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Serious question, I thought the whole "library of Alexandria" thing was overblown until I looked up what actually got lost
I used to roll my eyes at people who talked about the library of Alexandria like it was this huge tragedy. I figured it was just a building that burned down, big deal, stuff gets lost all the time. Then my buddy Dave lent me this book on ancient science and I started digging into what was actually kept there, and now I think I was flat wrong. Turns out we probably lost things like most of Eratosthenes' work on geography, original texts from people like Aristarchus who figured out the sun was way bigger than the earth around 200 BC, and entire plays from Sophocles and Euripides that we only know by name now. Over 500,000 scrolls at its peak, and we are not even sure how much of it was unique material that existed nowhere else. The bigger what if for me is not the fire, it was the slow decline, because funding dried up, scholars got chased out, and copy work stopped, so stuff rotted or got tossed by people who did not care. Has anyone here tried building a timeline of what we lost versus what survived through Arab scholars and Byzantine copies? I want to see how much of the gap was one bad event versus a long slide.
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kelly.charlie20d ago
Check the Wikipedia sources on the destruction of the library, they link primary docs for a timeline.
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