What Really Happened to the Library of Alexandria?

The Library of Alexandria was not destroyed in a single dramatic fire. The best reading of the evidence is a long decline over several centuries: damage when Julius Caesar's forces set fires in the harbour in 48 BCE, the slow loss of royal funding and scholars, the devastation of the city's palace quarter in the third century CE, and the destruction of the Serapeum temple, which housed a "daughter" library, in 391 CE. The popular story that Arab conquerors burned it in the 640s is regarded by most historians as a later legend.

That answer is less cinematic than the usual version, but it is more interesting, because it shows how knowledge is lost: usually through neglect, politics and changing priorities, not only through flames.

How the Library of Alexandria began

Alexander the Great founded Alexandria on Egypt's Mediterranean coast in 331 BCE. After his death, his general Ptolemy took Egypt, and the dynasty he founded made the city its capital. Under Ptolemy I and his son Ptolemy II, in the early third century BCE, the court created the Mouseion, a "shrine of the Muses" where scholars lived, studied and were paid by the crown. The Library was part of this institution, in the royal quarter near the harbour.

The Ptolemies collected aggressively. Ancient writers report that books found on ships arriving in the port were copied, with the library keeping the originals, and that official Athenian copies of the great tragedies were borrowed and never returned. Figures for the size of the collection range from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand papyrus scrolls. Those numbers come from ancient sources that cannot be checked, so the honest statement is simply that it was the largest collection of its time.

What happened inside

The Library mattered because of the work done around it. Callimachus compiled the Pinakes, a vast catalogue of Greek literature by author and subject, often described as a forerunner of library cataloguing. Eratosthenes, a later head librarian, estimated the circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy by comparing the angle of the sun at Alexandria and at Syene, modern Aswan. Scholars such as Aristarchus of Samothrace produced careful editions of Homer.

Alexandria was not only Greek. An Egyptian priest, Manetho, wrote a history of Egypt in Greek for the Ptolemies, and his division of the pharaohs into dynasties is still used today. Tradition also places the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, the Septuagint, in Ptolemaic Alexandria, though the famous account of seventy-two translators is legendary in its details. The city was a meeting place of Egyptian, Greek and Jewish learning, and later Roman and Christian thought too.

Caesar's fire, 48 BCE

In 48 BCE Julius Caesar was caught up in a civil war between Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII and found himself besieged in Alexandria. To stop the enemy fleet, his forces set fire to ships in the harbour, and the fire spread to buildings near the docks. Later Roman writers, including Seneca and Cassius Dio, say that books were burned; Seneca gives a figure of 40,000.

What burned is uncertain. Some of the lost scrolls may have been in warehouses by the port rather than in the Library itself. A few decades later the geographer Strabo described the Mouseion as still operating. Caesar's fire was a real loss, but it was not the end.

A slow decline rather than one disaster

The Library's real strength was royal patronage, and that proved fragile. Around 145 BCE, Ptolemy VIII expelled many intellectuals from the city during a political struggle, and leading scholars left. After Rome annexed Egypt in 30 BCE, membership of the Mouseion continued for a time as an honour, but the institution no longer sat at the centre of a royal court that wanted to own all knowledge.

Papyrus does not last forever in a damp coastal city, and scrolls had to be recopied to survive. Without money and scholars, collections thin out quietly. In the 270s CE, fighting during the emperor Aurelian's campaign to retake Egypt devastated the palace quarter where the Library had stood. After that, references to it become very scarce.

In 391 CE, after imperial decrees against pagan worship, Christians in Alexandria led by Bishop Theophilus destroyed the Serapeum, the great temple of the god Serapis, which had once held a secondary library. Whether many books were still there by then is unclear. The philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, killed by a mob in 415 CE, is often attached to the story, but no ancient source says she worked in the Library.

The Arab conquest legend

A widely repeated story says that when Arab forces under Amr ibn al-As took Alexandria in the 640s, the caliph Umar ordered the books destroyed, and they fed the city's bath furnaces for six months. The tale first appears in writers working more than five centuries after the conquest. Earlier accounts of the conquest, Christian and Muslim, say nothing of it, and by then the great Library had probably long since ceased to exist. Historians since at least Edward Gibbon in the eighteenth century have doubted it, and most now regard it as legend.

It is worth noticing how each version of the destruction has been used. Caesar, Christian zealots and Arab conquerors have all been cast as the villain, often by writers with their own arguments to make. The evidence supports a less satisfying but more accurate verdict: no single culprit.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina

In 2002 Egypt opened the Bibliotheca Alexandrina near the site of the ancient royal quarter, developed with UNESCO support. Its tilted, disc-shaped roof faces the sea, and its granite outer wall is carved with letters and signs from scripts around the world. It houses libraries, museums and research centres, and presents itself as a revival of the ancient library's spirit of open learning. You can find out more on the Bibliotheca Alexandrina website.

On the road through Egypt

The expedition's Egypt plan includes a focused look at Alexandria, at how Egypt, Greece and Rome exchanged ideas, and at the Library as a lesson in separating evidence from a single dramatic fire. Later in the walk, the expedition hopes to explore how the city's layered Egyptian, Greek, Jewish, Roman, Christian and Arab past is understood by the people who live there now.

Questions of how texts survive run through the whole route, from the Ethiopian Bible's 81 books to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Follow the whole line on the route page, read Leon's updates in the journal once he is walking, and support the walk if you value history told carefully.

Frequently asked questions

Who destroyed the Library of Alexandria?

No single person. Caesar's fire in 48 BCE caused damage, but the Library declined over centuries through lost patronage, war in the city in the 270s CE and changing priorities. The Serapeum was destroyed in 391 CE.

How many books were in the Library of Alexandria?

Nobody knows. Ancient estimates range from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand scrolls, and none can be verified.

Did the Arabs burn the Library of Alexandria?

Most historians think not. The story first appears more than five hundred years after the conquest of the 640s, and the Library had probably disappeared long before.

Does the Library of Alexandria still exist?

The ancient Library does not. Its modern successor, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, opened in 2002 near the ancient site.