Questions about the Grat Library of Alexandria

[daft]

Looking for opinions about the following:
Who burned down the Great Library? What was his/their motivation?
What great books/manuscripts and other forms of documents were/could have been stored inside?
Which documents do you wish were somehow saved from destruction in order to enlighten us in the present times?
Do you agree with the thesis that if the Great Library was never destroyed our knowledge of the past could have been significantly different today?
What knowledge was/could have been permanently lost to us as a result of the destruction of this Great Wonder?

 

[Plotinus]

Looking for opinions about the following:
Who burned down the Great Library? What was his/their motivation?

No-one knows, but it was almost certainly not destroyed in one fell swoop like this - rather, it was gradually lost bit by bit over time as the city suffered various invasions and other disasters.

What great books/manuscripts and other forms of documents were/could have been stored inside?

No-one knows, but presumably all (or most) of the lost works of antiquity - e.g. the 80% of Aristotle's writings that we don't have, the writings of Heraclitus, Carneades, etc.

Which documents do you wish were somehow saved from destruction in order to enlighten us in the present times?

I don't think any would enlighten us particularly. If people aren't already enlightened by all the texts we already have, from both antiquity and later times, adding more isn't going to enlighten them any further. I wish we had works by the original Stoic thinkers and the Academic sceptics, but only so we can understand them better.

Do you agree with the thesis that if the Great Library was never destroyed our knowledge of the past could have been significantly different today?

I doubt it. We might know more about some topics, but I don't see any reason to think there were any lost texts that would have completely revised anything we know about the past.

What knowledge was/could have been permanently lost to us as a result of the destruction of this Great Wonder?

Knowledge of what certain people, such as those mentioned above, really believed. No other knowledge. I don't think that the ancients had any mysterious scientific or spiritual wisdom that we've somehow missed.

 

[Louis XXIV]

I don't think any would enlighten us particularly. If people aren't already enlightened by all the texts we already have, from both antiquity and later times, adding more isn't going to enlighten them any further. I wish we had works by the original Stoic thinkers and the Academic sceptics, but only so we can understand them better.

Well, I think that's the point. There's a lot of lost historical sources. We could learn more about them if they weren't lost.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Did anyone else read ' the Grat Library of Alexandria' in the Borat voice?

 

[Kyriakos]

Did anyone else read ' the Grat Library of Alexandria' in the Borat voice?

We could use the cultural learnings of Ptolemaic Egypt for make benefit glorious culture of the west

*

As for the value of what was lost... Even the On Nature by Heraklitos would alone be worth saving, according to some sources (eg Socrates and his Delian swimmer comment on that).

Furthermore virtually all other works by Apollonios of Perga, apart from the 7-volume "Conics", which was a basis for the work of Newton and Kepler. Fermat also tried to re-create a lost work by Apollonios ("De locis planis" in latin).

I am sure that a huge amount of knowledge and art was lost with the Great Library, and the similar one at Pergamon as well.

 

[James Stuart]

No-one knows, but it was almost certainly not destroyed in one fell swoop like this - rather, it was gradually lost bit by bit over time as the city suffered various invasions and other disasters.

I thought the fact that part of it was destroyed when Julius Caesar took the city was not disputed. The story about the Moslems burning the library to heat Alexandria's baths, on the other hand, is completely apocryphal. Or are even those formerly accepted ideas disputed since I last checked?

 

[Agent327]

I thought the fact that part of it was destroyed when Julius Caesar took the city was not disputed.

That doesn't really invalidate anything Plotinus said.

 

[James Stuart]

That doesn't really invalidate anything Plotinus said.

I don't recall attempting to invalidate anything that he said.