Library of Alexandria: Founding, Scholars and Destruction

The Library of Alexandria was the largest and most famous library of the ancient world, founded around 285 BC by the first Ptolemaic kings of Egypt in their new capital on the Mediterranean coast. Together with the Mouseion, a research institute attached to the royal palace, it made Alexandria the centre of Greek learning for several centuries. Its slow decline, rather than one dramatic fire, is one of the most misunderstood stories in history.

Background: a new city and a new dynasty

Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in 331 BC, as told in Founding of Alexandria. After his death in 323 BC, his general Ptolemy took control of Egypt and in 305 BC proclaimed himself king, founding the Ptolemaic dynasty that would rule until the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC.

The Ptolemies were Macedonian Greeks ruling a land with an ancient, non-Greek culture. Patronage of Greek literature and science gave their court prestige among the rival Hellenistic kingdoms and helped present Alexandria as the true heir of Athens. Collecting books was also a statement of power: the king who owned the written knowledge of the Greek world could claim to be its cultural leader.

Founding of the Library and the Mouseion

The exact founding date is not recorded. The traditional account, found in the Letter of Aristeas (a Jewish text probably of the 2nd century BC), presents Demetrius of Phalerum, a former ruler of Athens and pupil of Aristotle’s school, as the royal librarian charged with gathering all the books in the world. The letter places him at the court of Ptolemy II, but Demetrius is more likely to have advised Ptolemy I Soter, since he fell from favour when Ptolemy II came to the throne. Most historians accept that planning began under Ptolemy I and that Ptolemy II Philadelphus (r. 283–246 BC) completed and expanded the institution, which is why a date around 285 BC is usually given.

The Library formed part of the Mouseion, literally a “shrine of the Muses”. This was a community of scholars who lived in the royal quarter, known as the Brucheion, received salaries and free meals from the king, and were exempt from taxes. The geographer Strabo, who visited Alexandria around 25–20 BC, describes a covered walkway, an arcade with seats and a large hall where the scholars ate together. He does not describe the Library building itself, and no remains of it have been securely identified.

Under Ptolemy III Euergetes (r. 246–222 BC) a second, smaller collection was placed in the Serapeum, the great temple of the god Serapis in the south-west of the city. This “daughter library” was more accessible to the public than the palace collection.

How the collection was built

The Ptolemies acquired books aggressively. The physician Galen, writing in the 2nd century AD, records that books found on ships arriving in Alexandria were seized and copied, with the copies returned to the owners and the originals kept; these were labelled “from the ships”. Galen also tells how Ptolemy III borrowed the official Athenian copies of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, paying a deposit of 15 talents of silver, and then kept the originals, sacrificing the deposit.

Books were papyrus scrolls, and a long work such as Homer’s Iliad filled many of them. Ancient figures for the size of the collection vary widely: 40,000 scrolls are mentioned by Seneca in connection with a fire, while later writers such as Aulus Gellius and Ammianus Marcellinus give as many as 700,000. Modern scholars treat these numbers as guesses. Estimates of a few tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand scrolls at the Library’s peak are commonly cited, with no certainty.

According to the Letter of Aristeas, Ptolemy II also commissioned a Greek translation of the Jewish Law, the origin of the Septuagint. The legendary details of that story, such as 72 translators working in isolation, are not historical, but the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek did begin in Alexandria in the 3rd century BC.

The scholars

The Library’s heads, sometimes called chief librarians, included some of the leading minds of the Hellenistic world. Zenodotus of Ephesus, the first, produced an early critical edition of Homer. He was followed by the poet Apollonius of Rhodes, author of the epic Argonautica, and then by Eratosthenes of Cyrene, whose estimate of the Earth’s circumference is described in Eratosthenes Measures the Earth. Later heads included Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace, the greatest of the ancient Homer critics.

Callimachus of Cyrene, poet and scholar, compiled the Pinakes (“Tables”), a catalogue of Greek literature in 120 books that listed authors by genre with short biographies. It is often called the first library catalogue, and it shaped how later scholars organised knowledge.

Alexandria also attracted scientists who were not librarians. Euclid worked in the city around 300 BC, as described in Euclid’s Elements. The physicians Herophilus and Erasistratus made major advances in anatomy, apparently using human dissection. Astronomers, mathematicians and engineers such as Ctesibius, inventor of a water clock and a force pump, worked in the same royal environment.

The Library’s most lasting contribution was philological. Alexandrian scholars compared manuscripts, marked doubtful lines, divided Homer’s epics into the 24 books still used today and wrote commentaries. Much of the Greek literature that survives reached later readers through texts edited in this tradition.

Decline and destruction

The idea of a single catastrophic fire is a myth. The evidence points to a long decline with several damaging episodes.

The first blow was political. In 145 BC Ptolemy VIII Physcon, after a bitter dynastic struggle, purged the intellectual elite of Alexandria, and Aristarchus left the city for Cyprus. Royal patronage never fully recovered, and the later Ptolemies were preoccupied with civil wars and Roman pressure.

In 48 BC Julius Caesar was besieged in the royal quarter during the Alexandrian War. To deny the enemy his ships, he set fire to vessels in the harbour, and the flames spread to buildings by the docks. Seneca, Plutarch and Cassius Dio refer to the burning of books; Cassius Dio speaks of storehouses of grain and books near the harbour. Many historians think warehoused scrolls were lost rather than the main collection, because Strabo was able to work in Alexandria about 25 years later and the Mouseion continued to operate under Roman rule.

The Roman emperors kept appointing members of the Mouseion, but the institution became less important. Around AD 272, during the emperor Aurelian’s campaign against the breakaway Palmyrene regime, the Brucheion district was badly damaged in fighting, and the palace-area Library is not heard of again.

The Serapeum collection survived longer. In AD 391, after imperial decrees against pagan worship, Christians led by Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, destroyed the Serapeum temple. Ancient accounts of the event do not clearly mention books, and it is uncertain how much of a library remained there by then. The murder of the philosopher Hypatia by a Christian mob in AD 415 is often linked to the Library in popular accounts, but she was not a librarian and the Library had effectively vanished by her time.

Myths and facts

The Arab burning of 642. A famous story says that after the Arab conquest of Egypt, Caliph Umar ordered the books burned, reasoning that they either agreed with the Quran and were unnecessary or disagreed with it and were harmful. This account first appears in writers such as Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi and Ibn al-Qifti around 1200, more than five centuries later. Most historians regard it as a legend.

All ancient knowledge was lost in one fire. Books were copied and circulated across the Greek and Roman world, and many works that were once in Alexandria survived elsewhere. Many others were lost over centuries simply because nobody recopied them.

The Library was a single grand building. No source describes its architecture, and it may have consisted of storerooms and shelving within the Mouseion complex rather than one monumental hall.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 331 BC: Alexander the Great founds Alexandria.
• 305 BC: Ptolemy I Soter takes the title of king of Egypt.
• c. 285 BC: Library and Mouseion established under Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II.
• c. 245 BC: Eratosthenes becomes head of the Library.
• 246–222 BC: Ptolemy III builds the Serapeum, which later houses a daughter library.
• 145 BC: Ptolemy VIII expels scholars; Aristarchus leaves Alexandria.
• 48 BC: Fire during Caesar’s Alexandrian War destroys books near the harbour.
• c. AD 272: Brucheion damaged in Aurelian’s war against Palmyra.
• AD 391: The Serapeum is destroyed under Bishop Theophilus.
• 2002: The modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina opens.

Why it matters

The Library of Alexandria created the model of a universal research library and pioneered cataloguing, textual criticism and the systematic collection of knowledge. Its real history shows that knowledge is lost less often through single disasters than through neglect, withdrawn funding and the failure to keep copying, a lesson that still applies to libraries and archives today.