Comment by notorandit
15 hours ago
I Hope more and more fragments of anything lost is found.
The burn down of Alexandria library was a pity
15 hours ago
I Hope more and more fragments of anything lost is found.
The burn down of Alexandria library was a pity
It is not an uncommon view among scholars that humidity and age caused more papyri to be lost than the burning down of the library of Alexandria did. Many of which would have survived by being repeatedly copied and disseminated throughout the region.
Evidence for this common myth is lacking.
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/the-great-library-of-a...
People say this without any evidence. This ai-post is just regurgitating hn-thread "received wisdom". The evidence for the existence of a library is thin and hard to piece together, but points to more than a myth. I appreciate that people want real proof of anything, but dumping an ai-slop summary is hardly doing any better than accepting the existence of a large library.
The Library almost certainly existed. It is the destruction (by deliberate fire) that is probably myth.
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This is a common refrain but in reality I'm not sure it made much difference. Papyrus just doesn't age well and most manuscripts from this era would've been on papyrus.
What really decided what texts survived and what didn't was monastic traditions in in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages [1]. At this time, a monk might spend their entire life transcribing a particularly long manuscript. The materials were also expensive. So monasteries were selective in what got retain and unsurprisingly it skewed heavily to texts of religious significance and then to texts of significance to, say, Roman and Greek tradition and history given that monasteries were European.
[1]: https://spokenpast.com/articles/medieval-monks-erased-preser...
It was a little before that even.
Greek was the language of most fields of learning besides law in the Roman Empire. But the Greeks themselves wrote works on these papyrus scrolls that crumbled fast, so anything not actively used by the Romans was quickly lost.
There's a good chance that if the papyrus scrolls in any library (Alexandria or otherwise) weren't being copied regularly they were crumbling even before they burned or were lost to time for other reasons.
Towards the end of the Roman Empire, a few philosophers took the time to transmit Greek knowledge in Latin as knowledge of Greek faded in western Europe. What these guys happened to translate was the basis of most of European learning in philosophy, math, and other fields for centuries.
But they weren't monks (the most famous, Boethius, was not Christian either but a lot of later writers thought he was), the monks in scriptorium came later and grew slowly.
St. Benedict said that monks should be taught to read and do so regularly, which required copying books, but he prioritized physical work (to create self-sufficient communities) and prayer. But future Benedictines responded to the incentives of the time and began scaling up the copying and doing less agricultural work as the years went on.
What’s the evidence Boethius wasn’t Christian? Wikipedia says he was.
Thanks for sharing. Maybe not as common as you think. I never heard that before.
It probably held a bunch of relatively boring local administrative records as far as "documents found only in the Library of Alexandria" from what I've read. Of course some scholars of the boring administrative history of the world would be thrilled though.
As far as I know the vast majority of cuneiform we have is essentially administrative records, tax record and receipts. And homework.
That's the stuff that tells us how societies and cultures really worked.
I don't discount the scholarly value of these works as you note. They provide a very important insight into these early and semi-documented societies but they don't have a visceral impact for the public like "The Hidden Mysteries of Things Previously Unknown" we accord to the Library of Alexandria in popular acclaim
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Everybody knows it's under Uncle Scrooge's money bin. Spoiler alert.
For some reason, there is a gigantic and ancient monastery on Mount Sinai with a commensurate collection of ancient manuscripts and papyri. Totally coincidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine%27s_Monastery#...
How did all that stuff get up there? It was holy angels. #itsalwaysangels
those are certainly Christian curated documents. The previous six hundred+ years had seen the development of vivid and exotic religion, philosophy and arts. The Christians famously slew the Dragons, condemned Herod as a sorcerer and astrologer, and replaced the Apollo cults with the scripture that many know well.
I imagine that the Library of Alexandria was plural and diverse with respect to the traditions and inquiry that was represented there.
The early Egyptian Christians were a particularly violent bunch. Lots of murders and political scheming against each other and other Christian authorities in the larger world of the Late Antique. They came to power in Alexandria by murder and looting, specifically