How big is the hole in our knowledge of history because of the burning of the library of Alexandria?

It didn't burn down in some sort of cataclysmic event, you know. It gradually decayed over hundreds of years. Most of what it contained was sent elsewhere or copied. By the time it was burned down for good it didn't even have any books in it.

The "burning of the library of Alexandria" is something people who don't know anything about history pretend to get upset about so they can feel like they know something about history

>101 ways to sell your second daughter to Berbers

Christians burned a lot of what was contained in the library after Julius Caesar burned it down the first time.

>Sophocles' plays
>Aristophanes' plays
>bad
great post user

No.

For every Aristophanes there were two dozen amateurs called Lysander and so on.

Only the renowned and with connections got themselves out of the Agora nigga

Yes. Yes exactly.

>it's a farming ledger
This would pretty useful to us in studying climate, for examale.

No you shithead.

The library was destroyed twice by accident during battle, by Caesar and Aurelian, and once on purpose, by Caliph Omar.

>shithead
wew

>accident
Never said it wasn't... aside from the fact Caesar lived in Rome and knew full well what fires do in large cities. He just didn't give a fuck.

And yes, Christians burned what remained of the library's collection years later.

>Christians burned what remained of the library's collection years later.
Citation needed

>repeating it over and over will make it true

After the Libarary was long gone, the remaining collection was housed in the Serapeum, but that collection was ultimately destroyed by Christians.

does anybody remember the original greentext this is based off of? it was posted on Veeky Forums a while ago

The proof that the Egyptian people and the African-American people are one and the same was destroyed along with it, we could have been colonizing universes now.

>name one important book that we dont know about because it was lost
You dont see the problem here?

You would think they would build the library to withstand fires, like by using asbestos and not allowing other buildings within a certain distance.

The Alexandrians literally seized every book that came into their cities, it was 99% junk

>the remaining collection was housed in the Serapeum
post proof

>Besides the image of the god, the temple precinct housed an offshoot collection of the great Library of Alexandria.[1][2]

>Alexandria

ofc, my point is most amateurs got btfo'd in the Agora, so it's unlikely they sent their manuscripts to Alexandria

id say it was all smuggled out on a ship and probably residing in malta or rome catacombs much like all the gold etc was smuggled out of france in wwii to hide it from the germs

this case study sort of showed the west that the levant in particular eggy wasnt worth the shit (right up until israel crosses the canal in the 70s or w/e with the crusader state of israels permanent establishment post wwii & belfour decleration

No, the Serapeum was a pagan temple that was destroyed, but it didn't contain any books.

So you're just going to assume it contained a bunch of important books even though there's no evidence for that at all?

This is a recurring theme "only give a fuck about your own charisma"
Huang Di did the same

t. Jesus Alvarez

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_Alexandria
>seasons harvest
t. deathgod

>Aristophanes
DUDE FARTS LMAO
DUDE DICKS LMAO
DUDE JURORS ARE GREEDY OLD MEN LMAO

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

>The Museum was a pagan temple that was destroyed, it didn't contain any books!

But we all already know that they wuz kingz and shit.

the great Library of Alexandria was a fulcrum of intellectual curiosity and invention. It was here that Archimedes invented the screw-shaped water pump; Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth, and Euclid discovered the rules of geometry.

It's called speculation.

>nobody is allowed to believe major libraries held knowledge that couldn't be found elsewhere

This was before the printing press... libraries didn't just have 200 million copies of Cat in the Hat

>...The basic questions we should ask are, how many books probably existed in the early third century, how likely it is that large-scale collecting continued under the later Ptolemies and the Romans, and whether these figures are at all in line with what we know of other ancient libraries.

>The computer databank of ancient Greek literature, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, contains about 450 authors of whom at least a few words survive in quotation and whose lives are thought to have begun by the late fourth century. No doubt there were authors extant in the early Hellenistic period of whom not a line survives today, but we cannot estimate their numbers. Of most of these 450, we have literally a few sentences. There are another 175 known whose lives are placed, or hose births are placed, in the third century b.c. Most of these authors probably wrote what by modern standards was a modest amount—a few book-rolls full, perhaps. Even the most voluminous authors of the group, like the Athenian dramatists, probably filled no more than a hundred rolls or so. If the average writer filled 50 rolls, our known authors to the end of the third century would have produced 31,250 rolls. We must then assume, to save the ancient figures for the contents of the Library, either that more than 90 percent of classical authors are not even quoted or cited in what survives, or that the Ptolemies acquired a dozen copies of everything, or some combination of these unlikely hypotheses. If we were (more plausibly) to use a lower average output figure per author, the hypotheses needed to save the numbers would become proportionately more outlandish.

>To look at matters another way, just 2,871,000 words of Greek are preserved for all authors known to have lived at least in part in the fourth century or earlier. Adding the third and second centuries brings the total to 3,773,000 words (or about 12,600 pages of 300 words each). At an average of 15,000 words per roll, this corpus would require a mere 251 rolls. Even at an average of 10,000 words per roll, the figure would be only 377 rolls. It was estimated by one eminent ancient historian that the original bulk of historical writings in ancient Greece amounted to something like forty times what has survived. If so, our estimate would run to an original body of 10,000 to 15,000 rolls. This may be too low, but is it likely that it is too low by a factor of thirty or forty, and that only one word in 1,500 or 2,000 has survived? Again, we would be required to believe that we do not even have the names of the vast majority of ancient authors, or that the Library possessed thirty or forty copies not only of Homer but of every single author.

>In sum, the ancient figures for the size of the Library or the number of volumes lost in the Alexandrine War do not deserve any credence. They do not appear to rest on any good ancient authority, they were repeated from author to author, and when their consequences are examined, they lead to impossibilities and absurdities. The actual numbers were probably lower, perhaps by as much as one order of magnitude. The Library of Alexandria, however comprehensive for its time, was not on a scale comparable with the great research libraries of the twentieth century.

The alexandrians managed to get most of the knowledge to Byzantium. The Byzantines got it all copied by monks and send it on to Venice, the Venetians sold all of it to the Spanish, who wanted to transport all of the knowledge to the New World, but Sir Francis Drake captured the fleet that carried the books and took it to what would later become the great city of [spoiler] Duckburg [/spoiler]

>Indeed, how could it have been? One has only to imagine the difficulties involved in cataloging such a collection. Book-form catalogs, even with all the advantages of the large codex, ceased to be useful when modern libraries started to reach the kinds of middle six-figure sizes imagined for Alexandria, and had to be replaced by the card catalog, unknown in antiquity. My own university’s library grew from 20,000 volumes in 1856 to 100,000 in 1889 and 362,000 in 1903. Even the giants did not reach the middle six digits until the middle of the nineteenth century, precisely the point at which the card catalog started to come into use. The British Museum had only some 200,000 volumes in 1830, reaching a million a third of a century later. Callimachus’s famous Pinakes, a systematic listing of genres, authors, and works in 120 books, could not have held the information necessary to catalog hundreds of thousands of rolls.

Roger S. Bagnall, "Alexandria: Library of Dreams," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 146 (2002) 348-362
archive.nyu.edu/handle/2451/28263

tl;dr: Library of Alexandria is hype

asdf asdf test test asdf asdf

shit mayn! it all make sense now!

Well, we know nothing now, and knew nothing then, so, nothing of value was lost.

Muslims burned it like they did in ctesiphon and in Persia, Umar al katthab even boasted about it.

senpai it's not the fact that we'd never know something ever again, it's just it stopped people at the time from making improvements on the pre-existing knowledge that was in the Baghdad library.

If improvements were made earlier who would know what could have happened?

>The disappearance of the Library is the inevitable result of the end of the impetus and interest that brought it into being and of the lack of the kind of sustained management and maintenance that would have seen it through successive transitions in the physical media by means of which the texts could have been transmitted. It is idle to indulge in such Gibbon-like reflections as the following claim of Hugh Lloyd Jones: “If this library had survived, the dark ages, despite the dominance of Christianity, might have been a good deal lighter; its loss is one of the greatest of the many disasters that accompanied the ruin of the ancient world.” This is to get things backward. It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages. Rather, the dark ages—and in the Eastern Roman Empire we may doubt the utility of such a concept—show their darkness by the fact that the authorities lacked the will and means to maintain a great library. An unburned building full of decaying books would not have made a particle’s worth of difference.

>Indeed, no more books would have survived antiquity if the Library had not been destroyed than did so anyway. The destruction simply is not important. This may seem like a bleak assessment, but it need not be so. It suggests that we should turn our attention away from the dramatic single event and toward the forces and personalities that create and sustain cultural institutions, for it is their absence in the Roman period, not the presence of some destructive force, that decided the fate of the books of Alexandria. Why should anyone be disillusioned by the realization that creative achievements survive only if we foster a cultural milieu that values them? Most books existed in multiple copies, and it is the failure of most to survive that is most important. The rarities of the Alexandrian Library too owe their disappearance as much to omission as to commission.

What if it was just one giant travel information/tax office?

More like shitty greek plays

youtube.com/watch?v=aCsBSO6S8So

The destruction of Aztec libraries was a much more detrimental blow imo.

It was a university too in its own right so no.

>not wanting to read gnostic bullshit
Of coz it is always christfags downplaying this loss

Where did this arabs were good at medicine meme come from anyway? I study medicine at a non western country and all we learn about the history of medicine is western from Galen to Watson

Mostly because no one goes to medical school to learn about the history of medicine, so tangential subjects like that are either utilitarian where the only thing that's important is whatever is the basis of current medical technique or they're the classical basics in which everything we know we learned from the Greeks.

Medieval Muslim medical texts were not uncommon in Western medical education as late as the 19th century, but being mostly focused on practical and dietary medicine they've been replaced by more modern and scientific works, leaving just the philosophical and neoclassical Greek legacy that's only still around for aesthetics and tradition at this point.