The Pharaoh’s Treasure

A Library to End All Libraries and the Sweet Smell of History

Papyrus paper which keeps the sweet harvest of the mind, and restores it to the reader whenever he chooses to consult it.

—Cassiodorus

By the time the Romans arrived in Egypt to take control, there was an unlimited supply of papyrus paper on hand, ink as good as the fountain pen ink of today, scribes and clerks standing by, and in Alexandria a heritage of learning, as well as one of the largest libraries, all there for the asking. The stage was set for the next great leap forward in global cultural advancement, which would begin with the arrival of Julius Caesar.

Caesar, the conqueror of Egypt, landed in Alexandria in 48 B.C. with 4,000 legionnaires in pursuit of Pompey. He gained control of the docks and boat landings in the harbor, but the Egyptian navy kept control of the basin and access to the sea. In order to clear the harbor and open his supply lines back to Rome, his first act was to prepare several fire ships. These were ships loaded with combustible material that were sailed out by skeleton crews toward the enemy fleet and set afire. The crews jumped over and swam ashore just before the ships collided with and set fire to the enemy ships.

images — Alexandria, fire is discovered in the Library (Hutchinson’s History of the Nations, 1910).

Crowded into the harbor as they were, the Egyptian fleet was quickly engulfed in flames fanned by a stiff northerly breeze. The wind blew flaming material onto the docks, which were laden with heaps of dry material ready for export. From there, the fire spread to surrounding buildings and the Royal Library, which unfortunately had been built close to the harbor. All of the scrolls, which contained the records of 3,000 years of history, went up in flames and were gone within hours.¹

It must have given off a fantastic aroma as we recall that papyrus contains something akin to incense, and that Pliny referred to it as “the aromatic weed.”

Some called it the greatest act of vandalism ever committed and blamed Caesar for setting the fire. They cite the fact that he never mentioned the destruction of the library in his memoirs as proof of a guilty conscience.²

Throughout all this Cleopatra would have stood horrified watching the momentous work of generations of her family burning away while Caesar sniffed. Being a politician and an army man the whole experience may have meant less to him, but the extraordinary thing was that this incident planted a seed in Caesar’s mind. If Alexandria had benefited so from a library, would Rome not benefit from one as well? Perhaps he had heard that among the scrolls that went up in flames were almost certainly copies of Ptolemy’s biography of Alexander, the godlike conquering hero who served Caesar as a role model. Being a consummate politician, he may have been attracted to the idea that he could make practical use of a concept that Alexander, Aristotle, and Ptolemy had begun. If knowledge was power and libraries a focus of such power, then why not make provision in Rome for such things? In addition to books and buildings, he probably visualized entertainments that would appeal to the populus Romanus: including public readings, lectures, and seminars.

As Professor Ewen Bowie, emeritus fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, noted in his excellent review of Libraries for the Caesars,³ Julius Caesar’s objectives in establishing a public library must have included maintaining his beneficent image in the eyes of the people and offering the population of Rome something that the major players in late Republican politics, with private libraries in both their town houses and villas, had never offered. Once conceived in Alexandria, Caesar launched his concept of public libraries when he returned to Rome, but was assassinated before any progress could be made.

As for the Royal Library in Alexandria, it survived and with time came back, and what an extraordinary place it must have been. Justin Pollard and Howard Reid captured the tone of the place in their book of The Rise and Fall Alexandria. The library was “the single place on earth where all the knowledge in the entire world was gathered together—every great play and poem, every book of physics and philosophy”;⁴ and all this on papyrus paper.

Alexandria occupies a point of land on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea that encloses several harbors. Though Alexander founded the town and was buried there, it wasn’t until after his death in 323 B.C. that his general, Ptolemy I, arrived and built a city that would remain the capital of Egypt for the next thousand years, and become one of the cultural capitals of the world. Lionel Casson, late professor emeritus at New York University, ascribed much of the intellectual aura and reputation of the city to the nature of the first four Ptolemies, all of whom insisted on having leading scholars and scientists as tutors for their children.⁵

It must also have helped that before leaving Macedonia the first Ptolemy (later titled Soter or “savior,” by the people of Rhodes), had taken great pains to acquire the corpse of Alexander, his childhood friend. In those days whoever had the body of the ruler who had just passed, held the future as a legacy, since, at the time of his death, Alexander had no heir. His only son was born after he died.

Ptolemy, intent on building his own kingdom in Egypt, could afford to snub the imperial regent and the rest of Alexander’s entourage, since he was encouraged on all sides by signs and portents regarding Alexandria; the city he would develop. Soter’s goal was to start his own dynasty and do his own thing rather than succeed to the Macedonian empire; so, once the city had been laid out and the first settlers had populated the early buildings, he set out to attract the best and the most talented people to his new capital. Thirty years after Alexander’s death, Soter succeeded.

One of the most attractive institutions in his new city was the museum. Built in about 299 B.C. and founded as an institute of advanced learning, it featured a roofed walkway, an arcade, and a communal dining room where scholars routinely ate and shared ideas. In addition to private study rooms, residential quarters, lecture halls, and a theater, it also housed the library, which along with the museum became “the cradle of modern science, of rhetoric, philosophy, medicine, anatomy, geometry, geography, and astronomy, [and] greatly influenced Rome, the other pole of the Mediterranean basin.”⁶

In time several of the city’s most distinguished thinkers served as librarians or counselors and advised on acquisitions. In addition, there were, as Pollard and Reid pointed out, a “host of geniuses who walked and talked, debated and denounced, read copiously, and finally set pen to paper in the great library and museum attached to the royal palaces of Alexandria.”

Among these were Euclid, the father of geometry; Archimedes, mathematician, physicist, engineer and philosopher; Galen, the greatest doctor and physiologist of the age; Claudius Ptolemy, the father of both astronomy and geography; Apollonius, the author of Jason and the Argonauts; Eratosthenes, the first man to measure the circumference of the earth; Aristarchus, the first to envisage a heliocentric solar system; Plotinus, a founder of Neoplatonism; Clement of Alexandria, a father of Christian theology; Arius, perhaps the first great Christian heretic; Philo, the radical Jewish theologian; and many more.

Ptolemy Soter died in 283 B.C. at age eighty-four and left a compact, well-ordered realm, a fitting climax to the end of forty years of war. In 289 B.C. he made one of his sons, Ptolemy II, coregent, who, following a smooth transition, further developed the library. Called Philadelphus, he was an army man, historian and shrewd diplomat. He declared himself pharaoh soon after establishing the library and thereafter ruled over an expanded kingdom. His son, Ptolemy III Euergetes (“Benefactor”) was also a great administrator and collector and continued in his father’s footsteps and spent lavishly to make Alexandria the economic, artistic, and intellectual capital of the Hellenistic Greek world. The rule of Euergetes’s not-so-great son, Ptolemy IV, marked the end of Ptolemy power. Eventually the arrival of Caesar and the Romans brought the dynasty down and changed Alexandria forever.

In addition to being a major port and thus having access to books from around the world, Alexandria had the advantage in that it was the main outlet for the only source of paper in the world. At that time, papyrus paper ranked second only to grain as a major export. We see how important it was in an account by Dio Cassius, a Roman consul and noted historian, who wrote that during Caesar’s fire “the storehouses of grain and books of the greatest number and excellence were burned . . .”⁷ Some have suggested that the books referred to were simply old records kept in storehouses in the port, one of the busiest places in the world. But if so, why use commercial buildings that must have been prime real estate? We have already seen the disdain with which old records were treated. Torn in half, they were carried to the town dump, hopefully to be quickly disposed of so that prying eyes would never discover any tax frauds, minor or major.

Assuming instead that the storehouses were holding paper rolls for export, we have grain and papyrus ranked together in the port commerce. It was also possible that Dio was referring to an even more valuable commodity, inscribed rolls; that is, copies of books stored in these dockside buildings and intended for export. The Ptolemies would not have been above making money by exporting such things.⁸

It is tantalizing to wonder if the rolls in the warehouses were as blank as those in Hemaka’s tomb three thousand years previously. Sadly, this also indicates what little progress we’ve made in understanding the papyrus paper industry of the day.

The Royal Library

Strabo, the Greek geographer, said later that the location of the new city was perfect. It was by the sea, not far from the plantations of the delta, and the very productive grain fields of the Nile valley. A 1521 map of Alexandria by Piri Reis, the Ottoman admiral and geographer, shows the walled city with plantations of food crops marked by palm trees to the west in that part of the delta where extensive papyrus swamps and paper factories would have been in production a thousand of years before. In fact, on his triumphal march from Pelusium to Memphis, Alexander must have passed by acre after acre of papyrus plantations. Once he established himself in Memphis, the old capital city, he was sure to realize the importance of papermaking and that he had just conquered and now ruled the only source of writing paper in the civilized West.

Once the capital shifted to Alexandria—and in later years, once it became a Roman port—a large harvest of papyrus stems would be taken each morning from these same delta plantations. A large portion of this harvest, once dried, would be fed into the boilers of the city’s baths, which had been modified to burn reeds rather than wood. Even more impressive was the daily production of paper that fed the ever-growing markets of the world, all of which, like the daily shipments of grain, would pass through Soter’s new city. Books became the concern of the Ptolemies early on and they acquired them in great numbers from booksellers in Athens and Rhodes. Casson tells us that in their effort they commissioned agents to buy everything and anything, especially older book scrolls that were close to the originals.⁹ Legions of Greek slaves were trained up as copyists and put to work copying books in foreign libraries as well as back home in Alexandria in the Great Library.

Having noticed on some occasion that ships passing through the port often carried books, either for trade or for ship’s officers to pass the time, the Ptolemies order these seized. The originals were then catalogued and copies sent back to the ships before they sailed. Books were also copied while they were on loan, the most famous example being the original definitive texts of the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. These were kept by the city clerk in Athens until Ptolemy III borrowed them against an enormous deposit, fifteen talents, which was the equivalent of millions of dollars. When challenged for their return, he sent back a deluxe set of copies on papyrus paper and forfeited the fine.¹⁰

The object of the Ptolemy effort was to make Alexandria the repository of every book ever written, thereby securing the title of the “best and only.” They also intended to provide the greatest tool for research ever assembled. From early descriptions of the library it is evident that they were well along the road to achieving their goal, and with holdings of over 490,000 books they were in excellent shape when Caesar dramatically brought all progress to a halt.

Sunset on the City

Just as Alexandria and the Royal Library had grown so spectacularly over the years, even rebuilding itself robustly after the initial fire, its decline was a spectacularly slow, dismal wasting, which included an attack by Aurelian in the 270s A.D., a decree followed by a crusade of vengeance by the Coptic Pope Theophilus in 391 A.D. and finally total destruction during the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 642 A.D. But, as early as the third and fourth centuries, Athenaeus wrote that in Alexandria, books, libraries, and the collection in the museum were by then just a memory. The reasons for this decline in the holdings in Alexandria are many but it did not help when Emperor Diocletian had the early Christian books in the library burnt in 302 A.D. In addition, he had Egyptian technical books thrown into the fire as well.¹¹ Another large factor was the movement to transfer reading material from papyrus scrolls and codices to parchment, which had begun in a big way by 325 A.D. under Constantine the Great. The books of interest then were the Christian works being produced in Constantinople, not the pagan ones languishing in the Alexandria collection. Another factor was that Rome now had its own libraries, thanks to Julius Caesar. In addition the new center of interest for leaders, politicians, intelligentsia, and theologists had shifted to Constantinople where the first Imperial Library had opened. Luckily, as we will see, there was a selective system put in place in Constantinople and pagan classics were saved systematically. By then Rome and Alexandria were just “so yesterday.”

The end was complete when the Great Library was leveled in the seventh century. At that time Amr Ibn al-Asi, the Arab general who conquered Alexandria in 642 A.D., sought advice from his leader, the Sultan Umar, about what to do with the hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls in the library. Umar gave him the following famous advice, “If what is written in them agrees with the Book of God, they are not required; if it disagrees, they are not desired. Destroy them therefore.” It is said that General Amr ordered the papyrus book rolls distributed among the bathhouses of the city where they provided fuel for the boilers for the next six months.

The Library of Alexandria was superseded in later years by the Imperial Library in Constantinople started by Constantius II, son of the Christian Emperor Constantine, which became the last of the great libraries of the ancient world.

Papyrus paper seemed doomed to the same fate as the Library of Alexandria in that its production had reached its zenith and by the third century B.C. was also on the decline. It was slowly being replaced with parchment, which was not subjected to the cartel economic system that controlled papyrus paper. But, before Pharaoh’s treasure sank completely, it was to experience one last burst of glory, as when a sunset sends out an explosion of light just before the orb dips below the horizon.

The new religious movement, Christianity, had arrived in Alexandria on the heels of the Apostle Saint Mark and this incited a burst of religious zeal, during which papyrus paper came to be used for Bibles, first in scroll form, then later in bound versions, codices that were the forerunners of the modern book. During the transition, which spanned a period of about three hundred years until 300 A.D. and until the Imperial Library in Constantinople got underway, the world had to make do with Roman libraries and Roman books that were evolving during this time.