How many scrolls were in the library of alexandria

Confronted with growing social unrest and other major political and economic problems, the later Ptolemies did not devote as much attention towards the Library and the Mouseion as their predecessors had, leading to its further decline. A shift in Greek scholarship as a whole took place around the beginning of the first century BC because by this time, all the major classical poetic texts had finally been standardized and extensive commentaries had already been produced on the writings of all the major literary authors of the Greek Classical Era.

Meanwhile, Alexandrian scholarship was probably introduced to Rome in the first century BC by Tyrannion of Amisus, a student of Dionysius Thrax, who lived from c.

However, the Roman historian Cassius Dio, who lived from c. The geographer Strabo,who lived from c. Still, the manner in which he speaks about the Mouseion shows that it was nowhere near as prestigious as it had been a few centuries prior. The Library likewise tragically dwindled in importance during the Roman period, due to a lack of funding and support. Its membership appears to have ceased by the s AD.

Between and AD, the city of Alexandria saw a Palmyrene invasion and an imperial counterattack that most likely destroyed whatever remained of the Library, if it still existed at that time. Meanwhile, as the reputation of Alexandrian scholarship declined, the reputations of other libraries across the Mediterranean world improved, and other libraries also sprang up within the city of Alexandria itself; some — or even all — of the scrolls from the Great Library may have been used to stock some of these smaller libraries.

The Caesareum and the Claudianum in Alexandria are both known to have had major libraries by the end of the first century AD. Mention of both the Great Library of Alexandria and the Mouseion that housed it disappear after the middle of the third century AD, however. The last known references to scholars being members of the Mouseion date to the s.

If the Mouseion and Library still existed at this time, they were almost certainly destroyed during the attack as well. As late as the beginning of the fourth century AD historians believe it held the largest collection of books in the city of Alexandria. In the s and s, the Serapeum was still a major pilgrimage site for pagans, however. It remained a fully functioning temple, and had classrooms for philosophers interested in theurgy, the study of cultic rituals and esoteric religious practices.

Under the Christian rule of Roman emperor Theodosius I pagan rituals were outlawed, and pagan temples were destroyed. In AD, Theophilus, the bishop of Alexandria ordered the destruction of the Serapeum and its conversion into a church. The pagans of Alexandria were incensed by this act of desecration, especially the teachers of Neoplatonic philosophy and theurgy at the Serapeum.

Its teachers took up arms and led their students and other followers in a guerrilla attack on the Christian population of Alexandria, killing many of them before being forced to retreat. In retaliation, the Christians of the city vandalized and demolished the Serapeum — although amazingly some parts of the colonnade were still standing as late as the twelfth century.

As the course of history shows, power and knowledge ebbs and flows from East to West, North to South, and libraries — perhaps even housing some of the precious scrolls that had been copied and housed at Alexandria — were popping up all over the Roman Empire. By the fourth century AD, there were at least two dozen public libraries in the city of Rome alone.

In late antiquity, as the Roman Empire became Christianized, Christian libraries modeled directly on the Library of Alexandria and other great libraries of earlier pagan times began to be founded all across the Greek-speaking eastern part of the empire.

It was conceived by scholar and exiled governor of Athens, Demetrius of Phalerum, who imagined a "universal library" in the city center, where any scholar could have access to large swaths of information with which to research and learn. The Egyptian King Ptolemy I Soter supported this idea, making Demetrius his advisor and giving him the resources and budget "to collect, if possible, all the books in the world," and to fill "his library with the writings of all men as far as they were worth serious attention," via Britannica.

According to Book Riot , construction began on the library around BCE, and Demetrius set about acquiring books from the book markets in Athens and Rhodes, as well as confiscating books found aboard ships that docked in the Alexandria harbor. Soon, the library contained over half a million documents from places as far away as Assyria, Persia, Greece, and India, and employed over scholars, according to The Ohio State University.

The collection grew so large that the library even expanded to include a second branch at the Temple of Serapis at Alexandria. Cyril is honored today in Christendom as a saint. But at the time of his death, many of his fellow bishops expressed great relief at his departure.

Tracing the enigmatic, mystical genesis of the Greek Olympiad, The Olympic Games: How They All Began takes you on a journey to ancient Greece with some of the finest scholars of the ancient world. Ranging from the original religious significance of the games to the brutal athletic competitions, this free eBook paints a picture of the ancient sports world and its devoted fans.

Socrates — , a church historian from Constantinople, says of Hypatia:. She carried on the Platonic tradition derived from Plotinus, and instructed those who desired to learn in…philosophic discipline. Wherefore all those wishing to work at philosophy streamed in from all parts of the world, collecting around her on account of her learned and courageous character. She maintained a dignified intercourse with the chief people of the city.

She was not ashamed to spend time in the society of men, for all esteemed her highly, and admired her for her purity. Hypatia, who was born about , collaborated with her father from early in her life, editing his works and preparing them for publication. Founded in B. Learn about the dazzling discoveries coming out of the Alexander the Great-era tomb at Amphipolis in Greece. Indeed, the Alexandria Library was much more.

In B. Within little more than a year, Aristotle died in Chalcis and Demosthenes in Calaurie. To this day, these three gigantic figures, more than any others, save Jesus and Plato perhaps, remain essential to the ideal of civilized life throughout the world. When Alexander died, his empire was divided among his three senior commanders.

Almost immediately the library epitomized the best scholarship of the ancient world, containing the intellectual riches of Mesopotamia , Persia , Greece , Rome and Egypt. Until it was closed in C.

The history of the library and its university center falls into five stages. The first, from its founding in B. The second, from B. This period coincided with the consolidation of Roman influence in the Mediterranean basin.

The fourth was the era of the Catechetical School, to C. Together, these five stages cover a thousand years. Sometime between and B. Demetrios set about this task with vigor, providing the course the library was to follow for a millennium. His genius lay in his conception of the library as something more than a receptacle for books; it was also to be a university where new knowledge would be produced. These halls were connected to other university buildings by marble colonnades.

Scholars were extended royal appointments with stipends to live and work in this university community. At the same time, task forces commissioned to acquire books were scouring the Mediterranean. The scriptorium where the copies were made also served as a bookstore, creating a lucrative enterprise with an international clientele. Demetrios was succeeded as chief librarian by Zenodotus of Ephesus — B.

This brilliant scholar was a Greek grammarian, literary critic, poet and editor. He also produced the first critical editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey and set each of them up in the 24 books in which we have them today. The Athenian Agora was a great center of ancient learning.

It was probably Zenodotus who established as part of the library the public lending section known as the Serapeion—so named because it was a sanctuary for the god Serapis as well as a public library. He appointed two assistant librarians: Alexander of Aetolia born c. Both of these men became famous in their own right as writers and scholars. One of the things we would most like to have today from the Alexandria library is its catalogue, called the Pinakes , the great work of Callimachus of Cyrene c.

Although only fragments of the Pinakes have survived, we know quite a lot about it. Most dependable sources agree on the organizational method utilized in the catalogue, which amply demonstrates the sophisticated character of the ancient library.

The Pinakes consisted of scrolls, in which all the works in the library were organized by discipline, with a substantial bibliographical description for each work. The Pinakes was the first great library catalogue of western civilization, just as The Bible of Gutenberg was the first great printed book. However, the Pinakes was more than a catalogue. It was the work of the foremost man of letters of his age.

Two and a half centuries later, in the time of Jesus, it held one million volumes. It was officials with the conquering Arab army who last saw the library in its operational state. Undoubtedly much of it was carried off to their royal libraries. Surviving fragments of the Pinakes confirm the likelihood of this.

For its first two centuries, the library at Alexandria continued to be a center for nearly every kind of research in the natural sciences as well as in philosophy and the humanities, employing the scientific method developed by Aristotle, which, thanks to Francis Bacon — , forms the foundation of modern science.

Eratosthenes of Cyrene — B. He was an accomplished mathematician, geographer, astronomer, grammarian, chronographer, philologist, philosopher, historian and poet. He founded the sciences of astronomy, physical geography, geodetics and chronology. He was known as the most learned person of the Ptolemaic age 26 and was acclaimed by his contemporaries as second only to Plato as a literary thinker and philosopher.

Eratosthenes dated the Trojan War to about B. One of his most memorable accomplishments was the invention of an accurate method for measuring the circumference of the earth see the sidebar to this article. During his tenure as chief librarian, Eratosthenes brought to Alexandria the official Athenian copies of the three great Attic tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Aristophanes of Byzantium c. He was a man with a photographic memory and could cite at length the literary sources in the library. It is said that while judging poetry competitions he regularly detected plagiarized lines, and on a number of occasions, when challenged by the king to justify his criticism, cited the sources and recited the original passages.

As a philologist, grammarian and author, Aristophanes produced poetry, dramas and critical editions of the works of his famous namesake, Aristophanes c. Near the end of his life, Aristophanes was imprisoned by Ptolemy V Epiphanes for entertaining an offer to move to the great library of Pergamum.

Such repression did not create an ideal climate in which scholarship might flourish. After his imprisonment, the library languished under an interim director, Apollonius Eidograph.

But in B. Aristarchus was chief librarian for 30 years, from to B. He is still considered one of the greatest literary scholars because his recension of the works of Homer continues to be the standard text textus receptus upon which all modern versions are based. Besides his two critical editions of Homer, he produced similarly erudite editions of Hesiod, Pindar, Archilochus, Alcaeus and Anacreon. He wrote commentaries on the works of all these classical poets as well as on the dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles and Aristophanes, and on the historian Herodotus.

Aristarchus had been the teacher of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II, and though the latter gained a reputation for being a monster, the two apparently remained friends. When a civil war and political insurgency against the king arose in B. With his reign, the history of wise and humane Ptolemies and illustrious librarians ended. Thereafter, valuable scholarship continued in Alexandria, such as the work of Philo Judaeus 30 B.

Revolutions, insurrections and persecutions wracked the kingdom as dynastic political intrigue plagued the country, the city and the scholarly community. Considering the extensive accumulation of scientific data collected by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and their advanced methods of empirical research, it is surprising that they did not achieve some key breakthrough in chemistry or physics that would have precipitated an industrial revolution.

The Greeks and Romans both understood, for example, the power of steam produced by heated water. The Romans harnessed steam for powering toys.

There is some indication that they employed it for powering siege guns. What held them back from utilizing it in steam-driven machinery, which would have enabled that giant leap from mere muscle to mechanical power? They had refined sciences of optics, geometry and physics. What prevented them from imagining and creating a microscope? They understood atomic theory in some coarse way. What prevented them from identifying the components of water as hydrogen and oxygen and thus moving on to the intricacies of chemistry?

They seem to have marched right up to the intellectual and scientific threshold for mechanization and then fallen back into a 1,year darkness. Their sciences needed to be rediscovered and reinvented in the Renaissance of the 12th to 14th centuries before the next step forward could be made.

The likely answer lies in the area of two cultural circumstances: 1 the shift in Alexandrian Library scholarship from Aristotelian empiricism to Platonic metaphysical speculation in about B. Increasingly during this period of decline, the wealth and intellectual capital of Alexandria was dissipated in trying to maintain workable relations with the rising power of Rome.

The zest to produce the things of culture was permanently interrupted. One consequence of these disturbing times was an intense turn toward religion. Hellenistic Jews were experimenting with various kinds of theologies. The roots of Christianity, Gnosticism and rabbinic Judaism were already insinuating themselves into the rich soil of this uneasy world.

In Alexandria, the scholarly community abandoned its intense, fruitful focus upon empirical science after the mode of Aristotle and lost itself in the scholarly inquiry into the religion and philosophy of Platonism. Father of geometry. So the scholarly culture of the ancient library became the seedbed of the great philosophies of Judaism and Christianity and thus has continued to influence Western culture for two millennia, showing little sign of abating as we move into the third.

Philo Judaeus was surely one of the most prominent scholars in Alexandria at the turn of the millennium. His life overlaps that of Jesus of Nazareth and is the scholarly bridge between the pre-Christian era of Greek antiquity and the begin ning of Christian history in Alexandria. With the appearance of Philo, Jewish scholarship became a prominent force there.

Philo was a member of a distinguished Jewish family in the influential Alexandrian Jewish community. His brother, Alexander the Alabarch, led that community.

Philo lived much of his life in contemplation, authoring a large array of books. Philo and his contemporaries considered themselves to be faithful Jews.