The Meso-American book burning is exactly the story of a Bunch of Catholic Fundamentalist Burning Unique books of Priceless value. One small thing (which I think only further substantiates the general point you’re making). He makes a number of dubious claims, presents speculation as fact and makes several flat out factual errors – true history pedants can find a detailed analysis everything he gets wrong or overstates in this post to the Reddit /r/badhistory group. I take your observations on that as a light-hearted remark. Hey Tim, Have you ever watched HistoryBuffs? But still suggest Bagnall’s figures seem a little too skeptical. Sozomen was writing in the following century and, as a Christian, may not be reliable on the lurid details, but Socrates Scholasticus, writing a little closer to the events, confirms that many Christians were killed in the unrest. A virtual alternate universe.”, “If religious barbarians hadn’t destroyed the library of Alexandria, we’d probably have colonies on Mars and the Jovian moons by now.”, “probably the single greatest loss to general knowledge,science engineering etc in history, even hitlers book burning pales by comparison”, “Science was set back two hundred years at least.as an example remember the romans had compex central heating 2000 years ago not widely seen again till 20th century.”. Julian says in a letter “I know the books of George, if not all of them then at any rate most”. “. So by adopting the almost certainly far  too high figure of an average of 50 scrolls to contain the work of each writer, Bagnall arrives as a mere 31,250 scrolls to contain all the works of all the writers we know about to the end of the third century. So the largely unempirical and abstract nature of Greek natural philosophy and the fact that it was generally socially divorced from the practical arts of engineering and architecture meant that most Greek and Roman scientists did little to advance technology, and the idea that the Great Library would have been filled with men excitedly sketching flying machines or submarines is, once again, a fantasy. Trajan’s library also seems to have established a design and layout that would be the model for libraries for centuries: a hall with desks and tables for readers with books in niches or shelves around the walls and on a mezzanine level. Carrier assures his online fan club “[a]ll he describes is the raid on its pagan statues, and some vague looting otherwise. However, most scholars would put it closer to 391. Epiphanius and John Tzetzes). Hmm …, “We know that it was ransacked on the orders of the Alexandrian bishop George the Cappodocian c. 360 AD and it is likely the library was looted in this action.”. Today, a hopeful high school football team in the provinces might call itself the “rival” of Manchester United. It will happen. Every building in the classical world had a function that we would today call religious, from the sacred hearths and shrines of the lares in houses to the boundary stones dedicated to terminus to the great temples and every political or administrative office had some form of priestly duties. Bagnal estimates the number of books or scrolls in the library at Alexandria, based on an absurd and profoundly unhistorical assumption: that it would contain only presently known Hellenistic writers. And part of the point is that few scholars in this period were simply “natural philosophers” any more than others were purely “textual critics” or “lexicographers”. Please keep comments on posts relevant to the post. Nor would they have taken the step of considering that different forms of matter, liquid or gas were made up of different combinations of atoms and so decide to experiment with these substances to understand this better, since this was completely contrary to their (erroneous) conception of the “Four Elements” of Earth, Air, Water and Fire. Caesar wrote of starting the fire in the harbor but neglected to mention the burning of the Library. Tim, have you read the historically-illiterate crap im-skeptical has posted in the comment section? Instead, his narrative stops in 378. When all this is pointed out some New Atheists try to invoke counter-evidence. Angry at this compromise, as the soldiers began to carry out the order, the Christian mob joined in the destruction, and made sure the great idol of Serapis was also destroyed. “Especially given the fact that the defining characteristic of Hellenistic culture, was the assimilation by Greeks, of Asian and African, Egyptian culture.”. Even more significantly, Eunapius of Antioch was a pagan, a scholar and a vehement anti-Christian, so had every reason to condemn any destruction of a library, yet he too makes no mention of it. Alexandria was founded in Egypt by Alexander the Great. Most philosophers either came from the upper class (though maybe its lower echelons in many cases) or had rich patrons or both, which meant most philosophers had little interest in making or inventing things: that was generally the preserve of lowly mechanics and slaves. If it is evidence that the Greco-Roman world was on the brink of a technological revolution and was only stymied by the rise of Christianity, one has to wonder what kept them from achieving this wondrous thing for the 600 years between its invention and the conversion of Constantine. The absolute god idea prevailed because its followers were more numerous than the believers in Reason and Philosophy to figure spiritual things out and in science and technonlogy to find some solutions to practical challenges. Once you have and absolute truth, revealed by God or dreamed, and wether there is a God not, deep thinkingeis impossible. Unless, of course, you imagine it was a very delicate, gentle and selective ransacking that left the collection of valuable books intact. The New Atheist mythic conception of the “Great Library of Alexandria” bears very little resemblance to any historical actuality. The Mouseion at Alexandria was far from  the only shrine to the Muses in the ancient world, nor was it the only one with an associated centre of study. 1449-67, p. 1459). James Hannam in his summary of the evidence (see “The Foundation and Loss of the Royal and Serapeum Libraries of Alexandria”, 2003) provides a useful summary table: Some of these figures are interdependent, so for example Ammianus is probably depending, directly or indirectly, on Aulus Gellius for his “700,000” figure, which in turn is where Kirsch gets the same number in the quote above. The Museum was a shrine of the Muses modeled after the Lyceum of Aristotle in Athens. The most harmless small thing gets you a warning. This means he is not just referring the books George had back in the 340s, though he is stressing he knew what books George had then as a further warning against being short-changed on the collection. This why Christianity, Judaism, Islam can not develop drastic new ideas; the material and the spiritual is all pre-explained by God. The emperor Julian condemned George, but he nowhere mentions that George may have taken any books from the library. For instance, Mark Antony was supposed to have given Cleopatra over 200,000 scrolls for the Library long after Julius Caesar is accused of burning it. All I can find in the text above is “writing around 378 AD, Ammianus Marcellinus” etc. This is why the Ancient Jews did not produce anyhing close to what the Greeks produced, certainly they could produce demogracy (rule of men by themselves, making therr own laws) because divine law made it impossible. That aside, the idea that the Mouseion  was a major centre of scientific speculation is at best an exaggeration and largely yet another fantasy. Orestes was said to be under the influence of Hypatia, a female philosopher and daughter of the "last member of the Library of Alexandria". So, allegedly, all the texts were destroyed by using them as tinder for the bathhouses of the city. Ammianus is muddling the Serapeum with the main Mouseion library with his reference to Caesar’s fire and the mythical “700,000” books, but the rest of his description is detailed and unique to his work in many respects. I see the “Cult of a Nice” turning people into idiots everyday. On the whole, Sagan’s roll call of great scholars is mainly hyperbole and speculation rather than historical fact. In 391 AD the Serapeum was indeed torn down by Roman soldiers and a Christian mob and it is here, finally, that we find the seed of the myth. The main culprit here is, unfortunately, the late Carl Sagan. I mean, where else could you just hop off of the main road and go to “college”? I say it was somewhere between 378 and 390 and am inclined toward the earlier end of that time bracket, with revisions and edits later. Which is why I keep saying the evidence is circumstantial. The temple to the Muses had a dedicated priest appointed by the Ptolemaic kings and was the centre of a complex that included an exhedra, or hall, with recesses and seats for lectures and private study. . Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s popular history The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (Vintage, 2012) won critical acclaim and even garnered him a Pulitzer Prize, despite being panned by actual historians for its many howlers and weirdly old-fashioned historiography (see my detailed critical review here, with links to other scathing critiques by historians). If there is a story that forms the heart of New Atheist bad history, it’s the tale of the Great Library of Alexandria and its destruction by a Christian mob. He’s a youtube channel that reviews historical films and he has done a review of the film Agora 1 year ago. If we were (more plausibly) to use a lower average output per author, the hypotheses needed to save the numbers would become proportionally more outlandish.” (Bagnall, p. 353). In 48 BC, Caesar was pursuing Pompey into Egypt when he was suddenly cut off by an Egyptian fleet at Alexandria. The library of Alexandria are desrtroyed more than once. If the destruction of the Library of Alexandria set us back a thousand years, why do we not destroy more libraries as a means of time travel? Assuming the enormous number of non-Greek works required to get anywhere near “500,0000 scrolls” based on little more than an assumption that the Greeks of Egypt would be more open to “barbarian” works than Greeks elsewhere is pretty hopeful stuff. (Letter of Julian to the citizens of Alexandria, quote in Socrates Scholasticus, Church History, III.3), “There is nothing in any of the sources indicating that George plundered the Serapeum library. The story of the destruction of the Great Library is a positivist fairy tale, cobbled together from disparate elements and bearing almost no relationship to accurate history. Finally a place where people are reasonable and an environment to learn. It is also quite likely that even if the Museum was destroyed with the main library the outlying "daughter" library at the Temple of Serapis continued on. What about works from former empires such as Persian, Babylon? He says the Serapeum was “once a temple, but was later reconsecrated to knowledge”. The Burning of the Library of Alexandria, 1876. As Bagnall notes, there would need to be dozens of copiesd of absolutely everything and all works would have to be take up many scrolls to get even close to the higher figures given for the Library’s holdings. There is also the variant story (as likely, maybe more likely, to be repeated by Christians as by atheists) that at an even later date, by the Muslim caliph Umar. We can perhaps shoehorn in Euclid and the physicians and anatomists Herophilos and Erasistratos, depending on when the Mouseion  was established, butoverall the evidence for the institution as some great centre of scientific research is actually rather thin. So what exactly are you asking? Pardon? As in your blog you say he mentions the library in the past tense… (so there is some discrepancy here).”, “There ARE besides in the city temples pompous with lofty roofs, conspicuous among them the Serapeum, which, though feeble words merely belittle it, yet IS so adorned with extensive columned halls, with almost breathing statues, and a great number of other works of art, that next to the Capitolium, with which revered Rome elevates herself to eternity, the whole world beholds nothing more magnificent. This is why Ammianus used 378 as his end point. a pseudo-atheist shill for Christian triumphalism [and] delusionally insane.” – Dr. Richard Carrier PhD, unemployed blogger. Therefore, we can rule out that George took books from the Serapeum, let alone that he plundered a substantial part of that library. Anyone who lives in, or near, my home town of Geelong and reads the local news papers will come to the same conclusion. Scholars traveled the world to find books to bring back to the library. “We know that it was ransacked on the orders of the Alexandrian bishop George the Cappodocian c. 360 AD and it is likely the library was looted in this action.” 97, No. Christians, Jews and Pagans all lived together in the city. It was a shrine with scholars attached to it, not a secular university. I’ve seen guys who say some harsh stuff which should by all means get them punished but don’t. The earliest account of Caesar’s siege damaging Alexandria comes from a lost work by Livy via an epitome by Florus (Florus, II.13) which describes Caesar burning the area around the docks to deprive enemy archers of a position on which to fire on his troops, and this is echoed by Lucan (The Civil War, X.24). His concern is clearly with the offense to the gods”. 2: Emperor Theodosius I via Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria This theory is even more complicated, and not just because it technically involves two jocks. A library so extensive that the emperor Julian later had it confiscated for his personal use. As such, it has not been reviewed for accuracy by the University and does not necessarily adhere to the University's scholarly standards. He famously made an aeolipile, though he didn’t actually invent it, given that it had already been described by the Roman engineer and architect Vitruvius, but this can only be called a “steam engine” in the loosest sense of the term. Rome had long since ceased to be the Imperial capital, even of the western Empire and he is describing how “the venerable city” was one of “nothing save dissensions, taverns, and other similar vulgarities”. Since historians know all too well that countless ancient things, writings, have been lost from ancient times.”. This means that a Greek conversation about “atoms” was largely an abstract and metaphysical exercise about the philosophical nature of a thing and how many times it could be divided conceptually and what this may mean; the word comes from the Greek ἄτομος meaning “unhewn, uncut, indivisible”. But this was carried out by troops; not some careful committee ready to only remove certain items and leave others untouched. The constant squabbles between would-be Emperors sapped the Empire’s strength, not to mention the damage the emerging christian church inflicted with it’s incessant guerrilla warfare campaigns against it’s rival superstitions. The answer lies not in the evidence about the Great Library, but in the history of its daughter library and annex in the Serapeum. If we had lower figures earlier and higher ones later then you may have had a point, but they are all over the place. United States 1814 Troops of the British Army The library was destroyed during the War of 1812 when British forces set fire to the U.S. Capitol during the Burning of Washington. It would certainly be unusual for a Greco-Roman library to give much attention to “barbarian” works, even if they are translated into Greek, but the Library was founded the succcessors of Alexander and so, for a while at least, the Ptolemies were much more connected to the eastern world than their more insular Greek and Roman cultural successors. It doesn’t take much thought, however, to realise this makes absolutely no sense. V, Ch. Some try to argue that the Christian chroniclers would be ashamed of the crime of destroying the last remnant of the Great Library and so hushed it up in their accounts. “It was the largest library in the ancient world, containing over 700,000 books.”. Yes, because Roman troops were renowned for respecting that kind of thing. Upon learning of "a great library containing all the knowledge of the world" the conquering general supposedly asked Caliph Omar for instructions. Concerning possible books/scrolls in translation, was the Alexandrian library even an attempt to amass “accumulated knowledge ” across ancient cultures? The popular image of the Great Library as an echoing hall lined with shelves of scrolls with desks and tables for scholars is almost certainly inaccurate. Temples had begun to be starved of funds with the conversion of the emperors of Christianity and the slower but gradual conversion of many rich patrons and city benefactors. This means you present this statement as the absolute truth. So the library would contain many non Hellenistic writings. Other works of Greek poetry, such as the odes of Pindar, were also analysed and studied in a similar way, as were the works of the great Athenian playwrights. It’s certainly a great story, retold in Carl Sagan’s seminal Cosmos TV series (1980) and in Alejandro Amenabar’s film Agora (2009). The emperor Julian condemned George, but he nowhere mentions that George may have taken any books from the library.”. Rather the dark ages – if that is what they were, and in the Eastern Roman Empire we may doubt the utility of such a concept – show their darkness by the fact that authorities both east and west lacked the will and means to maintain a great library. In Greek, I would expect not only “Hellenistic” Greek works, but also classic ones. Roman aristocrats and rulers also included the establishment of substantial libraries as part of their civic service. The fact that the Great Library was actually associated with a religious shrine is something that is ignored or glossed over in many modern accounts. The only problem is … it never happened. I respect the right of people to believe in God, just like I have to respect the right of people to believe anything. This probably refers to when the teenage Julian and his brother Gallus lived on the Imperial estate of Marcellum in Cappodocia, before George was installed as bishop in Alexandria. The Serapeum was always a temple and was not “reconsecrated” to anything. You see, there are, unfortunately, a tremendous number of widespread misconceptions about what the Library of Alexandria was and what happened to it. Finally, it seems to stem in no small part from (yet again) Sagan’s influential but fanciful picture of the institution as a distinctively secular hub of scientific research and, by implication, technological innovation. After his death, his nephew Cyril became Patriarch. In this film however he has portrayed “Fundamentalism” of all the religions as being the cause of the Library’s destruction (yes, he actually thinks the library was destroyed at this time without fact checking) and of course by his means “fundamentalism” It was mostly just Christianity, nothing to do with Paganism (especially when the pagans were “Rational Skeptic Philosopher of Greatest of Knowledge who built rockets!). Roger S. Bagnall is characteristically scathing about this silly idea: It is idle …. share. Historians also sometimes refer to Greek natural philosophy as “science” and popularisations of the history of science draw simplistic direct lines between things like Greek discussions of “atoms” and modern atomic theory. As we know from the study of ancient and modern rhetoric. Selected sources:"The Vanished Library" by Luciano Canfora"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbons. 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