Legendary Library at Alexandria
"The Museum is part of the Royal Quarter and it has a cloister and an arcade and a large house in which is provided the common meal of the men of learning who share the Museum. And this community has common funds, and a priest in charge of the Museum, who was appointed previously by the kings, but now by Caesar."
This description of the legendary, but not mythical Museum and Library at Alexandria Egypt was written by the geographer and philosopher Strabo who studied and lived at the Museum from 25-20 BCE while Alexandria was under Roman rule. While it is brief, it is the most detailed description that we have until that of Johannes Tzetzes 300 plus years later. While we can make educated guesses as to the structure and appearance of the Library, the lack of contemporary description as well as archeological evidence means that our vision will always remain guesses.
We know that the Library and its predecessor, the Shrine of the Muses (or Museum) were located in Bracchium, the Greek sector of Alexandria situated in the northeast quadrant of the city. The building was either inside of or very near the walls of the Royal Palace, a sprawling complex of buildings, gardens and fortification. Archeologists have unearthed the foundation of the Museum and portions of the much smaller sister-library at the nearby Temple of Serapis (Serapeum) whose construction was begun under Ptolemy II Philadelphus. From these discoveries and from scant contemporary descriptions, we can draw conclusions as to how the Great Library was structured.
There is no
doubt that it must have been a vast complex with lecture halls, laboratories, observatories, colonnades, halls to house
the stacks of scrolls, living quarters and a central dining hall that is believed to have been capped by a dome with
walks to allow astronomers to observe the movements of the stars and planets. All of this was surrounded by botanical
and zoological gardens filled with species from around the known world.
Who commissioned this vast building project? Ptolemy I Soter assumed the pharaoh’s crown in January 304 BCE after conquering Egypt and declared Alexandria, the city founded by his commander Alexander the Great, to be the new capital. Shortly thereafter, Ptolemy sent to Athens seeking Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle and founder of the Lyceum in Athens, to come to Egypt as a tutor for the pharaoh’s heir. Theophrastus recommended his friend and a fellow student of Aristotle, Demetrius of Phaleron, in his stead. Demetrius, recently deposed as ruler of Athens by political unrest between Alexander’s successors, arrived in Alexandria.
Demetrius recommended to Ptolemy that he gather together books on kingship and ruling in the style of Plato’s philosopher kings along with texts about the people’s and cultures of the world so that the new ruler may better understand his subjects and trading partners. According to Aristeas, a resident of the Library writing 100 years after its founding, Ptolemy instructed Demetrius to not only collect the world’s texts but also to supervise their translation into Greek. The first such project was the translation of the Septuagint, the Old Testament, which was carried out by 72 rabbis who lived and worked at the Library.
Despite Demetrius’ influential position in the founding of the Library, he is not listed as the first librarian. That honor falls to Zenodotus of Ephesus who served in the position from the end of Ptolemy’s I’s reign until 245 BCE. It was under Ptolemy II Philadlephus that the construction was begun onthe smaller library at the nearby Temple of Serapis in Rhakotis, the Egyptian sector of the city. It was completed under the reign of his son Ptolemy III and housed copies of many of the Museum’s scrolls.
Callimachus of Cyrene, the second librarian, undertook the task of cataloging the Museum’s scrolls according to subject. This index, called the Pinakes (Tables), was the first attempt to organize the Museum’s quickly growing collection and it followed Aristotle’s divisions, breaking up “philosophy” into subdivision of observational and deductive sciences. Callimachus records 400,000 mixed scrolls (those with multiple texts or authors), 90,000 pure or unmixed scrolls and an additional 42,000 housed at the Serapeum, all of which were kept in pigeon holes that formed banks of shelves lining the walls. Unlike today’s libraries, the shelves were not arranged by subject or category but by when the scrolls were acquired. When new batches of scrolls were submitted or translated, they were simply added on.
Apollonius of Rhodes, author of Argonautica, followed Callimachus and was himself followed by Erathosthenes of Cyrene in 235 BCE. A Stoic philosopher, geographer and mathematician, Erathosthenes compiled the “scheme of the great bookshelves” in an attempt to further organize the collection. In 195 BCE, Aristophanes became librarian and began an update of Callimachus’ Pinakes. The last librarian to be recorded by name was Aristarchus of Samothrace, an astronomer who was later driven from the position during the dynastic struggles between two Ptolemys. Aristarchus became librarian in 180 BCE and the library continued as a prominent institution of learning for another 600 years, surely additional librarians were appointed by the pharaohs as they had been, but we have been left no record of their names.
The modern world tends to view the library as an idyllic place where scholars and philosopher’s peacefully advanced existing subjects and laid foundations for new areas of learning while debating theories in a cloistered learning environment, but this vision is far from reality. Human nature hasn’t changed much in 2,000 years. Since the inception of the Library, Egypt had been under the rule of foreigners (the Ptolemy’s were Greek) and the cultural diversity enjoyed by a centrally located trading post led to interaction that wasn’t always harmonious. The dramas of politics, economics, religion and racism played out around the scholars of the Library and they were far from immune to their own opinions. As Alexandria broiled with turmoil, the Library envisioned by Demetrius would remain the center of learning in the known world until the early 5th century CE.
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Article originally printed in
Quarters Pagan Journal.