The incomparable Library at Alexandria was exposed to the same
vicissitudes as those which beset everything mundane. It was frequently
rifled and portions of its contents were often destroyed through
disturbances occurring in the period of the Roman domination, but it
was as frequently replenished by the literary activity which found home
and harborage in Alexandria for hundreds of years after the Christian
Era had begun.
Tradition is divided both as to the time and the circumstances under
which the Alexandrian Library and Museum, viewed as one institution,
came to its end. The tradition which gained large credence that its
career terminated at the time of the Saracen conquest of Alexandria in
642 A. D., and under the fanatical frenzy of the Caliph Omar, rests
upon very questionable authority. The oft-quoted answer of the Saracen
Emperor to the importunate appeal of the Alexandrian scholar (Joannes
Grammaticus) to spare the Library, that, "If those books agreed with
the Koran they were useless; if they did not agree with the Koran they
were pernicious; in either case should be destroyed," rests mainly
on the evidence of a stranger who lived six hundred years later, is
discredited by the best authorities, and is "overbalanced," as says
Gibbon, "by the silence of the early and native annalists." Says a
writer in the North American Review: "It may have been destroyed during
the great riot between the orthodox and Arian factions in 389, when the
Serapeum, which is said to have housed it, was burned. It can hardly
have had the wasting fate that perhaps befell its Roman rival, and it
is certain that Omar's iconoclasm is a myth. With Gibbon's judgment
modern historical scholarship concurs: 'The solitary report of a
stranger who wrote at the end of six hundred years in the confines of
Media is overbalanced by the silence of two annalists of a more early
date, both Christians, both natives of Egypt, and the most ancient of
whom, the patriarch Eutychius, has amply described the conquest of
Alexandria.'"[69] The better conclusion, therefore, seems to be that
there was little of the famous Alexandrian Library in existence at
the time of the Saracen conquest in 642 A. D., owing to the fact of
its earlier demolition, which was begun, at least, in the time of the
Emperor Theodosius, when, under the Emperor's permission, Archbishop
Theophilus, at the close of the fourth century, led fanatical
Christians in the destruction of heathen temples--not sparing the
literary treasures of the Library which had been associated with an
antecedent heathen patronage.
But, whatever the agencies of destruction, and whenever it was
consummated, there is no difference of opinion among antiquarians,
historians, and men of letters as to the world's irreparable loss
and literary impoverishment when this far-famed Library and Museum
(wherein had been gathered and treasured literature from Egypt, Rome,
Greece, and India,--with its extensive departments for the business of
transcribing literature, "and with every possible advantage which royal
munificence on the one hand and learned assiduity on the other, could
insure") was destroyed; and the literary accumulations of centuries,
including the immense library from Pergamos and inestimably valuable
manuscripts of the Bible, were ruthlessly and irremediably wasted.