Alexandria, The Library Of
- Alexandria, The Library Of
Created in the third century BC by Ptolemy I Soter, the king of Egypt. At its peak, it contained over 500,000 volumes covering mathematics, physics, biology, astronomy, literature, geography and medicine. An annex in the Temple of Serapis contained another 43,000 volumes. These scrolls represented most of the writings of antiquity. Copies of the scrolls were distributed to libraries throughout the civilized world.
These copies give us an idea of what was contained in the Library of Alexandria, since most of its scrolls were destroyed in several fires. The library was burned on four separate occasions. First in 47 BC during a civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great.
A fire was set to destroy the Egyptian fleet and it spread to the library, destroying about 40,000 books. Next in 272 AD, on orders of the Roman Emperor Lucius Domitius Aurelian. Then in 391 AD, on orders of the Roman emperor Theodosius I. Finally in 640 AD, by Muslims under the caliph Umar I. Some of the librarians for the Library of Alexandria included, Zenodotus of Ephesus, Callimachus (a poet), Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace. The knowledge lost in the fires took hundreds to thousands of years to be rediscovered, and some of that knowledge is still waiting to be rediscovered. See
Alexander The Great.
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