To John the Grammarian, a Coptic priest living in Alexandria at the time of the Arab conquest in A.D. 641, the Muslim conqueror Amr must have seemed something of a novelty. When John was named adviser to the general, he was delighted to discover that the city’s new governor was not so bored with music, poetry, and learning as barbarians are supposed to be. Soon John grew bold (and hopeful) enough to ask Amr what might be done with the “books of wisdom” held in the “royal treasuries”—the famous library contained in the palace of the Ptolemies. No doubt, he hoped the general would entrust the library to his hands. The general replied, however, that he could not decide the fate of the books without consulting Caliph Omar. The caliph’s answer, quoted here from Alfred J. Butler’s Arab Conquest of Egypt, is infamous:“Touching the books you mention, if what is written in them agrees with the Book of God, they are not required; if it disagrees, they are not desired. Destroy them therefore.” According to tradition, the scrolls were bundled up and delivered as fuel to the city’s baths, where it is said they fueled the furnaces for six months.
It’s too bad that such a colorful tale, fit as it is for the Thousand and One Nights, carries only the rudiments of truth. In fact, the story as we know it may have been invented by one Ibn al-Qifti, a twelfth-century Sunni chronicler. According to the Egyptian classicist Mostafa el-Abbadi, al-Qifti may have invented the story to justify the sale of books by the twelfth-century Sunni ruler Saladin, who sold off whole libraries to pay for his fight against the Crusaders. Despite its possible Islamic origin, however, the story has been handed down in the West as an Orientalist lament for the fate of Hellenic learning in the heathen East.
In fact, by the time the caliph’s army arrived at Alexandria in the seventh century A.D., the city’s storied library had seen at least one major fire already, and perhaps more. There had been not only one library but two: a great library founded in the third century B.C. within the Mouseion, or temple of the Muses, and a smaller “daughter” library. Built in the following century, the latter was placed in the temple of Serapis, a Hellenized Egyptian deity and divine patron of syncretistic Alexandria, whom the theologically resourceful Ptolemies had conjured for themselves. Both collections were housed in the royal precinct, the Brucheion, and are often spoken of as a single entity. Outside the royal quarter, books would have been found throughout the city in great quantities: home of the papyrus industry, Alexandria was the center of the book trade throughout the Mediterranean almost from its founding to the third century A.D.
When Julius Caesar came to the aid of Cleopatra in her war against young Ptolemy XIII in 48 B.C. (by which time the libraries were already nearly three hundred years old), he burned the ships in Alexandria’s harbor to prevent his enemy from taking the city by sea. According to Seneca, some forty thousand books were lost in the ensuing conflagration, though other authorities hold that only a few books, stored in the warehouses awaiting shelving, were burned. These books, in fact, were probably waiting for shipment to Rome on Caesar’s orders. Even if Seneca’s estimate is correct, it is dwarfed by the seven hundred thousand scrolls thought to have been in the main library of the Mouseion alone. There are rumors of subsequent fires, too; but visitors to Alexandria in the period following Caesar’s death leave evidence of great libraries’ continued existence. Strabo, who wrote in the time of Augustus and the birth of Jesus, seems to have been acquainted with a working Alexandrian library. Legend holds that Marc Antony offered Cleopatra the books of Pergamum (Alexandria’s great rival, located in what is now the Turkish province of Izmir) as compensation for the loss of her library, though Plutarch doubts the truth of this tale. Suetonius writes that Domitian, Roman emperor of the second century A.D., employed Alexandrian scholars to replace the texts of Augustus’s Palatine Library after it was destroyed in a fire; this would seem to indicate the ongoing presence of an intellectual community at Alexandria, holding precious texts from which copies could be produced. It is likely that what remained of the libraries was destroyed utterly in the third century A.D., when the Brucheion was razed during the emperor Aurelian’s war against the notorious Zenobia, queen of Palmyra. By this time, however, the libraries surely were in decline under Christians who, following their cultural triumph over pagans, Jews, and Neoplatonists, found the Hellenic riches of the libraries discomfiting. Their ire reached a fever pitch in the fourth century A.D.: Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, desired the site of the temple of Serapis for a church; he set loose a mob of Christians, who destroyed the pagan temple and, perhaps, the books of its library as well. Whatever the truth of the tale of the caliph’s decree three hundred years later, it seems clear that the flimsy papyrus of Alexandria burned more than once.
~~Library: An Unquiet History -by- Matthew Battles
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