About 2200 years ago there existed a Great City called Alexandria and in this great City there existed a great library “The library of Alexandria ” . It was near Cairo in Egypt .
It was build by Ptolemy the successor of Alexander and the king of Egypt . Ptolemy had a GREAT interest in books . Ptolemy had a great Ambition : ” to possess all the books that the world had ever produced .
And thet too in the orignal . Remember in those days books were not published . They were hand written . Ptolemy wanted the Author’s hand written copy . He wanted to collect these books and store them in his library .
His methods to acquire these books was unique . He wrote a letter to all kings of the world requesting them for the orignal books . He said that he will copy them and reurn the orignal . But what he did was to keep the orignals in the library and return the copies 🙂 . All ships that stopped in Alexandria were searched for books and if found they were taken to the library .
The library became a great centre of learning . It had over 120,000 books . The library also became a place where scholars and scientists could live and do their research . Here Eratosthenes calculated the size of the earth , and made its map . Hipparchus made a theory of the formation of the stars and catalogued their positions . Euclid produced his books on Geometry . Arichmedes invented the screw . The first woman Physicist and Mathematician Hyphatha also lived , lectured and was killed here. Galen wrote the basic works of Anatomy and Healing which dominated medicine till Renaissance .
This library was a tribute to man’s quest for knowledge !
But it was destroyed by the baseness in Man which so often overpowers his intellect . When Julius Caesar invaded Egypt the library was destroyed . The Romans did not share the love of learning that the Greeks had and found no use of the books there . They burnt the library and not a single scroll remained !!! The Romans were crazy . They were stupid . They were barbarians . They were *#$%##%* !
This was in approx 55 BC .
How can anyone burn a book ?????? Anyway the library were destroyed and so much orignal work that mathematicians and Scientists had done was destroyed with it . For example of the 123 plays of Sophocles only 7 survived the destruction .
See Carl Sagan’s Cosmos for a beautiful account of the library and its destruction .