ENDPAPER
The library that vanished
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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There are only a handful of good books on the ancient library of Alexandria.
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The new Bibliotheca Alexandria: In the tradition of its predecessor. Photo: AP
Is it possible that the lost Library of Alexandria, destroyed now for 1,500 years, still exists? That a secret order of intrepid librarians called The Guardians copied or stole most of that famed library’s scrolls and papyri (nearly half a mill
ion) before it burned down or disappeared? That’s the premise of The Alexandria Link, a recent bestselling novel by Steve Berry that imagines a secret library containing many precious and controversial ancient manuscripts that co
uld both enlighten and threaten the modern world with its vanished knowledge. The novel’s hero, a bookish Indiana Jones — ex secret-service-agent-turned-bookseller — is sent on a quest (replete with maps and riddles) to discover the vanished library of Alexandria. For sheer speculative ‘what if’ thrills, controversy and sensational erudition, Berry’s engrossing historical thriller rivals that other conspiracy bestseller (which we will leave unnamed). At the heart of this book is a tantalising secret (hidden among the scrolls in the Alexandria Library, which I will keep secret) that can redraw the map of the Middle East.
I have long been fascinated with the Alexandria library. How did it come to be? What did it actually look like? What writings did it contain? Why and how did it vanish without anyone recording its destruction? The answers to these questions, of course, can be found in anything from school textbooks to encyclopaedias: That it was set up by the Ptolemaic kings around the third century B.C.E, that it housed every written document, and that it was destroyed either by a fire or by foreign invaders.
But if one goes beyond textbook explanations to scholarly essays and books, the answers are varied and surprising. There are, however, only a handful of good books on this ancient library (because so much about it remains speculation and mystery) and none is more engaging than Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night. I’d like to profile Manguel (a magnificent, impassioned giant among bibliophiles and the author of A History of Reading) and review his b
ook in a later column, limiting myself here to his illuminating chapter on the Alexandria library.
First outline
It is from Manguel that we learn that, until the Alexandria library, there were only private libraries and government storehouses for written documents. He finds it infuriating that we do not have a familiar image, “however fantastical”, of the library. The illustrations found in books are only guessing at the structure. It is the Italian scholar Luciana Canfora who first studied the library in detail to give us the first outline of what the library may have looked like. The author of The Alexandria Link, draws on Canfora and several other sources. “The Ptolemies,” writes Berry, “were determined book collectors, dispatching agents throughout the known world. Ptolemy II bought Aristotle’s entire book collection. Ptolemy III ordered that all ships in the Alexandria harbour be searched. If books were found, they were copied, the copies returned to the owners, the originals stored in the library… Some 43,000 scrolls were eventually housed in the Serapeum, available to the general public, and another 500,000 at the main museum, restricted for scholars…Both roofed chambers opened into side rooms where papyruses, scrolls, and later codices lay stored in bins, loosely stacked, tagged for indexing, or on shelves. In other rooms, copyists laboured to produce replicas which were sold for revenue. Members enjoyed a high salary, exemption from taxes, and were provided dining and lodging. There were lecture halls, laboratories, observatories-even a zoo. Grammarians and poets received the most prestigious posts-physicians, mathematicians, and astronomers the best equipment.”
While Berry’s picture of the library is sweeping; Manguel’s is more intimate and insightful. In the chapter titled “The Library as Myth”, he tells us that “the Attalid kings of Pergamun, in northwestern Asia Minor, attempted to compete with Alexandria and built a library of their own, but it never achieved the grandeur of that of Alexandria. To prevent their rivals from creating manuscripts for their library, the Ptolemies banned the exportation of papyrus, to which the Pergamum librarians responded by inventing a new writing material which was given the city’s name: pergamenon or parchment.” (For an explanation of what destroyed the ancient library, I direct you to James Hannam’s investigative essay, ‘The Mysterious Fate of the Great Library of Alexandria’. Links at Wikepedia).
Modern library
The Egyptian government spent $220 million on the new Library of Alexandria (the “Bibliotheca Alexandrina”, fabulously designed by the Norwegian architectural studio Snohetta) which rises 32 metres high and encompasses a circumference of 160 metres, with enough shelf space to hold over eight million volumes. What we possess today from the Alexandria library are only fragments. And the works of some, such as Manetho, Galen, Aristarchus, Erathosthenes, Strabo, Zenodotus and Callimachus, are completely lost. It is stunning to learn that only seven of Sophocles plays have survived out of 133 lost, only 18 of more than 90 by Euripides remain. And Aeschylus? Eight known, 73 missing!
In The Book of Lost Books, Stuart Kelly, a connoisseur of missing masterpieces writes, “A lost book is susceptible to a degree of wish fulfilment. The lost book…becomes infinitely more alluring simply because it can be p
erfect only in the imagination.”
Part of my fascination then — and I would suppose the fascination of all devoted lovers of books as physical objects — is that this library is lost to us. Alberto Manguel’s insight on the Alexandria library is true of all libraries — small, big, private or public: “the library was to be a reader’s workshop, not just a place where books were endlessly preserved…Old books become new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.”
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