on, perhaps by the Minoans (the Sea Kings of ancient Crete) and the Phoenicians, who were for a thousand years and more the greatest sailors of the ancient world. We have evidence that they were collected and studied in the great library of Alexandria and that compilations of them were made by the greographers who worked there.

I had a dream about you. You told me you circled three words in three books scattered in the Library of Alexandria, the one that supposedly burnt down centuries ago. You wouldn’t tell me what words, what books, or give me any clues at all, so I just assumed those three words were I love you, and I thought about that while I made love to a being of light who made sure I was completely dry the whole time so I didn’t get electrocuted.

Like the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria or the supremely ignorant incineration of stacks of invaluable Mayan codices, the loss of knowledge we are experiencing as the last of the traditional elders pass from this physical plane of existence without heirs to their knowledge- as well as the very environment in which sacred plants grow- is a tragedy occurring right now as you read these lines, one that could well be beyond redemption.

Superstition [is] cowardice in the face of the Divine,’ wrote Theophrastus, who lived during the founding of the Library of Alexandria. We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times - a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universes and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor.

Forget your magic mirror," she decided to say. "If I lived here, I would spend my whole life in here, reading." "They're just... books...." He carefully lit the candelabra at the front and placed Lumière on the floor, dismissing him. "Just books? That's like saying Alexandria is just a library." She ran over to the closest shelf and tilted her head, reading the titles. "You don't understand. I don't understand how you don't understand. Look- here's an ancient text in Greek about astronomy... and next to it is everything Galileo Galilei ever wrote!! This whole section is about the stars and planets and the entire universe!" The Beast stood, looking slightly embarrassed, scratching the back of his neck with his hand. Belle grabbed a book and ran over to him, shoving it in his face. "Up until this man, Copernicus, everyone thought the entire universe rotated around the earth- that we were the center of it all." She flipped open to a page that had an engraving of planets and their paths, little callouts to their names and the length of their orbits. "Thanks to men like him and Tycho Brahe and Kepler, we now know nothing revolves around the earth- except the moon.

Like evolution itself, there have been rapid advances and crippling setbacks along the way. If the Library of Alexandria had never been burned to the ground it is possible to imagine that we would have built upon the achievements of the ancient Greeks to greater and earlier effect, and therefore it could have been in the time of a Cardano or a Newton or a Pascal that we first put a man on the moon. And we can only wonder where we would be. And at the planets we would have terraformed and colonised by the twenty-first century. Which medical advances we would have made. Maybe if there had been no dark ages, no switching off of the light, we would have found a way never to grow old, to never die.

In 1788, in Paris, he published the most important Greek text of the Iliad ever printed. Ten years earlier he had arrived in Venice, sent there by the enlightened instincts of the French crown, to trawl through the holdings of the great St. Mark’s library on the Piazzetta. Villoison was agog at what he found, and soon began writing ecstatic letters to his friends all over Europe. He had made the great discovery: a Byzantine edition of the Iliad that seemed to derive from the scholars who had worked on it in Alexandria in the second century BC, sifting the true text from the mass of alternative readings they had gathered in the great Ptolemaic library in the city. It was, Villoison wrote, the “germana et sincera lectio,” the real and uncorrupted reading.

Scientific works and entire libraries were set to torch kindled by the insane religious fanatics. We have already mentioned the Bishop of Yucatan, who burned the entire native literature of the Maya in the 1560's, and Bishop Theophilus, who destroyed much of the remnants of the Library of Alexandria (391). The Christian Roman emperor Valens ordered the burning of non-Christian books in 373. In 1109, the crusaders captured Tripoli, and after the usual orgy of butchery typifying the crusades (through this one did not yet include the murderous Teutonic Knights), they burned over 100,000 books of Muslim learning. In 1204, the fourth crusade captured Constantinople and sacked it with horrors unparalleled even in the bloody age of the crusades; the classical works that had survived until then were put to the torch by crusaders in what is generally considered the biggest single loss to classical literature. In the early 15th century, Cardinal Ximenes (Jimenez), who succeeded Torquemada as Grand Inquisitor and was directly responsible for the cruel deaths of 2,500 persons, had a haul of 24,000 books burned at Granada.

Sometimes what-if fantasies are useful. Imagine that the entirety of Western civilisation’s coding for computer systems or prints of all films ever made or all copies of Shakespeare and the Bible and the Qur’an were encrypted and held on one tablet device. And if that tablet was lost, stolen, burnt or corrupted, then our knowledge, use and understanding of that content, those words and ideas, would be gone for ever – only, perhaps, lingering in the minds of a very few men of memory whose job it had been to keep ideas alive. This little thought-experiment can help us to comprehend the totemic power of manuscripts. This is the great weight of responsibility for the past, the present and the future that the manuscripts of Constantinople carried. Much of our global cultural heritage – philosophies, dramas, epic poems – survive only because they were preserved in the city’s libraries and scriptoria. Just as Alexandria and Pergamon too had amassed vast libraries, Constantinople understood that a physical accumulation of knowledge worked as a lode-stone – drawing in respect, talent and sheer awe. These texts contained both the possibilities and the fact of empire and had a quasi-magical status. This was a time when the written word was considered so potent – and so precious – that documents were thought to be objects with spiritual significance. (...) It was in Constantinople that the book review was invented. Scholars seem to have had access to books within a proto-lending-library system, and there were substantial libraries within the city walls. Thanks to Constantinople, we have the oldest complete manuscript of the Iliad, Aeschylus’ dramas Agamemnon and Eumenides, and the works of Sophocles and Pindar. Fascinating scholia in the margins correct and improve: plucking work from the page ‘useful for the reader . . . not just the learned’, as one Byzantine scholar put it. These were texts that were turned into manuals for contemporary living.

In the cities of the Jewish diaspora (especially Alexandria, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, and Rome), Jews were widely admired by their gentile neighbors. For one thing, they had a real religion, not a clutter of gods and goddesses and pro forma rituals that almost nobody took seriously anymore. They actually believed in their one God; and, imagine, they even set aside one day a week to pray to him and reflect on their lives. They possessed a dignified library of sacred books that they studied reverently as part of this weekly reflection and which, if more than a little odd in their Greek translation, seemed to point toward a consistent worldview. Besides their religious seriousness, Jews were unusual in a number of ways that caught the attention of gentiles. They were faithful spouses—no, really—who maintained strong families in which even grown children remained affectively attached and respectful to their parents. Despite Caesar Nero’s shining example, matricide was virtually unknown among them. Despite their growing economic success, they tended to be more scrupulous in business than non-Jews. And they were downright finicky when it came to taking human life, seeming to value even a slave’s or a plebeian’s life as much as anyone else’s. Perhaps in nothing did the gentiles find the Jews so admirable as in their acts of charity. Communities of urban Jews, in addition to opening synagogues, built welfare centers for aiding the poor, the miserable, the sick, the homebound, the imprisoned, and those, such as widows and orphans, who had no family to care for them. For all these reasons, the diaspora cities of the first century saw a marked increase in gentile initiates to Judaism. Many of these were wellborn women who presided over substantial households and who had likely tried out some of the Eastern mystery cults before settling on Judaism. (Nero’s wife Poppea was almost certainly one of these, and probably the person responsible for instructing Nero in the subtle difference between Christians and more traditional Jews, which he would otherwise scarcely have been aware of.) These gentiles did not, generally speaking, go all the way. Because they tended to draw the line at circumcision, they were not considered complete Jews. They were, rather, noachides, or God-fearers, gentiles who remained gentiles while keeping the Sabbath and many of the Jewish dietary restrictions and coming to put their trust in the one God of the Jews. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, however, could turn out to be a difficult test of the commitment of the noachides. For here in the heart of the Jewish world, they encountered Judaism enragé, a provincial religion concerned only with itself, and ages apart from the rational, tolerant Judaism of the diaspora. In the words of Paul Johnson:

But the effective way of continuing to exist in a changing environment is to better manage correlations with the external world, that is to say, information: to collect, store, transmit, and elaborate information. For this reason DNA exists, together wih immune systems, sense organs, nervous systems, comolex brains, languages, books, the library of Alexandria, computers and Wikipedia: they maximize the efficiency of information management. The management of correlations favoring survival.

What made the library of Alexandria great wasn’t just the collection of books, but rather its intellectual raison d’être: the insatiable pursuit, creation, and dissemination of knowledge as a force to drive civilization.

Perhaps some very wicked persons will suspect that the lawgiver is here speaking enigmatically, when he says that the Creator repented of having created man, when he beheld their wickedness; on which account he determined to destroy the whole race. But let those who adopt such opinions as these know, that they are making light of and extenuating the offences of these men of old time, by reason of their own excessive impiety; for what can be a greater act of wickedness than to think that the unchangeable God can be changed?

It is curious to note how slowly the mechanism of the intellectual life improves. Contrast the ordinary library facilities of a middle-class English home, such as the present writer is now working in, with the inconveniences and deficiencies of the equipment of an Alexandrian writer, and one realizes the enormous waste of time, physical exertion, and attention that went on through all the centuries during which that library flourished. Before the present writer lie half a dozen books, and there are good indices to three of them. He can pick up any one of these six books, refer quickly to a statement, verify a quotation, and go on writing. Contrast with that the tedious unfolding of a rolled manuscript. Close at hand are two encyclopedias, a dictionary, an atlas of the world, a biographical dictionary, and other books of reference. They have no marginal indices, it is true; but that perhaps is asking for too much at present. There were no such resources in the world in 300 B.C. Alexandria had still to produce the first grammar and the first dictionary. This present book is being written in manuscript; it is then taken by a typist and typewritten very accurately. It can then, with the utmost convenience, be read over, corrected amply, rearranged freely, retyped, and recorrected. Fig 00346

Oh, but how I do miss our lovely city,” he sighed. “In Alexandria, there was beauty and learning and tolerance. Here, I see ugly buildings and people who want only to watch the bloody gladiatorial games.” He threw up his hands in disgust. “Where are the libraries? Where are the scholars, the poets? This is a place of brutes and beasts, not brains.

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

In AD 392, the same year Emperor Theodosius outlawed the Mysteries, Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria led a rabid mob into “the most beautiful building in the world” and razed it to the ground.2 It’s unclear if Theophilus (Greek for “beloved of God”) and the Christians he urged on were really after the glimmering statue of the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis, or the vast library collection that was cached in his temple precinct. Either way, Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World—which framed this investigation in the first chapter—lends exquisite detail to the annihilation of the “world’s first public library” and its “hundreds of thousands of volumes.” The Christians “roared with delight” as a “double-headed axe” split Serapis’s face. The body of the pagan statue was then barbecued in the central amphitheater as a form of “public humiliation”—“burned to ashes before the eyes of the Alexandria which had worshipped him.” Insatiate, the “warlike” mercenaries for Jesus then tore the temple apart stone by stone, “toppling the immense marble columns, causing the walls themselves to collapse.”3 We don’t know exactly what happened to the contents of the Great Library, but they were never seen again. As Nixey concludes,

Over the last thirty years, I don't think I have ever visited Ottawa and not taken a stroll around the buildings for a gawk. If you find yourself in the nation's capital on a fine, brisk day, I recommend you walk across the Alexandria Bridge over the Ottawa River to Quebec. From there, you will get the greatest view: the back of the buildings, even more magnificent than the front, and they jut out dramatically over the river's escarpment. Also, from this angle you see the beauty that is the Parliamentary Library. I feel about these buildings the way some people feel about sunsets. The way Justin Trudeau feels about mirrors. I can gaze at them all day.

Sadly, we know almost nothing about Euclid (c. 325-c. 265 BCE).32 We know even less about him than we do about Pythagoras, and what little we do know has been hotly contested by scholars. Euclid wrote at least ten books, only half of which have survived. A number of mutually consistent indications suggest that he lived after Aristotle and before Archimedes. He was one of the first mathematicians at the great library of Alexandria and there had gathered a group of talented mathematicians about him. Legends about him abound, many as (possibly apocryphal) insertions in other mathematicians' works. One tells that Ptolemy asked Euclid for a quick way to master geometry and received the reply, "There is no royal road to geometry." Another tells of a student who, after encountering the first proposition in the Elements, asked Euclid what practical use studying geometry could have. The mathematician allegedly turned to his slave and replied dismissively, "Slave, give this boy a threepence, since he must make gain of what he learns.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Largely credited to Philo of Byzantium. But since it was compiled in the third century BC, I’m guessing he called it the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. And even back then it pissed people off.” “Why?” “Because Philo did his research at the largest library of the time in Alexandria. And some people got the notion that the fix was in. At the top of the list, the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt—no argument there—and at the bottom, the lighthouse at Alexandria. The early Persians are like, ‘I thought we outgrew this hometown bullshit in the Neolithic. I mean, you can’t be serious. That lighthouse? When we’ve got the Apadana Palace of Persepolis? What are we, fucking Mesopotamians over here?

The Earth is Round! Nothing, other than perhaps our universe, started in a vacuum and neither did the discovery of the Americas, which of course included the island of Cuba. Why did Columbus want to sail for parts unknown? What was going through his mind when he turned his small fleet of three ships in a westerly direction and headed towards the edge of the world? Surely, he didn’t have a death wish, so what was it that he knew that the rest of the 15th century world didn’t? Scholars recalled that there had been a grand library in Alexandria, Egypt, that contained as many as 500,000 scrolls. These were the records of human endeavors, and the shared knowledge known to the people of that era. Many of these scrolls concerned themselves with science, history and the earthly wisdom that scholars wanted to share with others. Unfortunately, everything in the library was lost, when this magnificent structure burned to the ground in 48 BC however educated people still had a better understanding of Earth and their surroundings than we give them credit for. It was a fact that many did know that the Earth was round and speculated that navigators could sail west and arrive in the Far East!

I believe North Carolina is going to be a very important place in holding positive energy for this part of the world as we go through our next evolution on a body, mind, spirit, and planetary level. I believe that North Carolina is evolving into a light center for the United States. I see the symbolism with the lighthouses all along the North Carolina coast, shining brightly. They remind me of the great lighthouse in Alexandria, Egypt, where the world’s greatest library once existed. On the other end of the state lie the mystical Blue Ridge Mountains, one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, and with vortices in the area spinning with so much energy in cities like Asheville that the area has been nicknamed the Sedona of the South, in reference to the vortices and spiritual energy

he had none of the enthusiastic love of liberty which marks the independent creative spirit. On the contrary, he was dominated by the purely Asiatic conception of a monopoly of press, speech, justice, and thought by a single ruling caste, agreeing therein with the alleged Moslem saying that if the library of Alexandria contained the same things as the Koran it was useless, and if it contained things contrary it was harmful.

Hellenistic scholarship began in earnest with Zenodotus of Ephesus (c. 325-c. 234 B.C.), the first recorded librarian of the Great Library of Alexandria.

Given this appalling social climate, the new Library of Alexandria, built at a cost of $230 million in an attempt to revive its fabled ancient predecessor (and resembling nothing so much as a giant satellite dish), has unsurprisingly failed to ignite a renaissance of scholarly acumen.

Under the Ptolemys, the Museum Library of Alexandria grew to contain more than 700,000 scrolls, and included all the great classical works of antiquity. In 272 C.E. the main library was destroyed by the Roman Emperor Lucius Aurelianus, but much of the collection of classical works was saved by removing it to the nearby Temple of Serapis. In 391 C.E., under the Roman Emperor, Theodosius, the Christians, wishing to obliterate all centers of pagan (non-Christian) learning and culture, burned the remaining collection of classical literature, accomplishing the virtual elimination of all recorded thought of the remote past. It is for that reason that today we possess only scraps and pieces of scattered lines from the great mystics and philosophers of antiquity, along with bits of hearsay by later chroniclers who were, for the most part, indifferent or antipathetic to them.

Alexandria’s buildings reflected the breadth of its intellectual life. Here were the magnificent library and the Mouseion – in effect a great academy, unequalled throughout the empire, with its four faculties of medicine, literature, astronomy and mathematics; the obtaining of dining rights here was a fiercely contested honour. Among the presidents of the Mouseion had been Julia Balbilla’s grandfather, Claudius Balbillus. The library contained half a million books and at its zenith it was said that it held a copy of every available manuscript in the world.

A bonfire of the books. The thought curdles me. Some say my species is imperishable, but they lie, for ours is a chilling, provisional immortality. Although we commonly outlive our creators, the curious scholar need look no further than the inferno that razed the library of Alexandria to realize that a book may vanish irretrievably, leaving behind only a whiff of carbon and a pile of ash. Gutenberg, of course, did much to allay our angst -- for us the coming of mo vable type was the equivalent to the arrival of gonads amongst you vertebrates -- but the fact remains that visions of extinction haunt all texts. The moral of my dread is simple. Treasure each volume you hold in your hands, and read it whilst ye may. The Last WitchFinder

Do you know the library of Pergamon was second only to the library of Alexandria in the ancient world?

The real tragedy of the library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.

An oft-repeated tale recounts that a Christian mob destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria in 391 and burnt its books in the street. According to some versions, the repository in question was the original library in the Brucheium, while others state that it was a ‘daughter’ library located in the Serapeum. This tale has entered so deeply into the popular imagination that it even sometimes appears in otherwise respectable books of history. It is, however, a myth, originated in the late 18th century, when the great historian Edward Gibbon read an unwarranted meaning into a single sentence from the Christian chronicler Paul Orosius (fl. 414–17). The subtext of the legend is that the Christians of the fourth century were intensely hostile to the science, literature, and scholarship of classical culture, and that such matters were the special preserve of the pagans of Alexandria. This too is an 18th-century myth. The city’s scholarly and scientific class comprised Christians as well as pagans, and Christian scholars, rhetoricians, philosophers and scientists were active in Alexandria right up until the city fell to Arab Muslim invaders in 642. Regarding the library in the Brucheium – whose size, again, is impossible to determine – many ancient historians believed that it (or a large part of its collection) had already gone up in flames following Julius Caesar’s assault on the city in 48 or 47 BC, during his wars with Pompey. Some historians now also claim that, if any part of the original library remained, it vanished in 272, during the emperor Aurelian’s campaigns to reunite the empire. Whether either story is true, the Great Library of the Ptolemies no longer existed by the late fourth century. As for the ‘daughter’ library, it may have been situated within the enclosure of the Serapeum; there were, at any rate, library stacks in the temple. However, the Pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus (c.330–95) indicates that whatever library had once been there was long gone before the Serapeum’s demolition in 391. More importantly, none of the original accounts of the temple’s destruction mentions a library, not even the account written by the devout pagan Eunapius of Sardis (c.345–c.420), who despised Christians and who, as an erudite man, would have been enraged by the burning of precious texts. Later Medieval legend claimed that the actual final destruction of the ‘Library’ or libraries of Alexandria was the work of the Arab conquerors of the seventh century ad. Of this, however, no account exists that was written before the 12th century. Whatever the case, the scurrilous story of the Great Library’s destruction by Christians is untrue. It may tell us something about modern misconceptions regarding the past, but tells us nothing about Christian or pagan antiquity.

Wales started with a few dozen prewritten articles and a software application called a Wiki (named for the Hawaiian word meaning “quick” or “fast”), which allows anybody with Web access to go to a site and edit, delete, or add to what’s there. The ambition: Nothing less than to construct a repository of knowledge to rival the ancient library of Alexandria. This was, needless to say, controversial. For one thing, this is not how encyclopedias are supposed to be made. From the beginning, compiling authoritative knowledge has been the job of scholars. It started with a few solo polymaths who dared to try the impossible. In ancient Greece, Aristotle single-handedly set out to record all the knowledge of his time. Four hundred years later, the Roman nobleman Pliny the Elder cranked out a thirty-seven-volume set of the day’s knowledge. The Chinese scholar Tu Yu wrote an encyclopedia on his own in the ninth century. And in the 1700s, Diderot and a few of his pals (including Voltaire and Rousseau) took twenty-nine years to create the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers.

The fate of the books and all their vast numbers, is epitomized in the greatest library in the ancient world, a library located not in Italy but in Alexandria, the capital of Egypt and the commercial hub of the Eastern Mediterranean. The city had many tourist attractions, including an impressive theater and red light district. But visitors always took note of something quite exceptional, in the center of the city, at the lavish site known as "the museum" most of the intellectual inherits of Greek, Latin, Babylonian, Egyptian and Jewish cultures ad been assembled at enormous costs and carefully archived for researched. Starting as early as 300BCE, the Ptolemaic Kings who ruled Alexandria had the inspired idea of luring leading scholars, scientists and poets to their city by offering them life appointments at their museum...The recipients of this largess established remarkably high intellectual standards. Euclid developed his geometry in Alexandria, Archimedes discovered Pi and laid the foundation of calculus.

Since the days of ancient Alexandria libraries had stood for all the best that mankind could achieve. The very existence of libraries held out hope for the future of the human race, as far as Letty was concerned. If people had enough sense to collect and store information and make it available to everyone, perhaps they would someday have enough sense to use that wisdom to stop wars and find a cure for cancer.

The creation of the Museum and Library in Alexandria

Philadelphos did everything with extravagance – what the Greeks called tryphe[*4] – making his father’s library the greatest collection in the world and inviting all peoples to settle in Alexandria, which was soon home to a million people, Greek, Egyptian and Jewish. When he commissioned Greek-speaking Jews to translate their Torah into Greek, he made the Bible available to non-Jews, a move which later had world-changing consequences.

Nevertheless, here’s the point for even a nontechnical reader: the Bitcoin blockchain gives a history that’s hard to falsify. Unless there’s an advance in quantum computing, a breakthrough in pure math, a heretofore unseen bug in the code, or a highly expensive 51% attack that probably only China could muster, it is essentially infeasible to rewrite the history of the Bitcoin blockchain — or anything written to it. And even if such an event does happen, it wouldn’t be an instantaneous burning of Bitcoin’s Library of Alexandria. The hash function could be replaced with a quantum-safe version, or another chain robust to said attack could take Bitcoin’s place, and back up the ledger of all historical Bitcoin transactions to a new protocol.

The Library of Alexandria Being a student of Aristotle himself,

Each gene is a word; each organism a book. Each plant species that dies out contains words that have been written only in that book. If a plant species becomes extinct, one book is lost, and with it the words and messages it carried. We are burning the library of Alexandria every time we destroy a hectare of pristine habitat.

Having reviewed diverse theories and hypotheses on the waning of the Age of Enlightenment in Central Asia, it is now time to step back and raise a larger question: does it really require an explanation? The assumption behind our search for causes is that if one or another factor had not come into play, the movement of thought would have continued. But that great period of intense cerebration, that age of inquiry and innovation, had lasted for more than four centuries. If more information on the centuries preceding the Arab invasion had survived, we might confidently extend that period of flowering even further back in time. Even without this addition, the Age of Enlightenment was five times longer than the lifetime of Periclean Athens; a century longer than the entire history of the intellectual center of Alexandria from its foundation to the destruction of its library; only slightly shorter than the entire life span of the Roman Republic; longer than the Ming or Qing dynasties in China and the same length as the Han; about the same length as the history of Japan from the founding of the Tokugawa dynasty to the present; and of England from the age of Shakespeare to our own day. As they say in the theater world, it had a long run. It is well and good to speak of causes of the decline of the passion for inquiry and innovation, or of some supposed exhaustion of creative energies. But just as we feel little need to discover the cause of a nonagenarian’s death, we need not inquire too urgently into the cause of the waning of this remarkable age. Of course, the question of why the region as a whole remained in a state of backwardness from the end of the Age of Enlightenment down to recent times is vitally important, but it involves many factors besides those that came into play in the intellectual decline. It should form the subject of another book.

My Latin teacher would say, “We must be grateful that we don’t know what the great books were that perished in Alexandria, because if we knew what they were, we’d be inconsolable.

Suppose we wanted to transmit this knowledge, everything we had ever learned, to another world. First we would want to make the representation as compact as possible. By squeezing out redundancies we could compress the number so that it would occupy smaller and smaller spaces. In fact, if we are adept enough we can represent the number in a manner that requires almost no space whatsoever. We simply take the long string of digits and put a decimal point in front of it so that it becomes a fraction between 0 and 1, a mere point on a line. Then we choose a smooth stick and declare one end 0 and the other end 1. Measuring carefully, we make a notch in the stick -- a point on the continuum representing the number. All of our history, our philosophy, our music, our art, our science -- everything we know would be implicit in that single mark. To retrieve the world's knowledge, one would measure the distance of the notch from the end of the stick, then convert the number back into the books, the music, the images. The success of the scheme would depend on the fineness of the mark and the exactness of the measurement. The slightest imprecision would cause whole Libraries of Alexandria to burn. [...] Suppose the medicine men of Otowi had discovered this trick. Suppose, contrary to all evidence, that they had developed a written language, a number system, and tools of enough precision to encode a single book of sacred knowledge into the notch of a prayer stick -- the very book, perhaps, that explains what the symbols on the rock walls mean. And suppose a hiker, exploring one day in the caves above Otowi, found the stick. Could the knowledge be recovered? [...] Aliens trying to decode our records might recognize what seemed to be deliberate patterns in the markings of ink on pages or the fluctuating magnetic fields of computer disks (though, again, if the information had been highly compressed, it would be harder and harder to distinguish from randomness). If they persisted, would they find truths to marvel at, signs of kindred minds? Or would they even recognize the books and tapes as things that might be worth analyzing? One can't go around measuring every notch on every stick.

Quite possibly with the image of the library of Alexandria still fresh in his mind, Caesar wished to have buildings of learning along with with people of learning. He sought the construction of his own massive library.

An obsession is a pleasure that has attained the status of an idea.” I believe that to lend a book is an incitement to theft. Superstition and the art of libraries are tightly entwined. The search for others—to text, to email, to Skype, or to play with—establishes our own identities. We are, or we become, because someone acknowledges our presence. Perhaps all intercourse—with pictures, with books, with people, with the virtual inhabitants of cyberspace—breeds sadness because it reminds us that, in the end, we are alone. Because my childhood was largely nomadic, I liked to read about settled lives running their ordinary course. And yet, I was aware that without disruption there would be no adventure. “The gods weave misfortunes for men,” King Alcinous says in the Odyssey, “so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Don Quixote has attained the state of perfect readership, knowing his books by heart in the strictest sense of the word. Loss helps you remember, and loss of a library helps you remember who you truly are. “We must be grateful that we don’t know what the great books were that perished in Alexandria, because if we knew what they were, we’d be inconsolable.” Losing things is not so bad because you learn to enjoy not what you have but what you remember. You should grow accustomed to loss. Buenos Aires has always been a city of books, ever since its foundation. I remember the curious pride I felt when our history teacher told us that Buenos Aires had been founded with a library.

It wasn’t hard to access back catalogues of stuff from his own time, of course, the big movies, many of the TV series – though there were baffling blanks, and he had the sense that there had been some major loss of data over the centuries. A burning of the library of Alexandria, that had swept away, for instance, a 2030s big-budget remake of Blake’s Seven. He had found a reference to its existence, and that was all. An agonising loss.

By the time of Archimedes death the world center of intellectual life already had shifted from Athens to Alexandria. . . . Here Ptolemy I . . . established . . . a vast library and museum where scientists and scholars could carry on their studies.

Soon Alexandria’s Museum was a busy hive of intellectual labor, even as Strato and his Peripatetic colleagues provided the impetus for another act of Ptolemaic patronage, the Great Library. It was probably inspired by Aristotle’s library at the Lyceum and embodied a key Aristotelian principle: that the starting point of all true knowledge is not (contrary to Plato) abstract reasoning, but the collection and comparison of individual specimens, whether they be plants and shellfish or books and manuscripts.

It is possible, I sense, to make a specialism out of anything and hence unravel the native confidence of those you address. The more I read, the more my daughter recedes from me and becomes an object whose use I must re-learn, whose conformity to other objects like her is a matter for liminal anxiety. Most of these books begin, like science fiction, with a sort of apocalyptic scenario in which the world we know has vanished, replaced by another in whose principles we must be educated. The vanished world is the mother’s own. It is the world of her childhood, and her own mother was her last living inhabitant. In those days, the story goes, mothers were told what to do by _their_ mothers. The apocalypse, of unspecified cause but generally agreed to have been recent, put paid to that. Like the great library at Alexandria, a world of knowledge has gone up in flames. A chain has been broken. We will never know what the mothers whispered to their daughters, what secrets they handed down the years. Something about leaving babies in prams at the bottom of the garden, we think. But the point is that this is new—in many ways better—world. You are its first mother. And this is the first book.

Everything burns eventually. People. Places. Things. Trends. Movements. Epochs. Hypotheses. Data. Conclusions. All the knowledge we could ever hope to store in a thousand libraries in a thousand Alexandrias. It all burns. How funny. How sad.

The word Jerusalem did not originally refer to a location. It referred to a company of the Magi united by their common knowledge of nature and the heavens. The word is probably a corruption of derusalem, darusalem or djerusalem connoting the Druids. It is found in the Greek as Hierosolyma, meaning “high” or “sacred.” The root hieros (meaning sacred) gives us hierophant and hierarchy. It referred to the wise ones, the elect, the keepers of knowledge. The letter “H” was later pronounced as a “J,” and thus we arrive at Jerus-alem. In Arabic Aleim means “the gods” and gives us the Hebrew word Elohim that connotes a plurality of gods. Jerusalem would, in its simplest form, mean “place of the godly or godlike men.” The Roman mythographers cunningly took words like “Jerusalem,” “Hebrew,” “Jew,” “Israelite” and “Phoenician,” etc, and attributed them where they did not belong. They massacred those who once bore these titles, so honoring and respecting mere names and words was not a major concern. The sacred language had, by deliberate design, been successfully eradicated, and soon the world would believe whatever the new Romish hegemony dictated concerning world history and religion. Ireland’s great civilization was erased and Egypt’s civilization obliterated. Alexandria was burned to the ground and many other colleges and libraries smoldered to ash. Eventually, the world would forget the role of Athens, and time would not spare Rome’s vast empire. It too would eventually diminish and cease to exist. Those who sought to erase traces of Ireland’s contribution and tradition were most successful in their diabolical and sacrilegious undertaking.