The Library of Alexandria
Every book we will never read.
- EXISTED
- c. 285 BC – c. 3rd century AD
- WHERE
- Alexandria, Egypt
- LOST
- gradually, across centuries
- CAUSE OF LOSS
- Fire, neglect, shrinking patronage, and decree
The Library of Alexandria set out to do something no institution had attempted before: collect every book in the world. Ships entering the harbour were searched for scrolls to copy; at its height the library may have held hundreds of thousands of them, the collected science, poetry, medicine and history of the ancient Mediterranean, much of it existing nowhere else.
It did not die in one great fire, however the legend tells it. Caesar’s war burned part of it; centuries of imperial neglect, shrinking budgets, religious strife and decree did the rest, until by late antiquity there was nothing left to destroy. We know many of the lost books only by name, cited admiringly by authors whose own works survived, a library of ghosts, referenced forever, readable never again.
No single last day. The collection guttered out across centuries, by the time anyone thought to mourn it, nothing remained but the titles of books no one would ever read again.