AS WE THINK about the legacy of ancient libraries in the public consciousness, there is one legendary library whose fame has outlasted all others: Alexandria. Despite the fact that it existed far later than those in Mesopotamia, and that no material evidence survives from the library itself, Alexandria is the archetypal library of the Western imagination, and is still often referred to as the greatest library ever assembled by the great civilisations of the ancient world.
Despite the fact that our knowledge of the Library of Alexandria is patchy, to say the least – the primary sources being few, mostly repeating other sources now lost or too distant to verify – the idea of a truly universal library, a single place where the entire knowledge of the world was stored, has inspired writers and librarians throughout history. We do know that there were in fact two libraries in ancient Alexandria, the Mouseion and the Serapeum, or the Inner and Outer Libraries. The Mouseion was a temple to the muses – nine Greek sister goddesses who presided over human creativity and knowledge, everything from history to epic poetry to astronomy – and is where we get our term ‘museum’ from. The Mouseion was, however, far from a museum: it was a living library, full of books (in the form of scrolls) and scholars.
The Mouseion was a great storehouse of knowledge, a place for scholars to come and study. The building was located in the Royal Quarter, the Broucheion, close to the palace, giving a clear indication of its importance.1 Strabo, the Greek historian and geographer, writing in the first few years of the Christian era, highlighted the importance of royal patronage for the library, and described it as having a shared dining space where the king would sometimes join the scholars.2 These scholars read like a roll call of the great thinkers of the ancient world, including not just Euclid (the father of geometry) and Archimedes (the father of engineering) but Eratosthenes who was the first person to calculate the circumference of the earth with remarkable accuracy. Many of the intellectual breakthroughs that modern civilisation is based on can be traced to their work.
An offshoot of the library was held in the Serapeum, a temple to the ‘invented’ god Serapis. Ancient writers disputed whether Ptolemy I or II had introduced the cult of Serapis to Egypt, but archaeological evidence demonstrates that the temple was founded by Ptolemy III Euergetes I (246–221 BCE).3 The foundation of this library legitimised it further. Like the Mouseion it was built to impress. Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus described it as ‘so adorned with extensive columned halls, with almost breathing statues, and a great number of other works of art, that next to the Capitolium [Rome’s central temple], with which revered Rome elevates herself to eternity, the whole world beholds nothing more magnificent’.4
The Library of Alexandria grew steadily following its foundation, according to a curious document known as the Letter of Aristeas, written around 100 BCE. This document tells us that within a short period from its foundation the library grew to 500,000 scrolls, and that the addition of the Serapeum brought greater capacity. The Roman historian Aulus Gellius in his compendium Attic Nights gave a figure of 700,000 volumes, split across the two libraries. John Tzetzes got a little more precise – librarians tend to feel much happier with precise counts of their collections – stating that the Mouseion held 490,000 volumes and the Serapeum 42,800. We must treat the ancient estimates of the size of the collection with extreme caution. Given the extent of the surviving literature from the ancient world, the numbers quoted for the library cannot be realistic. While these estimates need to be looked at sceptically, they make it clear that the library was enormous, much bigger than any other collection known at the time.5
What can be said concerning the role that the Library of Alexandria played in the ancient kingdom? Was it more than just a storehouse of knowledge? While we know practically nothing about how the library operated, it seems that together with the evident ambition to acquire and preserve knowledge, there was a desire to encourage learning too. Aphthonius, writing in the fourth century CE, speaks of ‘storehouses … open to those eager to study, an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom’.6 It may be that the ‘legend’ of Alexandria has as much to do with the accessibility of the knowledge it contained as the size of the collection. We know from the Roman historian Suetonius that the Emperor Domitian at the end of the first century CE sent scribes to Alexandria to copy texts that had been lost in various Roman library fires.7 The large size of the two libraries, and the resident community of scholars of the Mouseion, and the liberal access policy, combined to create an aura around the library that placed it at the centre of scholarship and learning.
When the Library of Alexandria has been discussed, more often than not it is the cautionary tale of its destruction that is invoked – that towering library, said to contain a vast ocean of knowledge, razed to the ground in a fiery blaze. In some ways the destruction of the library has become as important, if not more, to its legacy as its existence. This is made clear when we realise that the classic story of Alexandria, consumed by one catastrophic inferno, is a myth. In fact it is a collection of myths and legends (often contradicting one another) that the popular imagination continues to cling to.
One account, perhaps the best known, is the story told by Ammianus Marcellinus who in his History (written around CE 380–390) declared that the ‘unanimous testimony of ancient records declares that 700,000 books, brought together by the unremitting energy of the Ptolemaic kings, were burned in the Alexandrine war, when the city was sacked under the dictator Caesar’.8 Another ancient writer, Plutarch, gives us more detail about the burning. After an Alexandrian mob had turned against the Romans, Caesar was forced to barricade himself in the palace quarter near the dockyards. An attempt was made to ‘cut him off from his navy’, and ‘he was forced to fend off the danger with fire, and this, spreading from the dockyards, destroyed the great library’. We get a slightly different take from Dio Cassius who, in his Roman History (written circa CE 230), tells us that although ‘many places were set on fire’ it was the storerooms in the dockyards rather than the Mouseion (library), both those of ‘grain and books, said to be great in number and of the finest’, that were destroyed.9
This myth – that Caesar was responsible for the destruction in some way – has had to compete through history with others. By CE 391, Alexandria had become a Christian city, and its religious leader, the Patriarch Theophilus, lost patience with the pagan occupiers of the Serapeum and destroyed the temple. In CE 642 the Muslim occupation of Egypt saw the occupation of Alexandria for the first time, and one account of the destruction of the library attributes its demise to deliberate destruction by Amr (the Arab military leader who had conquered the city) on the orders of the Caliph Omar. This account ascribes a perverse logic to the Caliph: ‘If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved,’ so the account tells us: ‘if they disagree, they are pernicious, and ought to be destroyed.’ This legend describes the orders of the Caliph being ‘executed with blind obedience’, the scrolls being distributed to Alexandria’s four thousand baths, where they were used as fuel to heat the water, taking six months to exhaust the supply.10
What the ancient historians all agree on, is that the library was destroyed. The weight of their opinions helped to propagate the myth. That propulsion was greatly speeded in the late eighteenth century with the publication of volume III of Edward Gibbon’s great epic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which includes the most vivid passage about the destruction of the library that had yet appeared in the English language. This passage would make the loss of Alexandria the powerful symbol for barbarity that it still is today. ‘The valuable library of Alexandria was pillaged or destroyed; and near twenty years afterwards, the appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator whose mind was not totally darkened by religious prejudice,’ he wrote, emphasising the loss of the ‘compositions of ancient genius’ and lamenting that so many works had ‘irretrievably perished’.11
What these myths all have in common is that they mourn the library as a victim of barbarity triumphing over knowledge. These stories have encouraged the symbolisation of Alexandria: the telling and retelling of the myths has led to its name being almost always invoked as metaphor, either to capture the desire to amass universal knowledge or to convey the loss of great amounts of knowledge. But what really happened to the Library of Alexandria? And is there more we can learn from its destruction, and its existence, behind the myth?
The fact that the library failed to exist beyond the classical period is unquestioned. Exactly why is less clear. Caesar himself reported the burning of Alexandria as an accidental consequence of his war against his great rival Pompey, in 48–47 BCE. Ships bringing enemy troops had been docked in the harbour, close to a series of warehouses, and Caesar’s troops torched them. In the conflagration that followed, a number of nearby warehouses were destroyed. Following the city’s instructions that all incoming ships should be searched for books, which were required to be copied for the library, it is feasible that these seized books had been temporarily stored in the dockside warehouses. Material damage was done to the collections of the library, but it was not its end. This ties in with the account of the geographer Strabo who did much of his own research some decades after the events of 48–47 BCE using sources from the library.12
Both libraries were very fragile. The Serapeum seems to have suffered a fire at some point around CE 181 and again in 217 but was rebuilt, although there is no indication whether the fire affected the library or just the temple complex.13 In CE 273 the Emperor Aurelian recaptured Alexandria after it had been occupied by the insurgent rebellion of Palmyra, destroying the palace complex and almost certainly inflicting damage on the library (although no ancient writers confirm this explicitly), but if this is a true record (and over a century later the area had still not been rebuilt) then it is possible that the Library of the Serapeum may have outlived the Mouseion.14
Gibbon’s profound statement about the loss of the library was the result of a great deal of careful reading around the subject, and his judgement on the most likely cause of the destruction can enlighten us. He dismissed the idea that the destruction of the library could be blamed on the Muslim conquerors of Egypt, and the instruction of Caliph Omar. This version of events had been reported by some early Christian writers (such as Abulpharagius), especially the evocative story of the scrolls being fuel for the thousands of hot baths in the city. Gibbon knew that this account had evoked a strong response in the scholars who had encountered it and ‘deplored the irreparable shipwreck of the learning, the arts, and the genius, of antiquity’.15 The Enlightenment sceptic was scathing in his analysis of that account: it was scarcely logical that the Caliph would burn Jewish and Christian religious books, which were also considered holy texts in Islam. Moreover the story was implausible on practical grounds as ‘the conflagration would have speedily expired in the deficiency of materials’.16
For Gibbon, the Library of Alexandria was one of the great achievements of the classical world and its destruction – which he concludes was due to a long and gradual process of neglect and growing ignorance – was a symbol of the barbarity that overwhelmed the Roman Empire, allowing civilisation to leach away what was being re-encountered and appreciated in his own day. The fires (whether accidental or deliberate) were major incidents in which many books were lost, but the institution of the library disappeared more gradually both through organisational neglect and through the gradual obsolescence of the papyrus scrolls themselves.
A manuscript by the medical scientist Galen, found relatively recently in a monastery library in Greece, contains a previously unknown account of a fire in CE 192 in the imperial library in Rome. The library, known as the Domus Tiberiana, was on the Palatine Hill in the heart of the city. The fire destroyed the original scrolls that contained a famous Greek scholar’s edition of the works of Homer, one of the most influential authors of the classical world (and perhaps of all time).17 What is important is that these scrolls had been brought to Rome from the Library of Alexandria as booty. Seized by Lucius Aemilius Paullus, father of the famous Roman general Scipio, from the defeated King Perseus of Macedon in 168 BCE this was the first great collection of papyrus scrolls to be brought back to Rome, and it had a profound effect on the literary life of the city.18
Papyrus was first used in Egypt as a writing material. It was derived from the papyrus rush, from which the pith could be extracted from the stem. Layers of the pith were laid on top of one another, fused together using water, dried in the sun, and then smoothed to enable the surface to take a form of ink. The sheets of papyrus were normally joined together and wrapped around a wooden rod to form a scroll (loosely termed liber in Latin, from where we derive the word ‘library’). Papyrus itself would be replaced by a more durable technology – parchment, developed in the western Mediterranean and then across Europe and then by paper, brought to the West from Asia through the agency of Arab craftsmen and traders, but for four centuries papyrus was the dominant writing medium.
One of the problems with papyrus was how easily it could be set on fire. Being made from dried organic matter, wrapped tightly around a wooden rod, it is inherently flammable, and when placed in a library of similar materials, these weaknesses become potentially disastrous. Most surviving papyrus was found as waste material, in rubbish heaps in Egypt (like the famous site of Oxyrhynchus) or as cartonnage – material used to wrap mummified bodies. The number of surviving libraries of papyrus scrolls is tiny, with the most famous being at Herculaneum – where the ‘Villa of the Papyri’ was discovered in the middle of the eighteenth century sealed under the tsunami of volcanic ash that came out of nearby Mount Vesuvius in CE 79. Eventually over 1,700 scrolls were excavated there, most charred or completely fused by the heat of the eruption. Enough of them are readable for us to know that the collector behind the library must have been fascinated by Greek philosophy (especially that of Philodemus).19 The fragile scrolls are still being unrolled and deciphered, most recently via X-ray: in 2018 it was announced that part of Seneca’s famous lost Histories had been discovered on one of them.
The environment papyrus is stored in is crucial to its long-term preservation. The climate of the coastal port of Alexandria was humid, which would have affected the older scrolls, encouraging mould and other organic decay.20 Other large library collections of papyrus (such as that at Pergamon in present-day Turkey) went through a process of recopying texts from papyrus scrolls onto parchment, a writing material based on treated animal skin. This was a kind of technological migration of knowledge from one format to another.
A lack of oversight, leadership and investment spread over centuries seems to have been the ultimate cause of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. Rather than highlighting the cataclysmic nature of barbaric ignorance triumphing over civilised truth, Alexandria is a cautionary tale of the danger of creeping decline, through the underfunding, low prioritisation and general disregard for the institutions that preserve and share knowledge. In contrast, Pergamon, Alexandria’s great rival, developed and maintained its collections.
Modern scholarship dates the foundation of the library at Pergamon to the end of the third century BCE, although ancient writers, like Strabo, dated its foundation to early on in the second century BCE, and attributed the foundation to King Eumenes II (197–160 BCE) of the Attalid dynasty.21 Pergamon was the library that most threatened the reputation of Alexandria as the greatest library of the ancient world, with this rivalry based not only on the nature and size of its holdings, but on the role played by the scholars who worked as part of the library itself.22 According to several ancient writers the rivalry became a matter of state, triggering competition between their two kings Ptolemy V (204–180 BCE) and Eumenes.23 The two libraries each had their own star scholars: Alexandria had Aristarchus, the famous commentator on the works of Hesiod. He was rivalled by Pergamon’s brilliant Crates of Mallos, the commentator on Homer. Like Alexandria, no specific remains can help us locate the physical site of this library, and its decline seems to have been closely related to the decline of the Attalid dynasty, which had linked the prestige of the library to their own status. Once the Attalid kingdom was taken over by the Romans in 133 BCE, the library ceased to be so crucially bound up with the state, and its own decline began.
The Library of Alexandria helps us understand the ideals of a library, as it created a template, which many other libraries in subsequent centuries have sought to emulate (even though the details of exactly what the library was like is obscure). From Alexandria we learn of the power of linking a great collection to the service of a community of scholars who were able to share knowledge and to develop new knowledge through their studies. Strabo did his geographic research at Alexandria, and referred to the librarians and scholars as a ‘synodos’, or community, of thirty to fifty learned men (women do not appear to have been included). The community was international: many came from Greece, which ruled Alexandria, but Roman scholars copied and commentated on Greek poetry and drama there.
The leadership of the institution was very important in its success. Five of the first six librarians were among the most important writers from the classical world: Zenodotus, Apollonius Rhodius, Eratosthenes, Aristophanes and Aristarchus.24 Around 270 BCE the librarianship passed to Apollonius Rhodius who wrote a great epic, the Argonautica, and who is reputed to have encouraged a young scholar named Archimedes of Syracuse to come and work in the Mouseion. During his time there Archimedes observed the rising and falling of the level of the River Nile, and invented the engineering device known as the ‘screw’ that still bears his name.25 The mathematician Euclid was invited to join the community at Alexandria, and he is thought to have compiled his famous Elements of Geometry, arguably the foundation of modern mathematics, while there, and he may also have taught his follower, Apollonius of Perga. The librarians and scholars of Alexandria did more than preserve knowledge, they standardised the texts, adding their own ideas to make new knowledge. What was created at Alexandria was what could not be destroyed in the fire and the long process of neglect: an approach to learning that we now call scholarship.
It is hard to prove the direct link between the libraries of the ancient world and those of subsequent generations, but it is possible to detect a common human practice of organising and preserving knowledge. There is no direct line of professional practice for librarians from Alexandria or Nineveh. No manuals were created, no pithy sayings have been passed down. What survives is more of an ethos – the ethos that knowledge holds great power, that the pursuit of gathering and preserving it is a valuable task, and that its loss can be an early warning sign of a decaying civilisation.
As I walk around the Bodleian today, there are constant reminders of the history of the practice of librarianship. Across the twenty-eight libraries that form the Bodleian you can see the evolution of practical methods to preserve and share knowledge. We continue to use these buildings, many of which were designed as libraries long ago (some more than six centuries ago), a fact that continues to inspire all of us who work there. These buildings now have electric lighting, central heating, computers, Wi-Fi and other aids to learning, but the process of innovation had its origins almost two thousand years before the founding of the Library of Alexandria.
When we examine the physical legacy of ancient libraries, it is truly remarkable what has survived. In the late 1940s, for example, a young goatherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib discovered a group of pottery vessels in the Qumran Caves in the Judaean desert. Inside these vessels were hundreds of scrolls containing the oldest surviving copies of texts of almost every book of the Hebrew Bible. An archaeological excavation dated the occupation of the site surrounding the cave complex to between circa 100 BCE and CE 70, while the manuscripts were written between the fourth century BCE and CE 70 (the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem). Known as the Dead Sea Scrolls their fragile and fragmentary state belies their remarkable survival. We have no real understanding of exactly how these documents came to be stored (or perhaps ‘hidden’) in the caves of Qumran, but the consensus is that they were purposefully hidden by a Jewish religious group, now thought to be the Essenes, during the Roman suppression that followed the First Jewish Revolt in CE 66–73. The desert location and the way this archive was stored ensured its preservation. Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written on parchment, although a small number were written on papyrus. The parchment documents are more durable.
A key lesson from Alexandria is that its demise would become a warning for subsequent societies. The commonly held view, encouraged by Edward Gibbon, has been that ‘dark ages’ followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. Historians today are clear that there was no ‘dark age’ following the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. Any darkness that still persists is due to a lack of evidence of the preservation of knowledge. Knowledge continued to be gathered and learning flourished across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East in continuation of the work undertaken at Alexandria and other centres. The learning of the Greek world would be most powerfully preserved through Arab culture, and through the power of copying and of translation. Major communities in Arabic centres of learning, such as Tabriz in modern-day Iran, would enable the transmission of Greek culture and science, much of which would come back to the West through re-translation into Latin, and through the cultural exchange in cosmopolitan cities like Toledo in al-Andalus (as Muslim Spain was called).26
As the Library of Alexandria decayed during the first centuries of the first millennium CE, the knowledge of the ancient world continued to be preserved through the agency of libraries. Evidence from one of these early libraries can be found in a mosaic on the tomb of the Empress Galla Placidia at Ravenna, in the chapel built specifically to house her tomb in CE 450. It shows a cupboard for storing books, which holds two shelves, each containing separate books lying flat, the four volumes being labelled for each of the Evangelists. The cupboard stood on stout legs raising it up from the floor (perhaps to protect the contents from flooding).27
The Capitular Library in Verona in northern Italy has its origins in the cathedral scriptorium. The oldest book associated with the library dates to CE 517, and was written by one Ursicinus, who held a minor order in the cathedral, but the library holds books that are at least a century older, when it is just possible that Alexandria may still have had some remnant of its former glory. It is very likely that these books were copied in its scriptorium from books brought for the purpose of building its collection. In the sixth century in the desert of Sinai, a religious community built a monastery dedicated to St Catherine, and formed a library that housed biblical manuscripts of tremendous importance, especially the celebrated Codex Sinaiticus, the earliest and most complete manuscript of the Bible in Greek, dating from the first half of the fourth century. The library continues to preserve manuscripts and printed books for the use of its own community and other scholars to this day.
Many key works were, however, lost during the period we now call ‘Late Antiquity’ (the period from roughly the third to the eighth centuries), and we know this through the occasional ghostly traces of them in later books, or from chance finds of fragments of papyri, where previously unknown texts have been found by archaeological digs over the last 150 years. These discoveries of papyri have also revealed better versions of the texts of classical authors that were known in the Middle Ages. Johannes Lydus at Byzantium in the sixth century had more complete texts of Seneca and Suetonius than have passed down to us. The North African Bishop St Fulgentius in the fifth century, and St Martin, Archbishop of Braga in Portugal in the sixth century, cited (or indeed plagiarised) texts from Petronius and Seneca that have not survived to join the corpus of Latin writers today.28
The best example of literary loss is the Greek poet Sappho, who was born on the island of Lesbos in the seventh century BCE, and who was such an important cultural figure in the ancient world that Plato referred to her as ‘the tenth muse’. Famous for her love poetry addressed to women, the English terms ‘sapphic’ and ‘lesbian’ are derived from her own name and the name of her home island. Name-checked by everyone from Horace to Ovid, and so popular that the scholars of Alexandria compiled not one but two nine-book critical editions of her poems, her work only survives in fragments of the texts. The single complete poem we have comes from an anthology of Greek lyrics and the rest have been pieced together from quotations found painted on potsherds and on papyrus found in rubbish heaps, especially one at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Poem 38 is a fragment that simply reads ‘you burn me’. As with the Library of Alexandria, there are competing theories as to why the works of such a key writer have not survived. The most popular has long been that the Christian Church deliberately destroyed them on moral grounds. Writers in the Renaissance even claimed that Sappho’s works were burned in Rome and Constantinople in 1073 on the orders of Pope Gregory VII. In reality, Sappho’s works (in an obscure Aeolic dialect hard to read) were probably lost when the demand was insufficiently great for them to be copied onto parchment when the bound codex superseded the use of papyrus scrolls. The rubbish heap at Oxyrhynchus, excavated in 1897 by the Egypt Exploration Society, provides us with over 70 per cent of surviving literary papyri.
As Christianity became established, books and libraries spread across Europe and the Mediterranean world. Even in Britain, at the very edge of the Roman Empire, we assume from scraps of evidence that there were libraries (the poet Martial, who died early in the second century, commented sarcastically that his works were read even in Britain). In major centres like Constantinople (which had been known as Byzantium, until refounded in CE 330) the spirit of Alexandria lived again when an imperial university was refounded by Emperor Theodosius II in c.425 and a new clerical academy was established.29 In the sixth century the scholar and statesman Cassiodorus retired from the court of King Theodoric of Italy to become a monk; he established a monastery in Vivarium in Calabria and built up an important library. The scriptorium there was a significant intellectual source, and at least two books were copied and sent to the early Christian community at the Abbey of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow in northern England. One was the Commentary on the Psalms by Cassiodorus himself (an eighth-century copy is now in the Cathedral Library at Durham) and the other was a copy of the Bible. It was later copied in the scriptorium at Monkwearmouth–Jarrow, making a book now known as the Codex Amiatinus, which was sent back to Rome as a gift. It never reached the city and is now in the Laurentian Library in Florence. The Codex Amiatinus even contains a painting of a library, complete with bookcase, books and with the Prophet Ezra busy writing next to it.30
During this period knowledge was copied and disseminated outside the Christian world by Islamic and Jewish communities. In the Jewish faith, the copying of the Old Testament and other sacred texts was so important that religious laws grew up to govern how the written word was to be handled.31 Across the Islamic world, although the oral tradition of memorising the Quran was still dominant, the book became an important intellectual mechanism for spreading the holy book as well as other ideas. Islamic communities learned how to make paper from the Chinese and, according to the thirteenth-century encyclopaedist Yaqut al-Hallawi, the first paper mill in Baghdad was established CE 794–5, and enough paper was produced there for the bureaucrats to replace their parchment and papyrus records.32 This mass availability of paper (less fragile than papyrus and much cheaper than parchment) enabled Muslims to develop a sophisticated book culture; as a result, libraries, paper-sellers and booksellers became a common sight in Baghdad where traders in books and paper were renowned as men of learning. This culture soon spread to other cities across the Islamic world.
From Islamic Spain to the Abbasid kingdom in Iraq libraries sprang up. There were great libraries in Syria and Egypt, over seventy libraries in Islamic Spain, and thirty-six in Baghdad alone, the first public collection in this great city being assembled during the reign of al-Mansur (754–75), the founder of Baghdad or his successor Harun al-Rashid (786–809). Harun’s son, the caliph al-Mamun, established the House of Wisdom, founded in the eighth century as a library and an academic institute devoted to translations, research and education, attracting scholars from all over the world from many cultures and religions. Here the spirit of Alexandria ruled again and teachers and students worked together to translate Greek, Persian, Syriac and Indian manuscripts. Under the caliph’s patronage the scholars at the House of Wisdom were able to study Greek manuscripts brought from Constantinople as well as translate the works of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Euclid, Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Brahmagupta and many others. Other libraries were created in succeeding centuries, such as the House of Knowledge, built in 991 by the Persian Sabur ibn Ardashir. It held over ten thousand volumes on scientific subjects but was destroyed during the Seljuq invasion in the middle of the tenth century.33
One commentator, the Egyptian encyclopaedist al-Qalqashandī, reported that ‘the library of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad … included books beyond measure that were valuable beyond anything else’. These libraries were to suffer damage, both deliberately and indirectly during the invasion of the Mongols in the thirteenth century.34 Islamic scholars also created their own sophisticated scholarship, especially in the sciences, and the collecting of books of Islamic science by European libraries over a thousand years later would help stimulate the creation of new scientific approaches.35
By the seventh century in northern Europe there were many more monasteries and many of them had libraries. These collections were small. In Britain, the early Christian communities at Canterbury, Malmesbury, Monkwearmouth–Jarrow and York had enough books to be termed library collections, but few of the books in these islands survived the Viking invasions.36
In the early ninth century, the monks of Iona, an island community established by St Columba, were massacred by the Vikings and their important scriptorium was destroyed. One theory is that the famous illuminated manuscript known as the Book of Kells was in fact written on Iona and moved to Kells through fear of Viking raids.37 One book that survived the Viking incursions, the world-famous Lindisfarne Gospels (now in the British Library), originated in the Christian community of Lindisfarne in the eighth century, and around a hundred and fifty years later left the island when the community moved to a safer location on the mainland, taking the book and the body of their spiritual leader St Cuthbert with them. The book is most famous today as a work of early Christian art, with paintings inside of spectacular beauty and intricacy, but it was important in its day as a powerful symbol of the Christianisation of northern Europe.
A century after it left the island of Lindisfarne the great book – lavishly bound with precious metals, stones and jewels – came to rest with its religious community at Durham. Here, in the mid tenth century, Aldred, a monk later to be associated with Durham’s sister community at Chester-le-Street, added an Old English gloss to the Latin text of the Gospels, effectively the earliest rendering of the New Testament in the English language. He added a colophon that records a tradition about the book: it was written by Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne (c.698–722), bound by Aethilwald, the successor bishop (who died in 740), and Billfrith adorned the cover with gold, silver and gems. In the twelfth century, the Durham monk Symeon recognised that the book, ‘preserved in this church’, was as much of a treasure as the body of St Cuthbert itself.38
The Bodleian has two books that were in a library in Constantinople at this period, and they are the earliest surviving complete copies of Euclid’s Elements and Plato’s Dialogues. Both were in the library of Bishop Arethas of Patras in the late ninth century.
By the time of the Norman invasion in 1066, the largest collections, such as that at Ely, were just a few hundred volumes strong, much smaller than their counterparts in the Islamic world. Most of the libraries in England before the Norman Conquest were small enough to be kept in a few strong chests or cupboards, and only a small number of monastic houses had library rooms. Peterborough Abbey, for example, founded in the seventh century, has a surviving list of books gifted to it by Bishop Aethelwold of Winchester (who refounded the abbey in 970). It lists only twenty books.39 The Venerable Bede tells us that Pope Gregory the Great sent many books to Augustine at Canterbury in the early seventh century, but these may have been service books and Bibles, and the only explicit reference to a library by Bede refers to that at Hexham, in Northumberland, which evidently comprised histories of the passions of the martyrs as well as other religious books.40
Libraries continued to exist following the end of the ancient civilisations, although none of the libraries from Greece, Egypt, Persia or Rome continued in an unbroken line. Through the act of copying new libraries were soon established to house the new books created. A few of these new Christian libraries – like those of St Catherine’s Monastery, or the Capitular Library in Verona – have continued since they were first begun in the last years of the ancient world. Many more established in the following centuries have also endured. They created a pattern for a flourishing of knowledge and engendered a network of institutions that was to support the societies of the West and of the Middle East throughout the Middle Ages.
The legend of Alexandria generated the idea that libraries and archives were places where new knowledge could be created – which is what we see with the Mouseion’s mixture of books and scholars. Alexandria’s fame spread across the ancient world, and has been passed down through history, inspiring others to emulate its mission to gather and organise the world’s knowledge: the preface to The Life of Sir Thomas Bodley, published in 1647, boasted that the great library he had set up surpassed even the ‘proud fame of the Aegyptian Library’.41 The legacy of Alexandria has also been an inspiration to librarians and archivists in their fight to protect and save knowledge.