Ancient Science · Part 7 · Alexandria · B1–B2
The Museum and Library of Alexandria: Books from the Ships, and How the Library Really Ended
Part 7 of Ancient Science: the Museum where the scholars of Alexandria lived and worked, and the Library beside it, are Philo’s own home. Sophia shows how the books were collected, not always honestly, what a visitor saw in Philo’s lifetime, and how the Library really ended: not in one great fire, but slowly. Was founded, were copied and had the books copied, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight we do not travel at all. We study the place where we are sitting: the Museum and the Library of Alexandria.
You know it as it is now, Marcos. Do you know how it was built, how the books were found, and what will happen to it?
I know that some of the books were taken from ships. My father says it was not entirely honest.
After Alexander’s death, Egypt was ruled by his general Ptolemy and his descendants. The first Ptolemies founded the Museum, the “house of the Muses”, inside the royal palace. The scholars who lived there were paid by the king, ate together in a great hall, paid no taxes and had nothing to do but study, write and argue.
Beside it was the Library. Its size is not known: ancient writers give numbers from forty thousand to seven hundred thousand scrolls, and none of them can be checked. A second, smaller library was later built in the temple of Serapis, the Serapeum.
The librarians included some of the greatest scholars of the ancient world: Zenodotus, who edited Homer; Eratosthenes, who measured the Earth; and Aristophanes of Byzantium. The poet Callimachus made a catalogue of the books, the Tables, sorted by subject and author. It filled 120 books, and it is lost.
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