cleopatrasdaughter: history week meme → day four: one building/location/architecture The Royal

cleopatrasdaughter:history week meme → day four: one building/location/architectureThe Royal Library of Alexandria or Great Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world. The Library was part of a larger research institution called the Mouseion, which was dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts. The idea of a universal library in Alexandria may have been proposed by Demetrius of Phalerum, an exiled Athenian statesman living in Alexandria, to Ptolemy I Soter, who may have established plans for the Library, but the Library itself was probably not built until the reign of his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus. The Library quickly acquired a large number of papyrus scrolls, due largely to the Ptolemaic kings’ aggressive and well-funded policies for procuring texts. It is unknown precisely how many such scrolls were housed at any given time, but estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 at its height. The exact layout of the library is not known, but ancient sources describe the Library of Alexandria as comprising a collection of scrolls, Greek columns, a peripatos walk, a room for shared dining, a reading room, meeting rooms, gardens, and lecture halls, creating a model for the modern university campus. Alexandria came to be regarded as the capital of knowledge and learning, in part because of the Great Library. Many important and influential scholars worked at the Library during the third and second centuries BC, including, among many others: Zenodotus of Ephesus, who worked towards standardizing the texts of the Homeric poems; Callimachus, who wrote the Pinakes, sometimes considered to be the world’s first library catalogue; Apollonius of Rhodes, who composed the epic poem the Argonautica; Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who calculated the circumference of the earthwithin a few hundred kilometers of accuracy; Aristophanes of Byzantium, who invented the system of Greek diacritics and was the first to divide poetic texts into lines; and Aristarchus of Samothrace, who produced the definitive texts of the Homeric poems as well as extensive commentaries on them. During the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes, a daughter library was established in the Serapeum, a temple to the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis. The loss of the ancient world’s single greatest archive of knowledge, the Library of Alexandria, has been lamented for ages.  In the book The Vanished Library by Luciano Confora, he interprets the evidence from ancient writers that Caesar did not, in fact, burn down the Library of Alexandria, but rather (and accidentally so) warehouses containing manuscripts near the port waiting for export.  Archaeologist and author Brian Haughton writes, “If the great Library was attached to the Museum then Strabo obviously felt there was no need to mention it separately, and, perhaps more importantly, if he was there in 20 BC, the Library had obviously not been burned down by Caesar twenty-eight years previously. The existence of the Library in 20 BC, though in a much less complete form, means that we have to look to someone other than Caesar as the destroyer of Alexandria’s ancient wonder.”A blow to the library was during the war between Emperor Aurelian and Queen Zenobia, in which  a large number of contents were lost. The Library continued in the form of its daughter, the Serapeum. The definitive end of the Great Library was in CE 391. In his campaign against paganism, Roman Emperor Theodosius I ordered the sanction to destroy the library, carried out by the Bishop of Alexandria, Theophilus. This was followed by the brutal skinning alive of Hpyatia, a Greek pagan philosopher and astronomer, in CE 415, by a Christian mob, in which historian Kathleen Wider argues marked the end of Classical antiquity. -- source link
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