Did the fire at the Library of Alexandria set humanity back?
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What made the Library of Alexandria so important in the ancient world?
Hey, it's Ira, and you're listening to Science Friday. In 48 BC, a massive fire ripped through the Library of Alexandria, one of the largest and most significant ancient libraries. It's estimated around 100,000 works of literature were lost, a staggering number. It's hard not to get a little sad at the scale of the great works that no longer exist. Well, throughout history, you know, there are lots of examples of things being lost. You've got lost cities like Pompeii, lost graves of figures like Genghis Khan, lost works of art from masters like da Vinci. And with each loss is a little bit of hope that someday, somehow, they'll be found again. My next guest has been on a quest to document the parts of history that have been lost so we can remember them once more.
Sam Kean, author of The Museum of Lost Things. Welcome to Science Friday. Hello. Thanks for having me. Nice to have you back. All right, let's go back to 48 B.C. Do we know what it would have been like to walk through the Library of Alexandria?
Yeah, it would have been a lot like walking through the stacks of a modern college library or something like that. I think nowadays we think about libraries as having big open spaces, you know, people sitting around tables, maybe collaborating a little bit. These were much more compact and a lot of scrolls jammed into a small place and probably not very well organized. You kind of had to know the gatekeeper librarian pretty well. You might not be able to find anything. But the amount of knowledge they had in there was probably one of the most comprehensive, if not the most comprehensive, in terms of just the percentage they had of all the known knowledge in the world at the time.
So you're talking about Greek, Roman scientists, philosophers, things like that?
Yeah. And going all the way out to, you know, the Middle East, going to Persia, even a little bit from places like China, they had a really wide array they were looking for. They wanted to make it as universal as they possibly could.
And, of course, so many of these items were made on papyrus, which is so fragile, right? I mean, they would have gone up in flame easily.
Yes, they would have gone up very easily, yeah. And they had to copy them over and over, too, which, you know, could introduce errors and things like that. And there were full-time jobs of people who just had to copy these scrolls because they would fall apart.
How would a visitor have experienced the Library of Alexandria’s stacks and organization?
How much of any of that actually survived?
We have very, very little, just scraps of one papyrus scroll is the only thing we know that was in the original Library of Alexandria because it's a list of documents that they had at the library. So there was no reason to have that anywhere else. Some of the things they had, you know, from the Iliad, the Odyssey, other Greek myths, Aristotle, Plato have survived in other forms, but we only have one scrap that we know was in the library.
Yet with all this talk about a fire, you raise questions in your book about whether there really ever was a fire. Yeah. Why is that?
There definitely was a fire there in 48 BC when Julius Caesar was down there fighting a war. We know there was a fire around there. But there are stray references to the library and the attached museum after that point. We don't know if they maybe rebuilt it. There was also an annex. So perhaps they had some things in the annex. And we just don't know what exactly happened to all the knowledge there. I think kind of a sadder situation would be one theory is that just over time, as the Roman Empire sort of crumbled, people just neglected the library and let these things die through just simple neglect, not copying them anymore, letting them go to waste, things like that.
We talked now about the Library of Alexandria losing lots of stuff, but this actually happened at the Library of Congress, did it not? A fire there?
There have been multiple fires there, yes, over the years. They had pretty poor fire prevention practices, I will say that, for a lot of its history. And we did lose some very important things.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What made the Library of Alexandria so important in the ancient world?
0:02–2:22
2
How would a visitor have experienced the Library of Alexandria’s stacks and organization?
2:22–5:07
3
How much of the Library’s original collection actually survived the fire?
5:07–7:18
4
Did a fire really destroy the Library of Alexandria, or could neglect have been the cause?
7:18–8:33
5
What parallels exist between the loss at Alexandria and the fires at the Library of Congress?
8:33–10:07
6
Can modern technologies like AI and infrared imaging recover lost ancient texts?
10:07–11:58
7
What is the Antikythera mechanism and why does it matter for our view of ancient technology?
11:58–13:50
8
What broader lessons does the book ‘The Museum of Lost Things’ teach about preserving knowledge?
13:50–13:58
Speakers
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