april fool's and folly
The library of Alexandria is my common metaphor for the internet. That shows you how I think and how I use it: Marshall McLuhan might have used the metaphor of a campfire, or someone else could call it a giant marketplace. I think of it as a vast storehouse of knowledge, and that's how I mainly use it.
I often think about the real library at Alexandria: do you remember how it got destroyed? Most people have some vague idea that it was ransacked by vandals, or possibly destroyed in war.
It was actually destroyed in stages. Julius Caesar's Alexandrian campaign destroyed half of it in AD 47; more of the museum and library were destroyed in 272, under the emperor Aurelian, during the civil war; Theodosius, responding to a Christian mob in 391, ordered the burning of much of the library annex at the temple of Serapis; in 640, Alexandria was captured by the Arabs, and the next year the Caliph of Baghdad ordered books burned, saying, famously, that "If these writing of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed"; the remaining books were used starting the next year as fuel for public baths.
Historians love to dispute the various accounts, but there's a central truth there. As Stewart Brand has pointed out, everyone's guilty. This army did it for this reason, that army did it for that reason. (Apparently, the Ptolemaists did a lot of the destroying in 47 in attempting to protect Alexandria by making it less of a prize. Yeeeeeesh!) This religious group did it, that religious group did it. And it was finished off by common citizens using books as fuel: the very symbol of anticivilization.
So no one can point the finger at anyone else. Religion, war, bureaucracy, personal grudges, it's all in there, helping to create the most powerful symbol of knowledge lost. At its height, the library had over five million volumes. Doesn't that make you sick?
The question is, does that make you sick enough?
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