What Happened to the Library of Alexandria?

When Julius Caesar set fire to the ships in Alexandria’s harbour in 48 BCE, books stored near the docks burned with them. But that fire did not end the Library of Alexandria. No single fire did. The Library declined over several centuries, after its kings drove out its scholars and its papyrus rolls were left to decay, and whatever remained probably vanished in the 270s CE, when war wrecked the palace quarter around it.

The popular villains, Caesar, a Christian mob in 391 and an Arab caliph, each belong to a different chapter of that long decline. Two of those stories are partly true. The third is a legend.

What the Library was, and how it filled its shelves

The first Greek kings of Egypt, the Ptolemies, founded the Library early in the 3rd century BCE in the royal quarter of their new capital. It belonged to the Mouseion, a royal institution “of the Muses” whose salaried scholars ate at a common table. Calling it the world’s first university is a modern comparison.

The kings wanted every book written in Greek. The physician Galen, writing some four centuries later, told how Ptolemy III had books taken from ships in the harbour, copied, and the copies handed back to their owners. It is a good story, and historians doubt it. The firmer evidence is quieter: scholars at Alexandria compared copies of Homer gathered from cities across the Greek world.

The poet Callimachus compiled the Pinakes, a list of Greek authors and their works in 120 books. It is the first known bibliography of Greek literature, an ancestor of the library catalogue. Only fragments survive.

When did the decline begin?

In 145 BCE, a century and a half after the founding. A new king, Ptolemy VIII, seized the throne and punished those who had backed his rivals. Intellectuals were driven out of Alexandria. Aristarchus, the head librarian whose edition of Homer lies behind the text we still read, fled to Cyprus and died there.

His successor was a spearman. The post became a political appointment, and nothing suggests the Library kept buying books. No books burned in 145 BCE, but the people who used and recopied them were gone.

Did Julius Caesar burn the Library of Alexandria?

Not as a whole. In 48 BCE Caesar was besieged in the city and burned the Egyptian fleet in the harbour. The fire spread, and books burned. Several ancient accounts place those books in buildings near the docks, perhaps warehouses. Only one of the main accounts, a biography written some 150 years later, says the great library itself burned.

What happened next tells against it. A Greek geographer who stayed in Alexandria about twenty-five years after the fire described the Mouseion still at work. The emperor Claudius added a new Museum beside the old one. Domitian, at the end of the 1st century CE, sent scribes to Alexandria to copy books that Rome had lost in its own fires. You do not send copyists to a library that no longer exists.

When was the Library of Alexandria destroyed?

Probably in the 270s CE. The city had been taken by forces of Palmyra, a rival power in Syria, and the emperor Aurelian fought to win it back. A Roman historian writing a century later recorded that Alexandria lost most of its palace quarter in that fighting, a district “long the abode of distinguished men”.

No writer of the time mentions the Library, so its end in those years is an inference, though most historians now favour it. After the 3rd century there is no clear trace of the main collection. The Mouseion lived on as a community of scholars, with no great library recorded.

Was it Christians, in 391?

This answer confuses two buildings. Alexandria had a smaller “daughter” library in the Serapeum, a great temple of the god Serapis in another part of the city. In 391, after an imperial order against pagan temples and street fighting between pagans and Christians, the bishop Theophilus had the Serapeum torn down.

The accounts of its destruction describe the temple and its cult statue, not books. A Christian historian writing a generation later did see empty book cupboards in temples, emptied, he said, by Christians in his own day. Whether the Serapeum still held many books in 391 is unknown. The main Library had probably been gone for over a century.

The Caliph Omar story

According to a story told in the Middle Ages, the Arab general Amr asked the Caliph Omar what to do with the books of Alexandria after the conquest of 642. If they agreed with the Quran they were unnecessary, came the answer, and if they disagreed they should be destroyed. The books then heated the city’s bathhouses for six months.

It is a legend. The story was first written down about 560 years after the conquest. It gives a leading role to a scholar who had died before the Arabs arrived. The only near-contemporary account of the conquest says nothing of books, and an almost identical tale is told about Persia. By 642 the Library had been gone for centuries.

Was Hypatia the last librarian of Alexandria?

No. Hypatia, a philosopher and mathematician, was murdered by a Christian mob in 415, during a feud between the city’s prefect and its bishop. Her father had belonged to the Mouseion. She did not, and no ancient writer links her to the Library.

The idea is modern. In 1980 Carl Sagan’s television series Cosmos called her the last scientist to work in the Library, and the film Agora later showed her rescuing scrolls from the Serapeum. Both are drama, not history.

How big was the Library, really?

Ancient writers spoke of 40,000 rolls, then 400,000, then 700,000. Most wrote centuries after the fact, and their manuscripts disagree. These are reports, not counts.

Modern historians think the real number was far lower. Every Greek author known to have lived by the 2nd century BCE would fill only tens of thousands of rolls, and Callimachus’ catalogue in 120 books could not have listed even 100,000 rolls. Even so, no other collection of its time matched it. The library at Pergamon was its rival, and the Library of Celsus at Ephesus, with perhaps 12,000 scrolls, was smaller than both.

Myths and evidence at a glance

Why the books would have perished anyway

Papyrus does not last forever. In Alexandria’s damp sea air a roll in regular use survived about a century, two or three at most. A library of papyrus stays alive only if someone keeps recopying it, and that took money and scholars the Library no longer had.

By the early 1st century CE, little of the first Ptolemies’ collection was still usable. Fire is not the only way a library ends: the clay tablets of the Library of Ashurbanipal survived because fire baked them, while papyrus simply crumbled. Egypt itself later gave up papyrus for paper, as the Road of Paper follows.

What was lost, and what survived?

Most of ancient Greek literature is lost, but not because of Alexandria. Books existed in other copies around the Mediterranean, and what disappeared was what nobody recopied. Historians argue that no more books would have survived antiquity if the Library had stood.

What Alexandria gave us is quality. Its scholars sorted, compared and corrected texts, and the Homer we read descends from their editions. Those texts reached us through copies made elsewhere, above all in Constantinople, and through translations into Syriac and Arabic.

The modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina now stands near where the ancient library is thought to have been. The old library’s exact site has never been found. The dream of a library holding everything has outlived every building that tried.

Sources and further reading

Roger Bagnall’s essay Alexandria: Library of Dreams weighs the evidence, from the size of the collection to the decay of papyrus. The Open University’s free course on the Library of Alexandria walks through each proposed destruction. Francesca Schironi’s chapter Enlightened Kings or Pragmatic Rulers? covers the Ptolemies, the librarians and the purge of 145 BCE. Bernard Lewis traced the Caliph Omar story in The Vanished Library.