The Legend of the Library

The library of Alexandria is a legend. Not a myth, but a legend. The destruction of the library of the ancient world has been retold many times and attributed to just as many different factions and rulers, not for the purpose of chronicling that ediface of education, but as political slander. Much ink has been spilled, ancient and modern, over the 40,000 volumes housed in grain depots near the harbor, which were supposedly incinerated when Julius Caesar torched the fleet of Cleopatra's brother and rival monarch. So says Livy, apparently, in one of his lost books, which Seneca quotes The figure of Hypatia, a fifth-century scholar and mathematician of Alexandria, being dragged from her chariot from an angry Pagan-hating mob of monks who flayed her alive then burned her upon the remnants of the old Library, has found her way into legend as well, thanks to a few contemporary sources which survived.Yet while we know of many rumors of the destruction of "The Library" (in fact, there were at least three different libraries coexisting in the city), and know of whole schools of Alexandrian scholars and scholarship, there is scant data about the whereabouts, layout, holdings, organization, administration, and physical structure of the place.

Foundation by Demetrius of Phaleron

The first mention we have of the library is in The Letter of Aristeas (ca. 180-145 B.C.E.), a Jewish scholar housed at the Library chronicling the translation of the Septuagint into Greek by seventy-two rabbis. This massive production was commissioned by the Athenian exile Demetrius of Phaleron under his patron, Ptolemy I, Ptolemy Soter.Demetrius himself was a former ruler, no less than a ten-year tyrant of Athens, and a first-generation Peripatetic scholar. That is, he was one of the students of Aristotle along with Theophrastus and Alexander the Great. Demetrius, helped into power in Athens by Alexander's successor Cassander, provided backing for Theophrastus to found a Lyceum devoted to his master's studies and modelled after Plato's Academy. After Ptolemy I Soter, on of Alexander's successful generals, secured the kingship for himself of conquered Egypt, Theophrastus turned down the Pharoah's invitation in 297 B.C.E to tutor Ptolemy's heir, and instead recommended Demetrius, who had recently been driven out from Athens as a result of political fallout from the conflicts of Alexander's successors .

Precedents for the Museum

According to Aristeas, Demetrius recommended Ptolemy gather a collection of books on kingship and ruling in the style of Plato's philosopher-kings, and furthermore to gather books of all the world's people that he might better understand subjects and trade partners. Demetrius must also have helped inspire the founding of a Museum in Ptolemy's capital, Alexandria, a temple dedicated to the Muses. This was not the first such temple dedicated to the divine patrons of arts and sciences. However, coming as it did in the half-century after the establishment of Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, Zeno's Stoa and the school of Epicurus, and located in a rich center of international trade and cultural exchange, the place and time were ripe for such an institution to flower. Scholars were invited there to carry out the Peripatetic activities of observation and deduction in math, medicine, astronomy, and geometry; and most of the western world's discoveries were recorded and debated there for the next 500 years.

The Museum

Archaeologists have not uncovered the foundations of the Museum, although they have excavated portions of the "daughter Library" in the nearby temple of Serapis. From scattered primary sources this much seems relatively clear: it was in the Brucchium (northeast) sector of the city, probably in or adjacent to the palace grounds. It was surrounded by courts, gardens, and a zoological park containing exotic animals from far-flung parts of the Alexandrian empire. According to Strabo , at its heart was a Great Hall and a circular domed dining hall (perhaps Roman?) with an observatory in its upper terrace; classrooms surrounded it. This is very similar to the layout of the Serapeum, which was begun by Ptolemy II Philadelphus and completed by his son. An estimated 30-50 scholars were probably permanently housed there, probably fed and funded first by the royal family, and later, according to an early Roman papyrus, by public money.

The Stacks

The physical shelves of the Library may have been in one of the outlying lecture halls or in the garden, or it may have been housed in the Great Hall. They consisted of pigeonholes or racks for the scrolls, the best of which were wrapped in linen or leather jackets. Parchment skins--vellum-- came into vogue after Alexandria stopped exporting papyrus in an attempt to strangle its younger rival library, set up by the Seleucids in Pergamon. In Roman times, manuscripts started to be written in codex (book) form, and began to be stored in wooden chests called armaria .

Development of the Library

-The Septuagint

Aristeas, writing 100 years after the library's inception, records that Ptolemy I handed over to Demetrius the job of gathering books and scrolls, as well as letting him supervise a massive effort to translate other cultures' works into Greek. This process began with the translation of the Septuagint, the Old Testament, into Greek, for which project Ptolemy hired and housed 72 rabbis at Demetrius' suggestion.

-Acquisition of Books

At the time of Demetrius, Greek libraries were usually collections of manuscripts by private individuals, such as Aristotle's library of his own and other works. Egypt's temples often had shelves containing an assortment of religious and official texts, as did certain Museums in the Greek world. It was Ptolemy I's great ambition to possess all known world literature that pushed these idiosyncratic collections-- the web sites of the ancient world-- into the realm of a true library. John Tzetzes records several centuries later that Callimachus cataloged 400,000 "mixed" scrolls (probably those that contained more than one chapter, work, or even author, see example in Vatican) and 90,000 "unmixed", plus an additional 42,000 in the Serapeum. Ptolemy's successors' methods for achieving his goal were certainly unique. Ptolemy III wrote a letter "to all the world's sovereigns" asking to borrow their books , When Athens lent him the texts to Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, he had them copied, returned the copies, and kept the originals. Supposedly, all ships that stopped in the port of Alexandria were searched for books which were given them same treatment, thus the term "ship libraries" for the collection housed in the Museum. This unorthodox procedure did at least inspire the first systematic work in emendation and collation of classical texts without which none of the authors would have survived.

-The First Librarians

While Demetrius was a convert of Serapis and thus probably an official of the new Greco-Egyptian cult invented by Ptolemy, the Serapeum was not yet built at his death and he is remembered neither as librarian of that institution nor at the Museum. The first recorded Librarian was Zenodotus of Ephesus, holding that post from the end of Ptolemy I's reign until 245 B.C.E. His successor Callimachus of Cyrene was perhaps Alexandria's most famous librarian, creating for the first time a subject catalog in 120,000 scrolls of the Library's holdings, called the Pinakes or Tables. It was by no means comprehensive, but was more like a good subject index on the web. Apollonius of Rhodes, his younger rival and the writer of the notoriously meticulous epic, Argonautica, seems to have been Callimachus' replacement. Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Stoic geographer and mathematician, succeeded him in 235, and compiled his "tetagmenos epi teis megaleis bibliothekeis", the "scheme of the great bookshelves". In 195 Aristophanes, a Homeric scholar of no relation to the comic playwright, took up the position, and updated Callimachus' Pinakes. The last recorded librarian was Aristarchus of Samothrace, the astronomer, who took up the position in 180 B.C.E. and was driven out during dynastic struggles between two Ptolemies. While the library and Museum persisted for many centuries afterwards, from that time onward scholars are simply recorded as Alexandrian, and no Librarians are mentioned by nam.

Organization

While it is doubtful the library had a perfectly systematic organization, but rather tended to house new chests and shelves of papyri in the groups in which they were acquired, the Alexandrians from Callimachus onwards tried to keep track of their holdings via a subject catalog. In this they followed Aristotle's divisions of knowledge, or at least his style of breaking up what had previously fallen under the umbrella of "philosophy" into subdivisions of observational and deductive sciences. Since this paper is an overview of the work and scholarship carried out at Alexandria, I will adhere to the subject divisions first set forth by Callimachus in his Pinakes, of mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and geometry, as well as philology. I have added the Aristotelian category of mechanics for some of the applied science which grew out of Alexandrian studies.

Conclusion

The Museum of Alexandria was founded at a unique place and time which allowed its scholars to draw on the deductive techniques of Aristotle and Greek thought, in order to apply these methods to the knowledges of Greece, Egypt, Macedonia, Babylonia, and beyond. The location of Alexandria as a center of trade, and in particular as the major exporter of writing material, offered vast opportunities for the amassing of information from different cultures and schools of thought. Its scholars' deliberate efforts to compile and critically analyze the knowledge of their day allowed for the first systematic, long-term research by dedicated specialists in the new fields of science suggested by Aristotle and Callimachus. Whole new disciplines, such as grammar, manuscript preservation, and trigonometry were established. Moreover, the fortuitious collection of documents in an Egyptian city allowed the transmission and translation of vital classical texts into Arabic and Hebrew, where they might be preserved long after copies were lost during the Middle Ages in Europe. Alexandria and its cousins, the Lyceum, Academy, and the younger Pergamon library, were probably the prototypes both for the medieval monastery and universities. While modern scholars often lament the amount of information lost through the centuries since the Museum's fall, an amazing number of Alexandrian discoveries and theories, especially in mathematics and geometry, still provide the groundwork for modern research in these fields. Finally, the methods of research, study, and information storage and organization developed in the Library are much the same as those used today, but just as the medium of linear scrolls gave way to books in its halls, we now are watching the transformation from books to multilayered documents in the electronic medium.