When was alexandria burnt

Ultimately, the library slowly disappeared as the city changed from Greek, to Roman, Christian, and eventually Muslim hands. Each new set of rulers viewed its contents as a threat rather than a source of pride.

And even if our reservoirs of knowledge are physically secure, they will still have to resist the more insidious forces that tore the library apart: fear of knowledge, and the arrogant belief that the past is obsolete.

The difference is that, this time, we know what to prepare for. You have JavaScript disabled. Menu Main menu. It is believed that the entire literary corpus of Ancient Greece was kept at the library, together with works by Aristotle, Sophocles, and Euripides, among others.

The Egyptian books were books about the traditions and history of Ancient Egypt. To this day, the Septuagint remains a crucial text in critical Bible studies.

The original library branch was located at the royal palace at Alexandria, near the harbor. It is believed that this fire spread to the library and completely destroyed it. It is likely that the collection was destroyed by the Christians who moved in. In the following years, the Christian attack against the library escalated, and the last great pagan philosopher and librarian, Hypatia, was tortured and killed.

The final blow came in CE when Alexandria came under Muslim rule. Even then, it is said that it took six months for all the materials to burn. Practically nothing of the library remains today. Modern Alexandria is a bustling metropolis and has maintained consistent occupation over the last 2, years. However, there is no dispute that the destruction of the Library of Alexandria significantly damaged our understanding of ancient civilizations.

Jordan N. Blue Springs North Branch. Those historical sources do not talk about a concerted effort to burn old scrolls, or there would not have been anything left for the caliph to burn. An interesting question is whether those scrolls would have been ancient Egyptian works or more recent Greco-Roman works donated by Marc Antony.

Amazing what you can learn from generations of accumulated knowledge that has been crammed into the smallest of spaces. The loss of the ancient world's single greatest archive of knowledge, the Library of Alexandria, has been lamented for ages.

But how and why it was lost is still a mystery. The mystery exists not for lack of suspects but from an excess of them. Alexandria was founded in Egypt by Alexander the Great. The Museum was a place of study which included lecture areas, gardens, a zoo, and shrines for each of the nine muses as well as the Library itself.

It has been estimated that at one time the Library of Alexandria held over half a million documents from Assyria, Greece, Persia, Egypt, India and many other nations. Over scholars lived at the Museum full time to perform research, write, lecture or translate and copy documents.

The library was so large it actually had another branch or "daughter" library at the Temple of Serapis. The first person blamed for the destruction of the Library is none other than Julius Caesar himself. Greatly outnumbered and in enemy territory, Caesar ordered the ships in the harbor to be set on fire. The fire spread and destroyed the Egyptian fleet. Unfortunately, it also burned down part of the city - the area where the great Library stood.

Caesar wrote of starting the fire in the harbor but neglected to mention the burning of the Library.