Library of Alexandria
The Library of Alexandria in Egypt, was once the largest library in the world. It is usually assumed to have been founded at the beginning of the 3rd century BC during the reign of Ptolemy II of Egypt after his father had set up the temple of the Muses, the Musaeum.
The Library at Alexandria was conceived largely as an attempt to bring together in Alexandria the whole of the earlier Greek science, art, and literature. At one point the Library held close to 50,000 books.
Plutarch describes how the library burned down in 48 BC when Julius Caesar set fire to his own ships in the harbor of Alexandria:
when the enemy endeavored to cut off his communication by sea, he was forced to divert that danger by setting fire to his own ships, which, after burning the docks, thence spread on and destroyed the great library.[1]
This is the only ancient account that explicitly states what happened to the library. Edward Gibbon wrote that the library was destroyed by Christian rioters in AD 391. This claim has been repeated in numerous accounts by anti-Christian writers, but it is not supported by any source older than Gibbon.
The loss of the Library, which contained the original (and sometimes only) copies of most of the ancient world's greatest works of literature, resulted in the decimation of ancient literature, and accounts for the modern paucity of ancient materials. Scholars estimate that historians now have only 1/10th of 1 percent of the ancient world's original source material to rely upon, as an almost exclusive result of the library's destruction. As an example, among the material lost in the library was a first-hand account of the life of Alexander the Great, written by his general and boyhood friend, Ptolemy. Historians know of the book's existence by a citation to it in secondary sources.
