The Silence of historical evidence often prompts a curious even dangerous psychological response projection when history cannot give us an answer to what was we fill those evidentiary gaps with our own aspirations our own fears our own Grievances and most of all to what concerns us modern people far removed from just that history in effect history hallucination become fused into a delirium that often comes to function as myth for better and For Worse perhaps one of the best examples of this phenomenon is the origins the Holdings and the fate of the Library of Alexandria you may be surprised to learn that very little in the way of reliable historical evidence can be had about the library at all there's literally no archaeological evidence of the library's existence at this point and yet the library between history and hallucination has become the repository of ancient wisdom holding hundreds of thousands of volumes in Papyrus roles whose destruction represents a descent into the Dark Ages derailing the progress of History itself and the cause of that destruction tells us about our fears and anxieties even our hatreds the dictator Julius Caesar the fundamentalist Christian mob the throngs of Eastern others in the form of the Muslim Conquest let's try to shake off this delirium and see what the evidence direct and indirect circumstantial and not might tell us about the library its Origins the scope of its Holdings the relationship it had to other libraries of its time and how the library at Alexandri came to become the stuff of dreams if you're interested in Magic hermetic philosophy Alchemy cabala or the history of the occult make sure to subscribe here to esoterica and check out my other content on topics in esotericism including Cur playlists also if you want to support this work of providing accessible scholarly free content on topics and esotericism here on YouTube I'd hope you consider supporting my work over at my patreon you can consider a onetime donation you can use a super thanks option below the video or you can pick up some of our black metal style merch over at the store tab but let's turn to the history and the myths of the Library of Alexandria I'm Dr Justin Sledge and welcome to esoterica where we explore the Arcane in history philosophy and religion [Music] to be sure the library Alexandria was not the first attempt the first state sponsored attempt at collecting under a single roof a vast array of written wisdom temples palaces administrative centers had long created Archives of varying degrees of public accessibility not that the public cared that much I mean you're talking about roughly a 1 to 3% maximum literacy rate in the ancient near East but the Hittites held substantial collections including even preserving religious rituals exterior to their own religion using the conform script that they employed to write their language in fact a new Indo-European language kisic was just discovered in one of those religious texts preserved by the Hittites so a brand new induran language from the Hittites well brand new not perhaps the grandest such archive or library was that of Ashner bipol holding more than 30,000 uniform tablets including the masterpieces of the Epic of gilgames the creation account of the enuma Elish and the myth of the first man adapa that collection was probably Frozen in time in 613 CE when Nineveh was destroyed by fire thus firing those clay tablets and preserving them down in the dark for us to discover thousands of years later even the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament tells of an Israelite Royal archive which held volumes such as mil Yahweh the wars of Yahweh which is quoted in the Torah at numbers 2133 through 14 but is otherwise lost to history like the book of yashar Egypt as well held State archives and the houses of life or the temples also had attached libraries of varying sizes from which some scant esoteric Literature Like The Book of to or the conversations in the house of life as the translators have it survive in substantial demonic fragments now if you're interested in libraries before Alexandria well by golly there's a whole book with just your name on it no it's actually just called the libraries before Alexander and it's utterly amazing I love this book it covers all the protol libraries of the ancient near East all the way up to the Library of Alexandria in the 3r century BC so check out that book it's amazing and overpriced but by the hegemony of the Helen in the region of the conquest of Alexandria archive libraries of various types various scopes of holding and various sizes would have been already ancient in the ancient near East but if would be the unique combination of the explosion of Greek thought and literature the use of durable lightweight Egyptian Papyrus as a recording medium and the project of heniz and Conquest Conquest that would set the stage for the three great libraries of that part of the world library of Ephesus the library at pergamum and of course the Library of Alexandria with the death of Alexandra the great his Empire was split and wared over by his generals and their descendants one front of that competition aside from just straight Warfare was pride of place of the various Regional capitals and the foundation of the Library of Alexandria can't be understood outside of that very particular talic desire for Alexandria to outshine the rest of the helenistic capitals including and especially Athens this is where they're going to really Flex on Athens is this old library Flex thus the library is as much a part of Empire building and a display of prestige as as much as it was anything else and as we'll see when this Library Flex was no longer needed or even possible because of constant Warfare the library would sadly suffer as well further we should also keep constantly in mind that the library was the the tip of the Spear of the process of heniz something that all of the generals and Alexander were dedicated to which was a frankly Colonial and assimilationist program whereby local particularities could be brought under the cultural linguistic and even religious hegemony of their Helen Imperial overlords thus the library at Alexandria was by no means a neutral Hoover a collector of any and all wisdom rather its task was very specifically to assimilate all of that wisdom into the specifically helenistic modality hence there being no evidence in the library had or even had any interest in having I don't know some of the indigenous wisdom of the Egyptians you know the very country the tmes were colonizing and the most famous project of translation from the entire Library Bears this out the translation of the Hebrew Bible the tanak into Greek known to us today as the even at times proving rationalizing I mean one of the Hebrew terms the technical terms for sorcerer for instance is translated there as phacus poisoner and one of the terms for Necromancer is translated as belly talker venquest removing any of the metaphysical sense of these terms from their original meaning in the Hebrew further text bearing indigenous Egyption perspectives SE heliz and later Roman occupation as fully apocalyptic the Hermetic literature comes to mind the so-called hermetic apocalypse for what they saw as the destruction of their world the Temple of the whole world which was Egypt for them the decline of their sacred language and the subsumption of their religious life into the Oblivion of Greco Roman assimilation it was a sadly apt prophecy the Egyptians didn't like this thus whatever the Library of Alexandria was and what it was meant to do and that's clearly to be a Prestige project of the early tommies in the service of the colonial agenda of heniz that should never be forgotten it certainly certainly was not any attempt at neutral objective wisdom collection in the pure interest of forwarding and bitting human wisdom that's not how ancient or even modern people work from bacon to Fuko we're always reminded how knowledge and power are bound up and how the pretention of neutrality it's very almost always the velvet glove hiding the Iron Fist so we know there was a library there but who found it we don't know there's no ancient account of the origins of the library in the area where the library has been probably it's never been excavated so there's basically no archaeological evidence of the library either now if you visit Alexandria the general belief by archaeologists it was probably somewhere near the contempor Al Andria opera house and the eliahu Anvi synagogue which is pretty amazing if you get the chance to visit Alexandria but exactly where it was remains a mystery and it's not going to be excavated anytime soon regardless there are only a few passing references to its founding a 12th century Byzantine scholar 12th century Byzantine scholar of dubious reliability has tmy thei Philadelphia inaugurating the institution though he may be relying on some ancient sources there is a lot of Reason To Doubt his account specifically he has a certain Demetrios Gathering books for tmy II though that very Demetrios actually died in Eternal Exile precisely for not backing tmy II during his succession following the death of tmy the so that doesn't really make a lot of sense why would you yeah the other source for much of the early information about the founding of the library is from the wonderfully mythological Infamous letter of artius which is both pseudepigraphic and full of all kinds of wild but frankly fun stories it's a great text of Mythology it also includes the story of the septu miracle that is to say 72 Jewish translators independently translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek all the while produce the exact same translation independently of course as if you know Guided by the hand of God no way that happened of course the letter is not only ancient Jewish propaganda to ingratiate helenistic Jews with the tommies you should remember more Jews lived in Egypt at this time than they did in Judea by a wide margin at this time the Jewish quarter of Alexandria was substantial calculated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of a third of the footprint of the entire city so it was really important that the Jews of Alexandria and their helenistic overlords saw eye to eye which they always wouldn't so while the letter of aristeus makes for fun reading it's incredibly doubtful as a historical text so we don't really know when or by whom the library was founded however a decent guess and it's a guess can be made that given the literary and Technical output starting in the late 3rd century and end of the 2 Century the library had not only been founded around that time but was actually really at the height of its Prestige institutional support and its ability to acquire ire Holdings this would be the period where literary Scholars would begin to settle the final redactions of Homer producing the volumes that we all know and love today osines would discredit flat earthers today back then by accurately calculating the circumference of the earth advances in medicine would be had assuming that you believe that galenic medicine was an advance early Alchemy would be appearing at this time astrology was becoming a true mathematical science at this time truly the Golden Age of the Library of Alexandria there in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE but really stretching for a couple of generations of Scholars and this is not to mention also the connection of the library to the serapium whose Holdings might have been referred to in some of the literature as the daughter of the alexandrian collection though it's kind of vague in the sources and the larger Research Center like institution of the museon the precursor to what we now call museums a temple to the muses which also had a small Library attached to it and attracted more literary-minded researchers those are the folks redacting Homer and hathat however the origins relationships and somewhat shared Fates between these three institutions is frankly very unclear it's difficult to know what's happening at any given time with any of these three institutions and probably like any institution they significantly transitioned in their role and their prominence over the centuries of their existence but but without doubt the Library of Alexandria was the largest holder of texts in the ancient world at least this part of the ancient world no one really contests that fact but how many volumes did that come to and what were they now it's difficult to know with any certainty whatsoever but numbers range enormously in ancient literature from 40,000 to the utterly impossible figure of 700,000 rolls even an exterior Storehouse was said to have contained 42,800 100 books there's even that lovely tale of uh book collecting Zeal by galin that tmy III searched any boats coming into the harbor and seized their books for copying and he raided the Holdings at Athens to gobble up all the roles of the tragedians and the dramatists of that time again these Tales make for great stories and they're great propaganda for the tmes but they're really a very dubious doubtful historical value it's just not the way scribe roll and book culture worked much less Maritime trade at that time just as records of ancient battles suffer from Soldier hyperinflation where you have hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the field in some ancient gig battles well so too do most these numbers in addition to how susceptible numbers are to Corruption of a manuscript tradition you get all kinds of problems with numbers and manuscripts Roger bunal without any doubt uh his article is quintessential for this episode being made it's really the most sober historical assessment of the library that I know of you can find the link in the description has done some absolutely wonderful forensic mathematics to get us a more sober more realistic number for the Holdings at Alexandria he points out by the late 4th Century there are about 450 authors for whom at least a few lines of their text survive plus another 175 from the third that are named but for whom basically nothing survives people like CPUs if the average writer composed say 50 rolls worth of material although 24 is probably closer to a real average of how much was produced by an average author but let's go with 50 roles that would only produce 31,250 rolls total if the number of 400,000 or 700,000 rolls were to be trusted then either the foundational Library must have contained hundreds of copies of texts or 90% of the world's ancient authors just just aren't even known to us by name they're never quoted they're never referenced and they're never otherwise cataloged in any form that or some combination of the two but neither of those frankly seem plausible of course for these numbers to be off it's well it's probable numbers are always off when you give with Antiquity but the idea that they're off by orders of magnitude that seems to me pretty unlikely bnot does another ingenious calculation to my mind if we take the the total words known to have been composed by the 2nd Century we come to around 3.77 million words total given a somewhat liberal estimate of about 10,000 words per role that figure only gives us 377 roles 377 straussberger an imminent historian estimates that the ancient Greek historians the most longwinded through CS for instance of writers produced about 40 times more than what have survived down to us to this day day so that might push the count up to about 15,000 rolls further calculations can drive that number up a bit more but nowhere near 400,000 much less 700,000 rolls and even the lower bound of 40,000 rolls is frankly pretty tough to get to another Avenue of estimation is the panac case the closest thing that we that we don't have to a catalog of the library it wasn't the catalog but it was based on and it's lost we don't have it but we do know how long it was about 120 rolls or books again based on some somewhat liberal but still historically possible estimates if it were composed of standard rolls of 20 sheets of 27 columns written in a tight very tight hand of 44 lines to a column the panes will come out to be around 14256 lines total now the binakis also contains a lot more than just and authors but also anecdotes comments arguments random ideas Etc and if those asides only occupi about a third of the panak with the other twoth thirds being just a list of authors and books we still don't even reach close to 100,000 rols total for the library and that's with really liberal estimates and very very cramped writing another way of getting some sense of disparity in the role calculations that we have from Antiquity versus what probably existed are similar estimates of Holdings in the 200,000 R range for libraries like at Ephesus and pergamum the smaller sister libraries to Alexandria while the Alexandria library again has never been found or excavated so we really don't know much about its actual footprint the other two are preserved to a significant degree especially the one at Ephesus the problem here just becomes well one of geometry the buildings just aren't big enough to have held hundreds of thousands of rolles by no means Scrolls unlike the Codex the book are very inefficient for lots of reasons for instance just try to go try to find a textual reference and a a scroll I mean anyone who had to futs with a tour scroll you know but also volumetrically they simply take up much more space Visa the information they contain compared to the Codex the Codex is a far superior technology now I've personally walked around in the library of Ephesus and some basic geometry of the four Space versus the size of the rolls not to mention the use of the shelving the tables that were in there the fact there are statues in there and things like this there just isn't enough room for hundreds of thousands of rolls thousands yeah maybe even cramped tens of thousands but I mean Papyrus rolls take up space It's a Wonderful pain in my neck for me to figure out where to put books also the creation and copying of Papyrus roles and trust me there I know a thing or two about that I've actually copied out long chunks of text just to get a sense of what they might have been dealing with in fact here's the copy hiding in the esoterica area esoterica place where I've copied out an entire section the very first book of Aristotle metaphysics by hand own Papyrus on basically the same size of a Papyrus that would have been used at the time although in slightly bigger hand more of like a a book hand uh that would be a little bit more extravagant but you get some sense of just sort of how you know thick this is double rolled and this is only the first book of the of aerosotle metaphysics and again this is a little bit extravagant for what have existed at the time so this is one roll one book of aristot mod metaphysics it's not it's not insubstantial but if you get some sense of trying to store hundreds of thousands of these rolled up much more tighter than this probably even them imagine hundreds of thousands of these shoved into a room I don't know basically this size or something there's no way you're fitting hundreds of thousands of these in there also we'll talk more about this in a little bit when we get down to it you can see these things can get damaged in fact I left this one in my car and it got rained on but I decided to leave the damage because well books got damaged in Antiquity and so I decided to leave it but I can tell you that these rolls are pretty pretty durable but they are not by any stretch of the imagination invulnerable and they can fall victim to very serious damage over time we'll talk about that in just a minute and without people constantly copying and correcting and repairing these time especially in a very human environment like I live in Michigan or in Mississippi where I copied this out reaks havoc on Papyrus so we'll get back to that in just a minute but I want to tell you that when I look at these texts when I think about this I'm not thinking about this in some purely abstract numbers since I've copied out these books and I can tell you right having copied them out you get some sense of what's going on in them by physically experiencing that process and I can tell you I really cannot imagine hundreds of thousands of these roles existing in the Library of Alexandria the math doesn't work the geometry doesn't work and as we'll see in a little bit unfortunately the institutional support is not going to work but if you're into caligraphy you should copy out an entire Scroll of your favorite I don't know book of Homer or something a book of The Iliad or the Odyssey just to get a sense of how much you should love those books because man they are a pain in the nck to produce I'm going put my Aristotle scroll over here to keep me company now you might be thinking what about all the books in Greek well what about books in Hebrew or Egyptian or Latin or the akashic records that are hidden beneath the Sphinx over there in Egypt somehow those could have swollen the numbers sure they could have swollen the numbers of the libraries again helenistic attitudes were assimilationist they wanted to read the books of barbaric peoples but but in Greek and moreover they wanted those barbaric peoples to assimilate to their ways not the other way around we strive to learn to read texts in their ancient primary languages but that's just not really part of the agenda of Hellenism it's an assimilationist program in fact frankly much the opposite second by the time Latin literature appeared on the scene it was primarily confined to the peninsula over there in Italy it never made a splash in the East where where Greek remained the lingua CA the lingua franka of the day and by then frankly the library was already in Decline as we'll see so the political agenda of the Library of Alexandria the available text to be housed within it and the spatial limitations of the structure itself probably represent a real impediment to hundreds of thousands of roles even multiple tens of thousands I think often we see estimates of 40 to 400,000 in the literature and online but I think 40,000 roles probably represents more of a true historical upper bound probably 40,000 is an upper bound but that's still truly impressive most contemporary research libraries like I don't know Colombia or Harvard they can only boast 20 to 50,000 books in the mid 19th century thus the library of Alexandria's Holdings were probably along with the bkma of bakda destroyed by the Mongols in 1258 these were probably the largest Western libraries in the world up until the 19th century now we don't need artificially inflated ridiculous numbers to make that point though if you want a golden age of massive libraries well you're you're living in it now the library at your local research University or Central Library in your city it contains orders of magnitude more books than all the libraries of the ancient world combined and if you want to taste the Library of Alexandria is holding just go spend an afternoon in the section where the lob classical editions are the wall of green or red volumes are their absolute best glimpse into that hallowed past so if you want to appreciate what the alexandrian library looked like just go hang out with an afternoon with the lobe classical Library all right let's get to the uh to the blame game who destroyed the library art and literature preserve the image of the library a fire destroyed in a single conf flagor that set Western progress back centuries there's also another place of projection this is also a place of psychological projection by setting the blame here we name who we fear or hate most often it's more about our own life and times than it is what actually happened in Alexandria I certainly grew up with that narrative but again is any of that true again this is all wrapped up with the the question of why the library existed in the first place it was first and foremost The Prestige structure to display toic Hemy that very hegemony would eventually come to falter both under indigenous Egyptian uprisings against the tmes and by rival soled attacks in times of such instability governments fund armies not libraries the tommies themselves would ultimately have to embrace more of an Egyptian image actually to maintain Ain local power to basically quash local Egyptian resistance something that Cosmopolitan helenistic Scholars that would have attended Library they would have probably scorned that as barbaric further toic cronies were placed as Scholars unsurprisingly cronyism and in those very power struggles the institutions there probably paid the ultimate price in such a Game of Thrones moment tmy VII purged purged the intellectuals for Alexandria in 145 BCE this is probably a couple hundred years maybe into the library's history if that further and by then the major achievements in literary production especially on homeric literature had basically come to their conclusion the political tide had turned the social situation had shifted in an institution once a Prestige of the talic regime had come to be seen as a liability by those tommies the slow Doom of the Library of Alexandria as an intellectual Center had certainly begun with the defeat of the last tmy Cleopatra V 7th the Romans were more interested in Egypt as a Bread Basket frankly than an intellectual Center Romans didn't care about this the most constant blame for the direct destruction of the libraries laid at the feet of Julius Caesar the hated dictator Trope who did start a fire a massive fire in 48 BCE of some boats which did spread inside the harbor and definitely damaged some buildings up to and including the library now the extent of that damage isn't clear but Plutarch and gas about a century later do tell us that the fire totally destroyed the library however this is a bit odd given that suetonius has D Mission Emperor from 81 to 96 of the Common Era actually sending Scholars to Alexandria precisely to copy text that had been destroyed recently in a fire in Rome so I don't suspect that Caesar's fire totally destroyed the library or the museon or the serapium but I do suspect that Plutarch and gas are indicating to us that the library was certainly at this time well it was a a shell of its former glory to say the very least of course Alexandria would be the site of further Imperial unrest under kacala Dian and especially aruan Waring with the Palm Marine Queen Zenobia who was pretty badass would see another conf auration of dran and 272 of the common area this would be a fire set and devastating the area precisely around where the library un the buan were this probably did destroy most of the Holdings of these three intellectual structures other folks like to blame the rampaging Christian mobs of 391 that certainly attacked and destroyed the serapium although no specific books are actually mentioned to have been destroyed there by the Christians in fact the archaeological ES excavations of the ruins of the serapium which you can visit make it pretty unclear even where a substantial housing of books would have even been in the first place and even with the Christian mob that murdered HIPAA and 415 of the Common Era it's often used to Signal the end of pagan learning and neoplatonism and teaching in Alexandria well we have archaeological evidence of new lecture Halls being built after her murder used by pagans and Christian Scholars like anas of Gaza even note the the endurance of the maon through the late fth Century so these entities are sort of limping on in a kind of halflife the anti-muslim faction of course will also put the blame on the conquest of the city in 642 by Amar iban al-as and the destruction in that case will be laid at the feet of Umar IB alab now there are a lot of reasons to doubt this especially if you know anything about umar's conquest of Jerusalem he was very liberal in many ways he just wasn't much of a destroying kind of guy and by the 7th Century you can guess what I'm going to say I don't think there was much there to be destroyed frankly but I'll say this one for a deep dive if you want to check out mad's channel on this topic he has a great Deep dive on this question about the Muslim relationship to Egypt more generally the Library of Alexandria but also one of my favorite episodes on this channel is what Muslims knew about the pyramids during their administration of the area it's just really fascinating and we're lucky to have guys like him in history tube sphere so check out Mota's channel on sort of the Muslim uh relationship of Li the Library of Alexandria and their relationship to ancient Egypt more generally the truth of the origins and Faith of the Library of Alexandria are mostly just sad sad because they are the sad fate of most intellectual institutions in history from the closure of the academy by Justinian which those philosophers just went straight to Syria so the Looting of the monasteries in the early modern period or the shuttering of liberal arts departments these days it was born out of Imperial vanglory the library was born out of Imperial vanglory in competition with Alexander's other generals and their Imperial Holdings especially in competition with Athens mostly again in the interest of heniz and it declined it declined when the political tide had turned probably as early as the 2 Century BC and not only did the library have to compete for political expediency for basic institutional survival but its very location its very location mean that its cradle would also prove to be its grave while Papyrus is very durable and acidfree it is highly susceptible to humidity and Alexandria is a place that is nothing if not human now of course hundreds of Papyrus manuscripts survive from Egypt we've all seen them nagam and oxir rinkus but those were all recovered from the Egyptian desert well outside that beautiful Lush Zone around the Nile without a dedicated staff a veritable Army of copyists people like me and restorers often study manuscripts manuscripts that would have been rolled and unrolled over and over and over again these would have become worn and tattered I think within 50 years and even probably Beyond destroy Beyond transmissibility within a 100 or so this process of just rolling them and unrolling them this is friction it damages them thus the whims of the state could not only exile philosophers and Scholars they could limit Collections and staff but even a generation just one generation of delayed maintenance could have spent the Doom for hundreds of rolles per year if not more even the Christian theological Library founded by origin was only spared because of Jerome's transmission of all those manuscripts from Papyrus to more durable Vellum in that environment and that didn't even spare The Collection among the texts that were lost from from that amazing collection were ancient was an ancient gospel probably written in Aramaic or Hebrew now we don't know what it was but an original gospel written in Aramaic or Hebrew the last such mention of a his text like that in the historical record along with origin's own copy of the hexa perhaps even some of the Dead Sea Scrolls that he recovered over near Jericho yes origin obtained Dead Sea Scrolls from new Jericho they may have been in that collection no one event doomed the Library of Alexandria and other educational centers like that one more than the waxing and waning of political fashion and the will to support just those kinds of Institutions ongoing and generalized instability brought on by Imperial warmongering and the Very material reality that books and education are always on a knife's edge of Vanishing without ongoing Community political and financial support Library can just collapse just that fast educational institutions are incredibly fragile institutions while many of the myths that surround the Library of Alexandria aren't much in the way supported by the historical evidence those myths can still be a very important place of inspiration for us the dream of a vast well-funded research educational and learning center accessible and serving the public serving the public it's something every Community can aspire to after all what separates democracy from Mob rule is basically an educated political body if we mourn the loss of the Library of Alexandria that should really motivate us to support and create such institutions and cherish cherish what has survived from the ravages of History Aristotle survived in one manuscript we're so lucky to have any AR stle at all to thank our intellectual ancestors every time we enjoy the Poetry of Homer and hessi are the fragments of the stoics upon which we can still see the trace of the hands of some of those Scholars of Alexandria that's how we mourn what's been lost with honor rather than the false piety of lamenting Pie in the Sky what could have been had it not been destroyed but rather to appreciate what we have by studying it and holding volumes like those de I do think we can take seriously the somewhat dismal facts of the matter are just the lack of good evidence in most cases from the historical point of view with the Library of Alexandria the museon or the serapium while at the same time we can be inspired by some of that myth making taking them seriously taking the myths very seriously the dream of libraries like that but not having to take them historically literally so support the educational institutions that matter to you because when they have to rely on the whim of politicians thickle and frankly exploitative administrators pushing Scholars to publish or Parish rather than engage with the public and applying for Grants chasing academic fashion from poststructuralism to string theory or the horrible Demi urge that is the algorithm for that matter trust me Scholars and scholarship and the access to them and access to scholarship is never as safe and as secure as we can make it together until next time I'm Dr Justin Sledge and thank you for watching esoterica where we explore the Arcane side of History philosophy and religion
