Library of Alexandria

library of Alexandria 

 Science lantern of antiquity

 ancient-cagin science-lantern

 Library, Alexander the Great BC.  It was founded in 332 in the city of Alexandria in Egypt.  After the death of Alexander the Great, it was founded by Ptolemy, the son of Commander Logus, who did not like wars, and remained the world's largest archive for 300 years.  Ptolemy, who declared his kingdom in Egypt, never had the goal of expanding the borders of the country.  He won the love of the people by adhering to Egyptian traditions and religions.

 2,300 years ago, the rulers of Alexandria set out with one of humanity's most daring goals;  to gather all the information in the world under one roof.  At its heyday, the library of Alexandria had unique scrolls and attracted the attention of the most successful of the Greek realm.  But, BC.  At the end of the 5th century, this large library was destroyed.  Most people believed the library was destroyed in a devastating fire.  The facts behind the rise and fall of the library are more complex.

 The idea of ​​such a library originated from Alexander the Great.  After being known as "the Conqueror", Aristotle's former student gave all his attention to Alexandria to establish an empire of knowledge in the city he named.  He died before its construction began, but his successor Ptolemy I realized the plans of Alexander the Great for the museum and the library.

 The Library of Alexandria, in the city's royal district, may have been built with massive Hellenistic columns, local Egyptian influences, or a unique combination of the two, but there is no surviving evidence of its architecture.  We know there are lecture theaters, classrooms, and of course racks.  As soon as the building was completed, Ptolemy I began to fill the building primarily with Greek and Egyptian scrolls.  He invited scholars to work and live in Alexandria and the library began to grow with their manuscripts, but the Alexandrian rulers still wanted a copy of every book in the world.

 Fortunately, Alexandria was a hub for ships passing through the Mediterranean.  III.  Ptolemy enacted a law requiring every ship anchored in Alexandria to turn over their books for copying.  After the library's scribes copied the texts, they took the original texts and sent the copies back to the ships.  Held-for-money book hunters scoured the entire Mediterranean for new texts, and the Alexandrian rulers tried to suppress their rivals by ending the export of Egyptian papyrus used for parchment-making.

 These efforts resulted in hundreds of thousands of books to arrive in Alexandria.  As the library grew, it became easier to find information on many topics than before, but also harder to find information on any topic.  Fortunately, Callimachus of Kiren began working on a solution by preparing 120-volume boards, the first of its kind, showing the contents of the library.

 Using the billboards, people could navigate through the library's crowded collection.  They made some surprising discoveries.  1600 years before Christopher Columbus set sail, Eratosthenes not only noticed that the earth was round, but calculated the circumference and diameter of the earth within a few miles of its true size.  Heron of Alexandria invented the world's first steam engine a thousand years before it was reinvented during the Industrial Revolution.  B.C.  About 300 years after its foundation in 283, the library prospered.

 But then, BC.  In 48, Julius Caesar besieged Alexandria and set the ships in the harbor on fire.  For years, scholars believed that the library burned as the fire spread throughout the city, and it is possible that the expanding collection was destroyed in the fire, but we know from ancient writings that scholars continued to visit the library centuries after the siege.  Ultimately, the library slowly disappeared as the city fell from Greeks to Romans, Christians, and eventually Muslims.  Instead of being proud of the library's content, every new manager who came to the top saw it as a threat.  B.C.  In 415, Christian rulers murdered a mathematician named Hypatia because they deemed the study of Ancient Greek texts unreligious.

 Even if the Library of Alexandria and its numerous texts are long gone, we are still struggling to find the best way to gather, access, and preserve our knowledge.  Today there is more information available and we have more advanced technologies to protect it, but we cannot know for sure that our digital archives will be more resistant to destruction than Alexandria's ink and paper scrolls.  Even if our reservoirs of knowledge are physically safe, they will have to be more resistant to insidious forces such as the fear of information and the arrogant belief that the past is the past that divides a library.  This time the difference is that we know what to prepare for.