My father was upset about the library being burned

My father was upset about the library being burned.  He tried to be stoic but I could tell he loathed the destruction of knowledge it represented.  I was at primary school and fancied myself as an amateur detective.  My main suspect was William McCartney, a boy in my class.  The evidence was circumstantial but clear.  I had discovered him defacing a library book at school.  He had drawn two huge breasts on the cover of a book on Cookery.  Instead of a prim, apron clad April Summers displaying cakes in each hand, William had constructed huge breasts incorporating the cherries on top of the cakes as nipples.  I was convinced such vandalism spoke of his disrespect for the written word.  

In our household books were everything and everywhere.  We devoured them like bread and water and whether it was by Henry Miller, the collected plays of Shaw, or Steinbeck we consumed them and then hunted for new fodder.  No folding down corners or scuffing the cover and no underlining of texts or notes in the margins.  Books had to be respected like people.  Even the crappy ones.  So Ms Summers added breasts offended my sensibilities.  William’s violent tendencies were shown clearly when he brought to school a black bin liner full of dead birds he had shot with his own air rifle.  When the American Constitution stipulates the right to carry arms, they must never have had classmates like mine.  I could honestly say I wouldn’t have trusted any of them with a firearm.  So there you have it.  William was violent (bag of birds – exhibit one) and he took pleasure from the defacement of literature (cookery book – exhibit two).  That made him in my mind a strong candidate for the burning of the library.  For a whole year I seethed with resentment towards William and blamed him for the book, the birds, the library and for bringing sadness to my father’s heart.

It came as something of a shock to discover later that my father was referring to the burning of the Great Library in Alexandria which happened around two thousand years ago.  A crime William, however vile, could not have committed.  Through the following years my father continued to mourn the loss of this great library and filled in the details of this catastrophe. 

When Alexander the Great died in 323 BC his kingdom was divided up into three pieces: Antigonids ruled Greece, Seleucids ruled Asia Minor, Syria and Mesoptamia while Ptolemis ruled Egypt.  Wanting to gain supremacy and legitimacy Ptolemy stole Alexander’s body and took it first to Memphis and then to Alexandria.  This was a blatant attempt to create a political and dynastic link with Alexander the Great.  Creating a museum “Temple of the Muses” was also a part of this goal.  After all, Aristotle who had taught Alexander, had a wonderful library and so Ptolemy and his line created the greatest library of the ancient world.  It was their intention to collect all the books in the world and works from India, Persia, Babylonia, Georgia, Armenia and far a field were gathered.  The works of poets, philosophers, historians etc were carefully obtained and kept in the library.  

There was a copy of Epidemics belonging to the physician Mnemon of Side, ancient scrolls and books from all over found their way to the library at Alexandria.  Even when a ship entered the port it was searched and if books or scrolls were found these were seized and copied.  The copies were returned but the originals were stored in the library.  The greatest fruits of human endeavour flowed to Alexandria and were collected and collated.   The arts and sciences were represented and so many were not only original but unique and priceless.  The fame of the Great Library of Alexandria spread far and wide.  It was an incredible search for knowledge all carefully gathered from the four corner of the earth. 

So what happened?  Well, as one has probably suspected by now, some idiot burned the library down.  After centuries of careful collection and cataloguing the works of great minds it took small minds a few days to dispose of the Great Library.  The disaster was of epic proportions.  We don’t know, even now, the scale of the loss.  But there are hints.  Callimachus, a poet and scholar, had created a catalogue/biography of the contents of the library called Pinakes.  We only have a tiny portion of this Pinakes (table of contents) left but there is enough to make you howl in despair at what went up in flames.  

Now, I understood why my father took the burning of the Great Library in Alexandria so personally.  So should we all!  But on further reflection I didn’t feel so bad about blaming William McCartney for the crime.  It turns out blaming those we dislike for despicable crimes they have not done is a theme common in history. For example,  Caliph Umar was blamed for the burning of the library and there is even a nice little tale told to explain why. , "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". It was, the story continues, thereupon, decided that the books were contrary to the Quran and the whole library was burned down without even opening the books.  Totally rubbish of course, the Great Library was lost much earlier probably in 47/48 AD perhaps by Julius Caesar who was burning ships around that time in the harbour.  Mohammad and the Quran did not appear for another five centuries and so Caliph Umar is in the clear.  There was another library in Alexandria called the Serapeum (daughter library) but this was burned down in 391 AD under the decree of Archbishop Theophilus.  Edward Gibbon (writer of the  The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) described Archbishop Theophilus as "...the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood." Not a great way to be remembered in the history books.  

But some people really do say and do such stupid things that they need to be remembered for posterity.  Like Pope Gregory’s famous line "Ignorance is the mother of piety." Following this principle to the letter, Gregory burned the precious Palestine Library founded by Emperor Augustus, destroyed the greater part of the writings of Livy and forbade the study of the classics. The Crusaders destroyed the splendid library of Tripoli and reduced to ashes many of the glorious centres of Saracenic art and culture. Ferdinand and Isabella put to flames all the Muslim and Jewish works they could find in Spain. 

Library burning has not gone out of fashion.  The library of Leuven, Belgium was burned in 1914 and then after being rebuilt was burned to the ground once more in May in 1940 by the Nazis.  In case you think this fetish for library burning has run out of steam one need only look at the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 when the National Library of Baghdad was burned and priceless ancient antiquities and manuscripts were lost. 

Knowledge is like a light that illuminates humanity and ignorance is the opposite, darkness.  The burning of libraries serves to show the bigoted, the fanatic and the stupid at work.  Such a shame to destroy what is really the birthright of the human race.  We should all sorrow over the loss of the Great Library at Alexandria.  It reminds us that ignorance is too dangerous to be permitted and the search for knowledge and truth is the only way ahead.