Reply #25: The usual annoying, smart-ass corrections... [View All]

[onager]

1. Actually, the COPIES were returned in most cases, which undoubtedly pissed off a lot of book owners. But this was an order from the Greek "Pharoah" of Egypt, so there was no appeal.

According to Galen, during the reign of Ptolemy III Eugertes (246-221 BCE): "...he ordered that all books of those who landed at Alexandria be brought to him so that copies could immediately be made and then the visitors were returned not the originals but the copies..."

He didn't stop there, either. Again according to Galen, Eugertes wrote the government of Athens and asked to "borrow" the irreplaceable original works of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus.

As a security deposit, Eugertes put up a large sum of money--fifteen silver talents.

After the works were copied, Eugertes kept the originals in Alexandria, sent the copies back home, and forfeited the security deposit.

2. It may be comforting to supernaturalists and woo-woos to imagine that religion inspired the creation of the Alexandria Library, but it just ain't so.

The book collection of the Library was intended as a general collection of world-wide knowledge on all subjects.

Even more important, it wasn't just a library in the sense of "collection of books." It was a center of learning. In modern terms, the Alexandria Library was a combination of the Library Of Congress, Harvard and MIT.

When Ptolemy Philadelphus II started seriously collecting books, he didn't treat religion differently from any other topic. According to a history written circa 367 CE by the Bishop of Salamis:

Ptolemy wrote letters in which he asked the kings and great men of the world to send him works of whatever nature: poetry, prose, rhetoric, sophistry, medicine, magic, history and everything else.

The Greeks knew the difference between science, magic and religion. In the Library, books on the latter topics were housed in a special collection called "Ancient Wisdom." They weren't mingled with the works of mathematics and geography.

This info comes from the book Alexandria, Third Century BC--The Knowledge Of The World In A Single City. It's a great history of the Alexandria Library that I bought at the New Alexandria Library when I was working in Egypt a couple of months ago.