Burning Books

Author: * Catharina Grafeldr - 2 Posts on this thread out of 295 Posts sitewide.
Date: Feb 18, 2008 - 16:18

I agree excellent posts! The thought of all that has been lost due to the slash and burn policies of the Church and those who considered themselves "civilized" is also responisible for not only our lost histories but also many of the predicaments we find ourselves in today. This discussion allows me to go off on the loss of great libraries of nowledge especially the exquisite library at Alexandria. Not many really think about or realize just exactly what was lost with the destruction of the library.(founded in 300 BC) This has always been a sore spot with me and even though it is not to do with the Goths. It does have to do with the destruction of valuable ancient knowledge Bairgawulf mentions.

We know there were other ancient libraries like Ashurbanipal's`which was solely for the king's use and specialized in materials for his particular needs. The collection Aristotle put together, despite its extent ands variety was strictly personal, a tool for his multifarious studies. The library at Alexandria however, was comprehensive, embracing books of all sorts from everywhere, and it was public, open to anyone with fitting scholarly or literary qualifications.

The very first problem faced by the Ptolemies who had established the library was acqusitions. Egypt boasted a long and distinguised culture and there were books aplenty throughout the land---in Egyptian. There were Greek books to be bought in Athens and Rhodes and other established centers of Greek culture but not in the newly fledged Alexandria. So the Ptolemies solution was money and highhandedness. They sent out agents with well filled purses and orders to buy whatever books they could, on every kind of subject, and the older the copy the better. Older books were prefered because less copying had taken place and they were much less likely to have errors in text. Newly aquired books were stacked in warehouses while they went through a preliminary accessions procedure.

The policy was to acquire EVERYTHING, from exalted poetry to humdrum cookbooks. There were two libraries, it is not known what the reason for that number. The rolls in the main library totald 490,000, in the "daughter" library , 42,800. At the head of the library was a Director appointed by the court. An intellectual luminary. The first to hold this post was Zenodotus. Presumable Zenodotus adapted what Aristotle had worked out for his collection to suit this larger one at Alexandria. First sorting the rolls according to the nature of their contents--verse or prose,literary or scientific and so on. The next step was to assign rooms or parts of rooms, to various categories of writings that he had decided upon and then put the aapropriate works on the shelves-arranging them by author in alphabetical order.

One of the greatest contributions we owe to the scholars at the library of Alexandria-alphabetical order as a mode of organization. This library could only be categorized today as awesome! So it was a sad day when Rome took over Egypt in 30 BC. Although they kept the library and museum going, membership was only awarded to military and those who had distingushed themselves in government service. The library no longer belonged to the scholars. The complete destruction of the library came in 270 AD when emperor Aurelian tried to suppress an insurgency of the Kingdom of Palmyra. During the struggle the library and museum were laid waste. One can only imagine what great minds and knowledges of the ancient world we have been deprived of, including for many of us our own true and perhaps more accurate ancestral histories