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The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed and it seems to have either survived or been rebuilt shortly thereafter.
The infamous destruction by fire of the Library of Alexandria, with the consequent loss of the most complete collection of ancient literature ever assembled, has been a point of heated debate for centuries.
Library of Alexandria, the most famous library of Classical antiquity. It formed part of the research institute at Alexandria in Egypt that is known as the Alexandrian Museum. The library was named after Alexander the Great, who initiated the collection of documents in 334 BCE.
The first person blamed for the destruction of the Library is none other than Julius Caesar himself. In 48 BC, Caesar was pursuing Pompey into Egypt when he was suddenly cut off by an Egyptian fleet at Alexandria.
Suddenly, early in the 13th century appears an account reported by Ibn al-Qifṭī and other Arab authors describing how ʿAmr had burned the books of the ancient Library of Alexandria. The story has a fictitious flavour and has repeatedly been criticized, notably by 18th-century British historian Edward Gibbon , and it has since been proved to ...
According to the most popular claim, it was destroyed by Julius Caesar by fire in 48 BCE. Other claims cite its destruction by the emperor Aurelian in his war with Zenobia in 272 CE, by Diocletian in 297 CE, by Christian zealots in 391 and 415 CE, or by Muslim Arab invaders in the 7th century.
On a sunny morning in 642 C.E., armies of Muslim Arabs, in the process of conquering Egypt, destroyed the ancient library at Alexandria, which for a thousand years had been the western world’s most important center of learning. 1. The library held a million volumes, including an extensive collection of Greek and Roman literature, as well as ...
One of our sources about the Alexandrian Library is the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who, in his History (written around AD 380-390) also brings together the two key facts: that...
The Library of Alexandria in Egypt held all the knowledge of the ancient world and at its height, it may have contained over 400,000 texts. Legend says Julius Caesar burned the Library of Alexandria, but scholars don't think that's what actually happened.
Ptolemy’s grandest building project was the Alexandria Library, which he founded in 306 B.C.E. Almost immediately the library epitomized the best scholarship of the ancient world, containing the intellectual riches of Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, Rome and Egypt.