Transcription
The Silence of historical evidence often prompts a curious, even dangerous, psychological response: projection. When history cannot give us an answer to what was, we fill those evidentiary gaps with our own aspirations, our own fears, our own grievances, and most of all, to what concerns us modern people, far removed from just that history. In effect, history and hallucination become fused into a delirium that often comes to function as myth, for better and for worse.
Perhaps one of the best examples of this phenomenon is the origins, the holdings, and the fate of the Library of Alexandria. You may be surprised to learn that very little in the way of reliable historical evidence can be had about the library at all. There's literally no archaeological evidence of the library's existence at this point, and yet the library, between history and hallucination, has become the repository of ancient wisdom, holding hundreds of thousands of volumes in papyrus rolls, whose destruction represents a descent into the Dark Ages, derailing the progress of history itself. And the cause of that destruction tells us about our fears and anxieties, even our hatreds: the dictator Julius Caesar, the fundamentalist Christian mob, the throngs of Eastern others in the form of the Muslim Conquest.
Let's try to shake off this delirium and see what the evidence, direct and indirect, circumstantial and not, might tell us about the library, its origins, the scope of its holdings, the relationship it had to other libraries of its time, and how the Library at Alexandria came to become the stuff of dreams.
If you're interested in magic, hermetic philosophy, alchemy, kabbalah, or the history of the occult, make sure to subscribe here to Esoterica and check out my other content on topics in esotericism, including curated playlists. Also, if you want to support this work of providing accessible, scholarly, free content on topics in esotericism here on YouTube, I'd hope you consider supporting my work over at my Patreon. You can consider a one-time donation, you can use a Super Thanks option below the video, or you can pick up some of our black metal style merch over at the store tab. But let's turn to the history and the myths of the Library of Alexandria. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
[Music]
To be sure, the Library of Alexandria was not the first attempt, the first state-sponsored attempt, at collecting under a single roof a vast array of written wisdom. Temples, palaces, administrative centers had long created archives of varying degrees of public accessibility. Not that the public cared that much. I mean, you're talking about roughly a 1 to 3% maximum literacy rate in the ancient Near East. But the Hittites held substantial collections, including even preserving religious rituals exterior to their own religion, using the cuneiform script that they employed to write their language. In fact, a new Indo-European language, Luwian, was just discovered in one of those religious texts preserved by the Hittites. So, a brand new Indo-European language from the Hittites.
Well, brand new, not perhaps the grandest such archive or library was that of Ashurbanipal, holding more than 30,000 cuneiform tablets, including the masterpieces of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the creation account of the Enuma Elish, and the myth of the first man, Adapa. That collection was probably frozen in time in 613 BCE when Nineveh was destroyed by fire, thus firing those clay tablets and preserving them down in the dark for us to discover thousands of years later. Even the Hebrew Bible, or the Christian Old Testament, tells of an Israelite Royal Archive, which held volumes such as "Mil Yahweh," "The Wars of Yahweh," which is quoted in the Torah at Numbers 21:33-14, but is otherwise lost to history, like the Book of Jasher.
Egypt, as well, held state archives, and the Houses of Life, or the temples, also had attached libraries of varying sizes, from which some scant esoteric literature, like "The Book of Thoth," or "The Conversations in the House of Life," as the translators have it, survive in substantial, albeit fragmentary, forms.
Now, if you're interested in libraries before Alexandria, well, by golly, there's a whole book with just your name on it. No, it's actually just called "The Libraries Before Alexander," and it's utterly amazing. I love this book. It covers all the proto-libraries of the ancient Near East, all the way up to the Library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE. So, check out that book. It's amazing and overpriced.
But by the hegemony of the Hellenes in the region, the conquest of Alexandria, archive libraries of various types, various scopes of holdings, and various sizes would have been already ancient in the ancient Near East. But it would be the unique combination of the explosion of Greek thought and literature, the use of durable, lightweight Egyptian papyrus as a recording medium, and the project of Hellenization and conquest, conquest, that would set the stage for the three great libraries of that part of the world: the Library of Ephesus, the Library at Pergamum, and, of course, the Library of Alexandria.
With the death of Alexander the Great, his empire was split and warred over by his generals and their descendants. One front of that competition, aside from just straight warfare, was pride of place of the various regional capitals, and the foundation of the Library of Alexandria can't be understood outside of that very particular Ptolemaic desire for Alexandria to outshine the rest of the Hellenistic capitals, including and especially Athens. This is where they're going to really flex on Athens, is this old library flex. Thus, the library is as much a part of empire building and a display of prestige as as much as it was anything else. And as we'll see, when this library flex was no longer needed, or even possible, because of constant warfare, the library would sadly suffer as well.
Further, we should also keep constantly in mind that the library was the the tip of the spear of the process of Hellenization, something that all of the generals and Alexander were dedicated to, which was a frankly colonial and assimilationist program whereby local particularities could be brought under the cultural, linguistic, and even religious hegemony of their Hellenic imperial overlords. Thus, the library at Alexandria was by no means a neutral Hoover, a collector of any and all wisdom. Rather, its task was very specifically to assimilate all of that wisdom into the specifically Hellenistic modality. Hence, there being no evidence in the library had, or even had any interest in having, I don't know, some of the indigenous wisdom of the Egyptians, you know, the very country the Ptolemies were colonizing.
And the most famous project of translation from the entire library bears this out: the translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, into Greek, known to us today as the Septuagint. Even at times proving rationalizing. I mean, one of the Hebrew terms, the technical terms for sorcerer, for instance, is translated there as "pharmakos," poisoner. And one of the terms for necromancer is translated as "belly talker," thus removing any of the metaphysical sense of these terms from their original meaning in the Hebrew.
Further texts bearing indigenous Egyptian perspectives, seeing Hellenization and later Roman occupation as fully apocalyptic, the Hermetic literature comes to mind, the so-called Hermetic Apocalypse, for what they saw as the destruction of their world, the temple of the whole world, which was Egypt for them, the decline of their sacred language, and the subsumption of their religious life into the oblivion of Greco-Roman assimilation. It was a sadly apt prophecy. The Egyptians didn't like this.
Thus, whatever the Library of Alexandria was, and what it was meant to do, and that's clearly to be a prestige project of the early Ptolemies in the service of the colonial agenda of Hellenization, that should never be forgotten. It certainly, certainly was not any attempt at neutral, objective wisdom collection in the pure interest of forwarding and benefiting human wisdom. That's not how ancient or even modern people work. From Bacon to Foucault, we're always reminded how knowledge and power are bound up, and how the pretension of neutrality, it's very almost always the velvet glove hiding the iron fist.
So, we know there was a library there, but who founded it? We don't know. There's no ancient account of the origins of the library in the area where the library has been. Probably it's never been excavated, so there's basically no archaeological evidence of the library either. Now, if you visit Alexandria, the general belief by archaeologists is it was probably somewhere near the contemporary Alexandria Opera House and the Eliahu Hanvi Synagogue, which is pretty amazing if you get the chance to visit Alexandria. But exactly where it was remains a mystery, and it's not going to be excavated anytime soon.
Regardless, there are only a few passing references to its founding. A 12th-century Byzantine scholar, a 12th-century Byzantine scholar of dubious reliability, has Timothy II, Philadelphia, inaugurating the institution, though he may be relying on some ancient sources. There is a lot of reason to doubt his account. Specifically, he has a certain Demetrius gathering books for Timothy II, though that very Demetrius actually died in eternal exile precisely for not backing Timothy II during his succession, following the death of Timothy I. So that doesn't really make a lot of sense. Why would you?
Yeah, the other source for much of the early information about the founding of the library is from the wonderfully mythological, infamous Letter of Aristeas, which is both pseudepigraphic and full of all kinds of wild, but frankly fun, stories. It's a great text of mythology. It also includes the story of the Septuagint miracle, that is to say, 72 Jewish translators independently translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek, all the while producing the exact same translation independently, of course, as if, you know, guided by the hand of God. No way that happened, of course. The letter is not only ancient Jewish propaganda to ingratiate Hellenistic Jews with the Ptolemies. You should remember, more Jews lived in Egypt at this time than they did in Judea by a wide margin at this time. The Jewish quarter of Alexandria was substantial, calculated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of a third of the footprint of the entire city. So it was really important that the Jews of Alexandria and their Hellenistic overlords saw eye to eye, which they always wouldn't. So while the Letter of Aristeas makes for fun reading, it's incredibly doubtful as a historical text.
So, we don't really know when or by whom the library was founded. However, a decent guess, and it's a guess, can be made that given the literary and technical output starting in the late 3rd century and end of the 2nd century, the library had not only been founded around that time, but was actually really at the height of its prestige, institutional support, and its ability to acquire holdings. This would be the period where literary scholars would begin to settle the final redactions of Homer, producing the volumes that we all know and love today. Eratosthenes would discredit flat-earthers today by accurately calculating the circumference of the Earth. Advances in medicine would be had, assuming that you believe that Galenic medicine was an advance. Early alchemy would be appearing at this time. Astrology was becoming a true mathematical science at this time. Truly the Golden Age of the Library of Alexandria, there in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, but really stretching for a couple of generations of scholars.
And this is not to mention also the connection of the library to the Serapeum, whose holdings might have been referred to in some of the literature as the "daughter of the Alexandrian collection," though it's kind of vague in the sources, and the larger research center-like institution of the Mouseion, the precursor to what we now call museums, a temple to the Muses, which also had a small library attached to it and attracted more literary-minded researchers. Those are the folks redacting Homer and Hesiod.
However, the origins, relationships, and somewhat shared fates between these three institutions is frankly very unclear. It's difficult to know what's happening at any given time with any of these three institutions. And probably, like any institution, they significantly transitioned in their role and their prominence over the centuries of their existence. But, but without doubt, the Library of Alexandria was the largest holder of texts in the ancient world, at least this part of the ancient world. No one really contests that fact.
But how many volumes did that come to, and what were they? Now, it's difficult to know with any certainty whatsoever. But numbers range enormously in ancient literature, from 40,000 to the utterly impossible figure of 700,000 rolls. Even an exterior storehouse was said to have contained 42,800 books. There's even that lovely tale of, uh, book collecting zeal by Galen, that Ptolemy III searched any boats coming into the harbor and seized their books for copying, and he raided the holdings at Athens to gobble up all the rolls of the tragedians and the dramatists of that time. Again, these tales make for great stories, and they're great propaganda for the Ptolemies, but they're really of very dubious, doubtful historical value. It's just not the way scribe roll and book culture worked, much less maritime trade at that time.
Just as records of ancient battles suffer from soldier hyperinflation, where you have hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the field in some ancient big battles, well, so too do most these numbers. In addition to how susceptible numbers are to corruption of a manuscript tradition, you get all kinds of problems with numbers and manuscripts. Roger Bagnall, without any doubt, uh, his article is quintessential for this episode being made. It's really the most sober historical assessment of the library that I know of. You can find the link in the description. Has done some absolutely wonderful forensic mathematics to get us a more sober, more realistic number for the holdings at Alexandria. He points out, by the late 4th century, there are about 450 authors for whom at least a few lines of their text survive, plus another 175 from the third century that are named, but for whom basically nothing survives. People like Callimachus. If the average writer composed, say, 50 rolls worth of material, although 24 is probably closer to a real average of how much was produced by an average author, but let's go with 50 rolls, that would only produce 31,250 rolls total. If the number of 400,000 or 700,000 rolls were to be trusted, then either the foundational library must have contained hundreds of copies of texts, or 90% of the world's ancient authors just just aren't even known to us by name, they're never quoted, they're never referenced, and they're never otherwise cataloged in any form. That, or some combination of the two. But neither of those, frankly, seem plausible.
Of course, for these numbers to be off, it's, well, it's probable numbers are always off when you deal with antiquity, but the idea that they're off by orders of magnitude, that seems to me pretty unlikely.
Bagnall does another ingenious calculation, to my mind. If we take the the total words known to have been composed by the 2nd century, we come to around 3.77 million words total. Given a somewhat liberal estimate of about 10,000 words per roll, that figure only gives us 377 rolls. 377. Strausberger, an eminent historian, estimates that the ancient Greek historians, the most long-winded, through Thucydides, for instance, of writers, produced about 40 times more than what have survived down to us to this day. So that might push the count up to about 15,000 rolls. Further calculations can drive that number up a bit more, but nowhere near 400,000, much less 700,000 rolls. And even the lower bound of 40,000 rolls is frankly pretty tough to get to.
Another avenue of estimation is the Pinakes. The closest thing that we, that we don't have to a catalog of the library. It wasn't the catalog, but it was based on, and it's lost. We don't have it, but we do know how long it was: about 120 rolls or books. Again, based on some somewhat liberal, but still historically possible, estimates. If it were composed of standard rolls of 20 sheets of 27 columns, written in a tight, very tight hand of 44 lines to a column, the Pinakes will come out to be around 14,256 lines total. Now, the Pinakes also contains a lot more than just authors, but also anecdotes, comments, arguments, random ideas, etc. And if those asides only occupy about a third of the Pinakes, with the other two-thirds being just a list of authors and books, we still don't even reach close to 100,000 rolls total for the library, and that's with really liberal estimates and very, very cramped writing.
Another way of getting some sense of disparity in the roll calculations that we have from antiquity versus what probably existed are similar estimates of holdings in the 200,000 roll range for libraries like at Ephesus and Pergamum, the smaller sister libraries to Alexandria. While the Alexandria library, again, has never been found or excavated, so we really don't know much about its actual footprint. The other two are preserved to a significant degree, especially the one at Ephesus.
The problem here just becomes, well, one of geometry. The buildings just aren't big enough to have held hundreds of thousands of rolls. By no means scrolls. Unlike the codex, the book, are very inefficient for lots of reasons. For instance, just try to go, try to find a textual reference in a a scroll. I mean, anyone who had to futz with a Torah scroll, you know. But also volumetrically, they simply take up much more space vis-à-vis the information they contain compared to the codex. The codex is a far superior technology.
Now, I've personally walked around in the Library of Ephesus, and some basic geometry of the floor space versus the size of the rolls, not to mention the use of the shelving, the tables that were in there, the fact there are statues in there and things like this, there just isn't enough room for hundreds of thousands of rolls. Thousands, yeah, maybe even cramped tens of thousands. But I mean, papyrus rolls take up space. It's a wonderful pain in my neck for me to figure out where to put books. Also, the creation and copying of papyrus rolls, and trust me, there, I know a thing or two about that. I've actually copied out long chunks of text just to get a sense of what they might have been dealing with. In fact, here's the copy, hiding in the Esoterica area. Esoterica place where I've copied out an entire section, the very first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics, by hand, on papyrus, on basically the same size of a papyrus that would have been used at the time, although in slightly bigger hand, more of like a a book hand, uh, that would be a little bit more extravagant. But you get some sense of just sort of how, you know, thick this is, double rolled. And this is only the first book of the of Aristotle's Metaphysics. And again, this is a little bit extravagant for what would have existed at the time. So this is one roll, one book of Aristotle's Metaphysics. It's not, it's not insubstantial. But if you get some sense of trying to store hundreds of thousands of these rolled up, much more tightly than this, probably even them, imagine hundreds of thousands of these shoved into a room, I don't know, basically this size or something. There's no way you're fitting hundreds of thousands of these in there.
Also, we'll talk more about this in a little bit when we get down to it. You can see these things can get damaged. In fact, I left this one in my car and it got rained on. But I decided to leave the damage because, well, books got damaged in antiquity. And so I decided to leave it. But I can tell you that these rolls are pretty, pretty durable, but they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, invulnerable. And they can fall victim to very serious damage over time. We'll talk about that in just a minute. And without people constantly copying and correcting and repairing these, time, especially in a very humid environment like I live in Michigan, or in Mississippi, where I copied this out, wreaks havoc on papyrus. So we'll get back to that in just a minute.
But I want to tell you that when I look at these texts, when I think about this, I'm not thinking about this in some purely abstract numbers. Since I've copied out these books, and I can tell you, right, having copied them out, you get some sense of what's going on in them by physically experiencing that process. And I can tell you, I really cannot imagine hundreds of thousands of these rolls existing in the Library of Alexandria. The math doesn't work, the geometry doesn't work, and as we'll see in a little bit, unfortunately, the institutional support is not going to work.
But if you're into calligraphy, you should copy out an entire scroll of your favorite, I don't know, book of Homer or something, a book of The Iliad or The Odyssey, just to get a sense of how much you should love those books, because man, they are a pain in the neck to produce. I'm going to put my Aristotle scroll over here to keep me company.
You might be thinking, what about all the books in Greek? Well, what about books in Hebrew or Egyptian or Latin? Or the Akashic Records that are hidden beneath the Sphinx over there in Egypt? Somehow those could have swollen the numbers. Sure, they could have swollen the numbers of the libraries. Again, Hellenistic attitudes were assimilationist. They wanted to read the books of barbaric peoples, but but in Greek. And moreover, they wanted those barbaric peoples to assimilate to their ways, not the other way around. We strive to learn to read texts in their ancient primary languages, but that's just not really part of the agenda of Hellenism. It's an assimilationist program.
In fact, frankly, much the opposite. Second, by the time Latin literature appeared on the scene, it was primarily confined to the peninsula over there in Italy. It never made a splash in the East, where where Greek remained the lingua franca, the lingua franca of the day. And by then, frankly, the library was already in decline, as we'll see. So the political agenda of the Library of Alexandria, the available texts to be housed within it, and the spatial limitations of the structure itself, probably represent a real impediment to hundreds of thousands of rolls, even multiple tens of thousands. I think often we see estimates of 40 to 400,000 in the literature and online, but I think 40,000 rolls probably represents more of a true historical upper bound. Probably 40,000 is an upper bound, but that's still truly impressive. Most contemporary research libraries, like, I don't know, Columbia or Harvard, they can only boast 20 to 50,000 books in the mid-19th century. Thus, the Library of Alexandria's holdings were probably, along with the Bait al-Hikma of Baghdad, destroyed by the Mongols in 1258, these were probably the largest Western libraries in the world up until the 19th century.
Now, we don't need artificially inflated, ridiculous numbers to make that point, though. If you want a golden age of massive libraries, well, you're you're living in it now. The library at your local research university or central library in your city, it contains orders of magnitude more books than all the libraries of the ancient world combined. And if you want a taste of the Library of Alexandria's holdings, just go spend an afternoon in the section where the Loeb Classical Editions are. The wall of green or red volumes are their absolute best glimpse into that hallowed past. So if you want to appreciate what the Alexandrian library looked like, just go hang out for an afternoon with the Loeb Classical Library.
All right, let's get to the, uh, to the blame game. Who destroyed the library? Art and literature preserve the image of the library: a fire destroyed in a single conflagration that set Western progress back centuries. There's also another place of projection. This is also a place of psychological projection. By setting the blame here, we name who we fear or hate most. Often, it's more about our own life and times than it is what actually happened in Alexandria. I certainly grew up with that narrative. But again, is any of that true?
Again, this is all wrapped up with the the question of why the library existed in the first place. It was first and foremost a prestige structure to display Ptolemaic hegemony. That very hegemony would eventually come to falter, both under indigenous Egyptian uprisings against the Ptolemies and by rival Seleucid attacks. In times of such instability, governments fund armies, not libraries. The Ptolemies themselves would ultimately have to embrace more of an Egyptian image, actually, to maintain their local power, to basically quash local Egyptian resistance, something that cosmopolitan Hellenistic scholars that would have attended the library, they would have probably scorned that as barbaric. Further, Ptolemaic cronies were placed as scholars. Unsurprisingly, cronyism and in those very power struggles, the institutions there probably paid the ultimate price. In such a Game of Thrones moment, Ptolemy VIII purged, purged the intellectuals of Alexandria in 145 BCE. This is probably a couple hundred years, maybe into the library's history, if that. Further, and by then, the major achievements in literary production, especially on Homeric literature, had basically come to their conclusion. The political tide had turned, the social situation had shifted, and an institution once a prestige of the Ptolemaic regime had come to be seen as a liability by those Ptolemies. The slow doom of the Library of Alexandria as an intellectual center had certainly begun.
With the defeat of the last Ptolemy, Cleopatra VII, the Romans were more interested in Egypt as a breadbasket, frankly, than an intellectual center. Romans didn't care about this. The most constant blame for the direct destruction of the library is laid at the feet of Julius Caesar, the hated dictator trope, who did start a fire, a massive fire, in 48 BCE of some boats, which did spread inside the harbor and definitely damaged some buildings, up to and including the library. Now, the extent of that damage isn't clear, but Plutarch and Cassius Dio, about a century later, do tell us that the fire totally destroyed the library. However, this is a bit odd, given that Suetonius has Domitian, Emperor from 81 to 96 CE, actually sending scholars to Alexandria precisely to copy texts that had been destroyed recently in a fire in Rome. So I don't suspect that Caesar's fire totally destroyed the library, or the Mouseion, or the Serapeum. But I do suspect that Plutarch and Cassius Dio are indicating to us that the library was certainly at this time, well, it was a a shell of its former glory, to say the very least.
Of course, Alexandria would be the site of further imperial unrest under Caracalla, Diocletian, and especially Aurelian. Waring with the Palmyrene Queen Zenobia, who was pretty badass, would see another conflagration in 272 CE. This would be a fire set and devastating the area precisely around where the library and the Mouseion were. This probably did destroy most of the holdings of these three intellectual structures.
Other folks like to blame the rampaging Christian mobs of 391, that certainly attacked and destroyed the Serapeum, although no specific books are actually mentioned to have been destroyed there by the Christians. In fact, the archaeological excavations of the ruins of the Serapeum, which you can visit, make it pretty unclear even where a substantial housing of books would have even been in the first place. And even with the Christian mob that murdered Hypatia in 415 CE, it's often used to signal the end of pagan learning and Neoplatonism and teaching in Alexandria. Well, we have archaeological evidence of new lecture halls being built after her murder, used by pagan and Christian scholars like Synesius of Cyrene. Even note the the endurance of the Mouseion through the late 5th century. So these entities are sort of limping on in a kind of half-life.
The anti-Muslim faction, of course, will also put the blame on the conquest of the city in 642 by Amr ibn al-As and the destruction in that case will be laid at the feet of Umar ibn al-Khattab. Now, there are a lot of reasons to doubt this, especially if you know anything about Umar's conquest of Jerusalem. He was very liberal in many ways. He just wasn't much of a destroying kind of guy. And by the 7th century, you can guess what I'm going to say: I don't think there was much there to be destroyed, frankly.
But I'll say this one for a deep dive. If you want to check out Mota's channel on this topic, he has a great deep dive on this question about the Muslim relationship to Egypt more generally, the Library of Alexandria, but also one of my favorite episodes on this channel is "What Muslims Knew About the Pyramids During Their Administration of the Area." It's just really fascinating, and we're lucky to have guys like him in the history tube sphere. So check out Mota's channel on sort of the Muslim, uh, relationship to the Library of Alexandria and their relationship to ancient Egypt more generally.
The truth of the origins and fate of the Library of Alexandria are mostly just sad. Sad because they are the sad fate of most intellectual institutions in history, from the closure of the Academy by Justinian, which those philosophers just went straight to Syria, to the looting of the monasteries in the early modern period, or the shuttering of liberal arts departments these days. It was born out of imperial vainglory, the library was born out of imperial vainglory in competition with Alexander's other generals and their imperial holdings, especially in competition with Athens, mostly again in the interest of Hellenization. And it declined. It declined when the political tide had turned, probably as early as the 2nd century BCE. And not only did the library have to compete for political expediency, for basic institutional survival, but its very location, its very location meant that its cradle would also prove to be its grave.
While papyrus is very durable and acid-free, it is highly susceptible to humidity. And Alexandria is a place that is nothing if not humid. Now, of course, hundreds of papyrus manuscripts survive from Egypt. We've all seen them, Oxyrhynchus, but those were all recovered from the Egyptian desert, well outside that beautiful, lush zone around the Nile. Without a dedicated staff, a veritable army of copyists, people like me, and restorers, often study manuscripts. Manuscripts that would have been rolled and unrolled over and over and over again. These would have become worn and tattered, I think within 50 years, and even probably beyond, destroy, beyond transmissibility within a hundred or so. This process of just rolling them and unrolling them, this is friction, it damages them.
Thus, the whims of the state could not only exile philosophers and scholars, they could limit collections and staff. But even a generation, just one generation of delayed maintenance, could have spelled doom for hundreds of rolls per year, if not more. Even the Christian theological library founded by Origen was only spared because of Jerome's transmission of all those manuscripts from papyrus to more durable vellum in that environment. And that didn't even spare the collection. Among the texts that were lost from from that amazing collection were an ancient gospel, probably written in Aramaic or Hebrew. Now, we don't know what it was, but an original gospel written in Aramaic or Hebrew, the last such mention of a his text like that in the historical record, along with Origen's own copy of the Hexapla, perhaps even some of the Dead Sea Scrolls that he recovered over near Jericho. Yes, Origen obtained Dead Sea Scrolls from New Jericho. They may have been in that collection.
No one event doomed the Library of Alexandria and other educational centers like that one more than the waxing and waning of political fashion and the will to support just those kinds of institutions. Ongoing and generalized instability brought on by imperial warmongering and the very material reality that books and education are always on a knife's edge of vanishing without ongoing community, political, and financial support. Libraries can just collapse just that fast. Educational institutions are incredibly fragile institutions.
While many of the myths that surround the Library of Alexandria aren't much, in the way, supported by the historical evidence, those myths can still be a very important place of inspiration for us. The dream of a vast, well-funded research, educational, and learning center, accessible and serving the public, serving the public. It's something every community can aspire to. After all, what separates democracy from mob rule is basically an educated political body. If we mourn the loss of the Library of Alexandria, that should really motivate us to support and create such institutions and cherish, cherish what has survived from the ravages of history. Aristotle survived in one manuscript. We're so lucky to have any Aristotle at all. To thank our intellectual ancestors every time we enjoy the poetry of Homer and Hesiod, or the fragments of the Stoics, upon which we can still see the trace of the hands of some of those scholars of Alexandria. That's how we mourn what's been lost with honor, rather than the false piety of lamenting pie in the sky, what could have been had it not been destroyed, but rather to appreciate what we have by studying it and holding volumes like those.
I do think we can take seriously the somewhat dismal facts of the matter, are just the lack of good evidence in most cases from the historical point of view with the Library of Alexandria, the Mouseion, or the Serapeum, while at the same time, we can be inspired by some of that myth-making. Taking them seriously, taking the myths very seriously, the dream of libraries like that, but not having to take them historically literally. So support the educational institutions that matter to you, because when they have to rely on the whim of politicians, fickle and frankly exploitative administrators pushing scholars to publish or perish rather than engage with the public, and applying for grants, chasing academic fashion from poststructuralism to string theory, or the horrible demiurge that is the algorithm, for that matter, trust me, scholars and scholarship, and the access to them, and access to scholarship, is never as safe and as secure as we can make it together.
Until next time, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane side of history, philosophy, and religion.