As flames engulfed the Library of Alexandria, the ancient world’s greatest repository of human knowledge vanished. But who lit the match? It’s one of history’s most, well, burning questions, and with good reason—the library was one of history’s most important institutions in education and culture.
Despite being the pride of the ancient world, the famous Egyptian library burned multiple times, and in 48 B.C., found itself in the crosshairs of a civil war.
Did Julius Caesar really burn down the Great Library of Alexandria? Or was it Islamic scholars? Or the library’s patron himself? Here are all the leads historians have about the library’s destruction.
What was the Library of Alexandria?
Despite its location in Egypt, the library was actually a bastion of ancient Greek culture. Built inside a temple known as the Mouseion, or Temple of the Muses, the museum and its reading rooms and gardens no longer exist. But contemporary reports waxed poetic over their architecture‚ and contents—all a nod to Greek civilization thanks to the influence of the three-century reign of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt.
(This Wonder of the Ancient World shone brightly for more than a thousand years.)
It is unclear if the library was the brainchild of Ptolemy I Soter, first pharaoh of the Ptolemaic dynasty who took the throne in 323 B.C., or his adviser, Demetrius of Phaleron. Ptolemy was Macedonian Greek by birth, and turned Egypt into a mecca of Greek culture during his rule. He had big ambitions for the city of Alexandria, which he helped build on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast and made capital in 305 B.C., writes historian Guy de la Bèdoyére in The Fall of Egypt and the Rise of Rome: A History of the Ptolemies. Eventually, he writes, Ptolemy’s great city “served as a port of entry in every possible way, for literature, art, and philosophy, as well as trade.”
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Around 295 B.C., he tasked Demetrius with building the world’s greatest collection of written works, a move that would put Alexandria on the map and turned Egypt into an important Greek cultural center.
However, Ptolemy I did not live to see the library; he died in 283 B.C.; historians mostly agree that it opened during the reign of his son and successor, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, between 284 and 246 B.C . By then, the Ptolemaic dynasty had devoted exorbitant resources to the project and to Alexandria’s expansion. As the pharaoh’s scouts scoured the world for written works, they acquired or copied treasures like the library of Aristotle and copies of original plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles.
(Read what Euripides’ 5th century play had to say about sirens.)
Though best known for containing the entirety of ancient Greek literature, the library also contained works from other cultural hubs like Syria, Persia, and India. And it stunned visitors not just with its hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls, but with its architecture.
The library was known worldwide as a repository of knowledge. Like a modern university, it attracted scholars tempted by its large collections and eager to further knowledge of science, mathematics, and the arts. It was so large that it spun off a sister institution, the Serapeum, in another temple nearby. But Ptolemy VIII expelled all foreign scholars as part of a succession struggle around 145 B.C.
Modern scholars know “frustratingly little” about the library and its scholars, notes Bèdoyére. Nevertheless, he writes, it made an outsized impact on its world. “Perhaps then its greatest contribution to the history of scholarship is that it existed at all,” he notes, calling the library “the greatest gift of the Ptolemies to the ancient world.”
How the Library of Alexandria burned
Social unrest across Egypt may have fueled the library’s fall. In 48 B.C., at least part of the library became a casualty of an Egyptian civil war. That year, Roman general Julius Caesar and his men traveled to Alexandria to defend Caesar’s ally, Cleopatra, in a war against her brother, Ptolemy XIV. In the process, the Romans attempted to block Ptolemy’s fleet from leaving the docks by setting Alexandria’s ships and wharves on fire.
As the fires spread, they reached the Mouseion. Historical sources disagree on how much damage resulted; some early historians like Plutarch claim the entire library burned, while philosopher Seneca the Younger later quoted a now-lost work that says 40,000 scrolls were destroyed.
(How Julius Caesar started a big war by crossing a small stream.)
Did anything survive? Later sources refer to the Mouseion, indicating that the temple was still in use, and scholars seem to have continued working with collections that would have been burned if the library had been fully destroyed.
The fall of the Library of Alexandria
The remnants of the library, and the academics affiliated with it, experienced a slow decline along with Alexandria itself, other scholars hold.
Over time, the Library of Alexandria “rather slowly demised due to neglect,” writes librarian and curator Sebastian Modrow in Libraries, Archives and Museums. Once a seat of Greek knowledge, Alexandria was now under Roman rule, and Roman leaders seem to have largely ignored the repository, historian Roy MacLeod writes in The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World. “We are told very little about the library (or whatever was left of it) in the Roman Imperial period.”
The Library of Alexandria may have been gone, but there is evidence its sister institution survived—only to burn twice itself.
As Christianity spread throughout Rome, Christian rulers like Theodosius I, the Christian patriarch of Alexandria, began to fight what they saw as pagan idolatry. In A.D. 391, a group of Serapeum scholars angry at the Roman attack on their gods and muses attacked some Christians in Alexandria. In response, the Christians vandalized and tore down the Serapeum.
Arson, or accusations thereof, continued to play a role in the library’s downfall. In 642 A.D., Arab forces commanded by Amr ibn al-As captured Alexandria during the devoutly Islamic Rashidun Caliphate’s conquest of Egypt. According to a surviving 13th-century text, the Arab invaders were commanded by Caliph Umar to destroy the great library, supposedly using its books as fuel for fires to warm their bath water during the occupation that followed.
But modern historians say that is a myth likely created and propagated by medieval Christians suspicious of Islam and its teachings. “Intellectual tolerance was a hallmark of medieval Islamic civilization,” writes historian Asma Afsaruddin in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Contrary to popular myth, Afsaruddin writes, Muslims of the era were remarkably receptive to the knowledge of other cultures.
An enduring debate
For years, writes classical historian Roger S. Bagnall in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, debates raged about who destroyed the fire and why. “This is a murder mystery with a number of suspects,” he writes, noting that “passions still run high on this matter.” He notes, some scholars blamed the Christian teachers of 391 for laying waste to the remnants of classical learning that remained at the library, while others pinned the great library’s ultimate destruction on the Islamic Caliphate and its supposed rejection of non-Muslim knowledge.