What Destroyed the Library of Alexandria?

One of the grandest and most important libraries in the ancient world, the Library of Alexandria was established in the third century B.C. with the lofty goal of being a repository for all human knowledge. Its collection might have numbered as many as 400,000 scrolls. It flourished as a center of scholarship for hundreds of years, but its buildings and collections were destroyed or obliterated by the time Arab rule was established in Egypt in the seventh century A.D.

Over the millennia, the library’s destruction has been the source of speculation, romanticized portrayals and politically motivated storytelling. People have pictured it going up in flames in a Roman invasion, a Christian riot and an Islamic purge. Although some of these depictions draw on historical events, they do not capture the modern historical consensus of what became of the library: It was gradually destroyed over centuries of decline and neglect—a loss driven by political and financial concerns and punctuated with smaller fires.

The Egyptian port city of Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C. After Alexander’s death, one of his Macedonian Greek generals took control of Egypt, installing himself as Ptolemy I, king and pharaoh. It was Ptolemy’s son Ptolemy II who likely established the library in the early third century B.C. The institution’s first librarian, Zenodotus of Ephesus, organized its collection topically by room and pioneered the use of alphabetical order to sort the scrolls within their categories. The library was located in Alexandria’s royal quarter and was part of the Mouseion (Museum), a larger cultural institution. The library’s early leaders included renowned Greek scientists, poets and scholars.

The rulers of the Ptolemaic dynasty used their political power and resources to build the collection. They sent well-funded agents to key cities and far-off lands to purchase as many texts as possible. Most of these works were written on papyrus scrolls, with a single work taking up several dozen scrolls.

The renowned Greco-Roman medical writer Galen wrote in the second century A.D. that during the library’s heyday, when ships arrived at Alexandria’s port, any books found on board were taken immediately to the library to be copied. The library’s rapid pace of acquisition created storage problems, some of which were remedied with the construction of the Serapeum, a temple and satellite library farther away from the port, during the reign of Ptolemy III. The library and Mouseion welcomed scholars from throughout the Greek-speaking world to come and work with the texts and even gave them stipends to cover their expenses, freeing them for study.

The Library of Alexandria flourished in this initial state for around a century, but in 145 B.C., the institution suffered its first significant setback. During a royal power struggle, Ptolemy VIII Physcon drove out many of the city’s intellectuals, including head librarian Aristarchus of Samothrace. The building and collection remained, but the nature of royal patronage changed and the position of librarian lost its academic prestige as Alexandria declined as a center of scholarship.

In 48 B.C., a portion of the Library of Alexandria went up in flames during the siege of Alexandria as part of the ongoing Roman civil war. Egypt had been under increasingly direct Roman influence for a few decades, and in 48, it became a flashpoint in the struggle between Julius Caesar and allies of his rival Pompey the Great. Caesar came to Alexandria, struck up his famous alliance and romantic relationship with Cleopatra VII and fought off attacks from forces led by Cleopatra’s brother and sister.

To fight off an assault on the royal quarter, Caesar set fire to ships in the harbor as a diversion, but the flames spread to the city, burning portions of the royal palace and the Mouseion, including at least part of the library. Ancient historians vary as to how much of the collection was destroyed: Plutarch claimed it all went up in flames, Cassius Dio reported that a great number of fine books were burned, while other writers don’t mention the library at all in their accounts of the fire.

Whatever the level of destruction in Caesar’s fire, the Library of Alexandria survived as an institution, surfacing occasionally in the historical record. Whether it was partially preserved or partially rebuilt, it continued to lose prestige as Alexandria declined in importance during Roman rule. Alexandria endured sacks and sieges under the emperors Aurelian and Diocletian in the late third century. Then in A.D. 365, the city was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami, accelerating changes to the coastline that would eventually submerge the entire royal quarter, including the sites of the library’s original buildings.

The library’s annex at the Serapeum stood on higher ground, surviving flood and land subsidence only to become the scene of another kind of destruction. In A.D. 391, Theophilus I, the Christian patriarch of Alexandria, ordered that the Serapeum’s pagan temple (which may have still included a collection of scrolls) be destroyed and replaced with a church. Ancient sources say Theophilus’ edict spurred violent clashes between pagan worshippers and Christians, leading to the temple’s near-total destruction.

Nearly 800 years later, another rumor of religious destruction began to circulate: a story that during the rise of Islam, after Arab forces conquered Alexandria in A.D. 641, Caliph Omar (the Prophet Muhammad’s father-in-law) ordered the Library of Alexandria’s books destroyed since they were not relevant to Islam. According to the legend, the scrolls were burned as fuel to heat Alexandria’s bathhouses for several months.

This account is roundly rejected by modern scholars as a later fabrication, not least because it is doubtful any remnants of the library existed to be destroyed at the time. Instead, they view it as a folktale likely first told to justify Sultan Saladin’s destruction of book collections he deemed heretical when he took control of Cairo at the end of the Fatimid dynasty in the 12th century. In later centuries, translations of the story were used by European writers in support of a false narrative of Islamic anti-intellectualism.

On October 16, 2002, after more than 25 years of planning, design and construction, a new, giant library was dedicated not far from the approximate spot where the original Library of Alexandria once stood. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina was conceived by Alexandria University, developed with help from UNESCO and funded by donations from international organizations including France’s national library and the Internet Archive. The library has shelf space for 8 million books—hundreds of times as many works as the original Library of Alexandria held at its peak, though still only a fraction of the world’s recorded knowledge.