Chapter XVIII: Varying Fortunes of the Alexandrian Library

The incomparable Library at Alexandria was exposed to the same vicissitudes as those which beset everything mundane. It was frequently rifled and portions of its contents were often destroyed through disturbances occurring in the period of the Roman domination, but it was as frequently replenished by the literary activity which found home and harborage in Alexandria for hundreds of years after the Christian Era had begun.

Tradition is divided both as to the time and the circumstances under which the Alexandrian Library and Museum, viewed as one institution, came to its end. The tradition which gained large credence that its career terminated at the time of the Saracen conquest of Alexandria in 642 A. D., and under the fanatical frenzy of the Caliph Omar, rests upon very questionable authority. The oft-quoted answer of the Saracen Emperor to the importunate appeal of the Alexandrian scholar (Joannes Grammaticus) to spare the Library, that, "If those books agreed with the Koran they were useless; if they did not agree with the Koran they were pernicious; in either case should be destroyed," rests mainly on the evidence of a stranger who lived six hundred years later, is discredited by the best authorities, and is "overbalanced," as says Gibbon, "by the silence of the early and native annalists." Says a writer in the North American Review: "It may have been destroyed during the great riot between the orthodox and Arian factions in 389, when the Serapeum, which is said to have housed it, was burned. It can hardly have had the wasting fate that perhaps befell its Roman rival, and it is certain that Omar's iconoclasm is a myth. With Gibbon's judgment modern historical scholarship concurs: 'The solitary report of a stranger who wrote at the end of six hundred years in the confines of Media is overbalanced by the silence of two annalists of a more early date, both Christians, both natives of Egypt, and the most ancient of whom, the patriarch Eutychius, has amply described the conquest of Alexandria.'"[69] The better conclusion, therefore, seems to be that there was little of the famous Alexandrian Library in existence at the time of the Saracen conquest in 642 A. D., owing to the fact of its earlier demolition, which was begun, at least, in the time of the Emperor Theodosius, when, under the Emperor's permission, Archbishop Theophilus, at the close of the fourth century, led fanatical Christians in the destruction of heathen temples--not sparing the literary treasures of the Library which had been associated with an antecedent heathen patronage.

But, whatever the agencies of destruction, and whenever it was consummated, there is no difference of opinion among antiquarians, historians, and men of letters as to the world's irreparable loss and literary impoverishment when this far-famed Library and Museum (wherein had been gathered and treasured literature from Egypt, Rome, Greece, and India,--with its extensive departments for the business of transcribing literature, "and with every possible advantage which royal munificence on the one hand and learned assiduity on the other, could insure") was destroyed; and the literary accumulations of centuries, including the immense library from Pergamos and inestimably valuable manuscripts of the Bible, were ruthlessly and irremediably wasted.