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Who Destroyed the Library of Alexandria?

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A Ship Of Theseus
Discussing the destruction of the Library of Alexandria is a bit like debating the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. Just as one must wonder if a ship’s identity remains intact after all of its boards, timbers and mechanisms have been exchanged with new material, the same identity question must be asked of a library that has its masonry and books destroyed and replaced. How about geographical relocation; does that change the identity of a library collection? Similarly, if the Ship of Theseus is sunk, but its lifeboat survives, can the lifeboat inherit the name of the Ship of Theseus, even though the lifeboat had a different scale and purpose? So too must we consider the identity of portions of the Great Library that were housed outside of the main Library compound. How a person answers these questions greatly impacts the discussion over who destroyed the Library of Alexandria.

Depending on what constitutes this “Library of Alexandria,” arguments can be made that its destruction was brought about by numerous figures through the ages, including Julius Caesar, Emperor Aurelian, Emperor Diocletian, Emperor Theodosius I and Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria, as well as later Islamic figures such as al-Mustanṣir and Saladin. Due to complicated circumstances, many people in the Western cultures have an inaccurate impression that the famed ancient Library of Alexandria was destroyed while the region was controlled by Islamic empires. This misleading belief was unfortunately reinforced by propagandists of the 12th and 13th centuries who falsely attributed the destruction of the Library to ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ (who occupied Alexandria in 642) in an effort to manufacture a defense for the Fatimid and Ayyubid Dynasty practice of selling books as a fundraising method to fill the treasury in the 11th and 12th centuries. People may also confuse the destruction of the Library of Alexandria with the collapse of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, which fell sometime between the 12th and 15th centuries. Whatever the case, this notion that Islamic forces and figures were responsible for the destruction of the Library of Alexandria is extremely misleading. To find those who hold the most blame for the destruction of the original Great Library of Alexandria, one must go back to the era of the ancient Romans.

The Great Library
The Great Library project, part of a larger Alexandrian Mouseion (shrine/seat of the Muses) research institute, was initiated when King Ptolemy I of Egypt (r. 323–285 BCE)—formerly a general of Alexander the Great—tasked his scholarly advisor, Demetrius of Phaleron, to oversee the founding of the Library and Mouseion around 295 BCE. It was built in the palatial Bruchion quarter of Alexandria. Ptolemy II (r.285–246 BCE) also embraced the project, and it was during his reign that Jewish scripture was acquired and translated for the Library of Alexandria. By the reign of Ptolemy III (r. 246-221 BCE), the Great Library’s collection of books grew to such an extent that the king designated Alexandria’s Serapeum temple to serve as a sister or daughter library to the original facility. Saint Epiphanius (c. 315-403 CE) described these events, writing, “And so the Scriptures, when they had been transferred to the Greek language, were placed in the first library, which was built in the Bruchion, as I have already said. And there arose in addition to this library a second up in the Serapeum, called its daughter.” (Epiphanius, On Weights and Measures, 11.53c). Over the centuries, these library facilities accumulated humongous collections. Estimates varied greatly about how many books the Library of Alexandria possessed, with claims ranging between 40,000 and 700,000 texts at the height of the Mouseion.



Julius Caesar
A key figure in the destruction of the Library of Alexandria was the Roman dictator, Julius Caesar (c. 100-44 BCE). His Civil War rival, Pompey, after being decisively defeated by Caesar at the Battle of Pharsalus in August of 48 BCE, decided to flee to Ptolemaic Egypt, where a number of his former associates were employed. Instead of finding shelter or an alliance, Pompey met a hostile reception and was ultimately killed in September by partisans of King Ptolemy XIII of Egypt. Caesar, who had been in pursuit of Pompey, reached Alexandria in October and learned of the murder of his rival. Unfavorable winds restricted Caesar’s movements around Alexandria, so he decided to winter his army in the city. While there, Caesar injected himself into the succession crisis that had developed in Egypt after the death of the former king, Ptolemy XII Auletes (r. 80-51 BCE). Succession, as reportedly directed in the late king’s will, was meant to fall to the eldest living son and the eldest daughter, namely Ptolemy XIII and Cleopatra, who were intended to enter an incestuous marriage that was typical to the Ptolemaic Dynasty. Their co-rule, however, broke down by late in the year 50 BCE, and Cleopatra had been forced to flee Alexandria. While in exile, Cleopatra was able to raise an army and she had begun an active war against her brother’s forces by the time Pompey and Caesar arrived in Egypt.

Julius Caesar, positioning himself as an arbitrator in the succession crisis, went on to seize the palace quarter of Alexandria, placed Ptolemy XIII under house arrest, and invited Cleopatra to join them in the city. Although King Ptolemy and Queen Cleopatra were under Caesar’s control, war soon broke out between Ptolemy’s partisans and the Romans. Besieged and threatened by a general named Achillas, Julius Caesar quickly acted to secure the harbor regions of the city and entrenched his forces for urban warfare. As part of these opening moves, Caesar sent troops to occupy the Lighthouse of Alexandria and he also set fire to the Egyptian fleet in the Alexandrian harbor. Caesar reported this in his war commentaries, namely The Civil War, in which he stated: “But Caesar carried the day: he burnt all these ships, together with the remainder which were in the dockyards, because he was unable to defend such a wide area with his small force, and hastily landed soldiers on Pharus” (Julius Caesar, The Civil War, Book III, chapter 111). The fire from the ships and the dockyards reportedly spread into Alexandria and damaged the city. One of the victims of the flames was the main facility of the Library of Alexandria. On this connection, the scholar Plutarch (c. 50-120) wrote, “in order to save his fleet from being cut off he had to repel the danger with fire, which then spread from the docks and destroyed the great library” (Parallel Lives, Caesar, chapter 49). Unfortunately for the city, the property damage was just beginning.

Even if portions of the main Great Library facility survived the fires, there was more destruction left to come in the war between the Romans and the Egyptians. The Alexandrian War continuation—attributed to Aulus Hirtius (c. 90 BCE—43 CE)—which expanded on Caesar’s commentaries, reported, “[F]rom the buildings, too, battering-rams were directed through apertures in the walls to pound the neighboring buildings, and his defenses were pushed forward to incorporate any ground gained by collapse or capture” (The Alexandrian War, chapter 1). Even the Egyptians did not spare the city’s structures while they battled the Romans. Notably, after Arsinoe—a sister of Ptolemy and Cleopatra—seized control of the Egyptian army and elevated her mentor, Ganymedes, to lead the forces, they reportedly began dismantling or salvaging buildings in Alexandria to serve their war purposes. On one such action of the Egyptian forces, The Alexandrian War text stated, “There were no oars: so they took the roofs off colonnades, gymnasia, and public buildings, and the rafters became oars” (The Alexandrian War, attributed to Aulus Hirtius, chapter 13). This dismantling and destruction of structures by both sides of the war, in addition to the earlier fire set by Caesar, would have greatly imperiled the main facility of the Great Library of Alexandria.

Urban warfare in Alexandria continued for months, stretching into early 47 BCE, when the arrival of Roman reinforcements pushed the balance of power into Julius Caesar’s favor. Ptolemy XIII, who was released out of Caesar’s custody in exchange for Arsinoe, mobilized his forces to confront the Romans in one last unsuccessful battle, but the king drowned, prompting the Egyptians to surrender. With the war over, the city of Alexandria could start to rebuild. Yet, although the Mouseion campus and other parts of the city could undergo restoration, the main facility and collection of the Great Library of Alexandria was irreparably harmed.

Several contemporaneous and near-contemporaneous writers mentioned the destruction that Julius Caesar’s fire wrought on the Library of Alexandria. The geographer, Strabo (c. 64 BCE- 21 CE), referred to the collection in the past tense, stating that any past scholar at the Mouseion would have been “well supplied if he had a library as large as Hipparchus says it was” (The Geography, 2.1.5). Strabo also lamented that the situation in Alexandria left him “being in want of copies⁠ with which to make a comparison” (The Geography, 17.1.5). The philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BCE–65 CE), less vague in his commentary, coldly wrote: “Forty thousand books were burned at Alexandria: some would have praised this library as a most noble memorial of royal wealth, like Titus Livius, who says that it was ‘a splendid result of the taste and attentive care of the kings’” (Dialogues, 9.9.5). And Plutarch (c. 50-120) has already been mentioned, who wrote of Caesar setting fire to the harbor, causing the destruction of the Library.

In the decades and centuries after Plutarch, writers began to more openly discuss the number of texts burned and the finality of the destruction at the Library of Alexandria. One such author was Aulus Gellius (flourished 2nd century CE), who wrote, “At a later time an enormous quantity of books, nearly seven hundred thousand volumes, was either acquired or written⁠ in Egypt under the kings known as Ptolemies; but these were all burned during the sack of the city in our first war with Alexandria,⁠ not intentionally or by anyone’s order, but accidentally by the auxiliary soldiers” (Attic Nights, 7.17.3). Similarly, the historian Cassius Dio (c. 163-235) wrote that “many battles occurred between the two forces both by day and by night, and many places were set on fire, with the result that the docks and the storehouses of grain among other buildings were burned, and also the library, whose volumes, it is said, were of the greatest number and excellence” (Roman History, 42.38.2). In the 4th century, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus similarly reported, “Ancient records are unanimous in their evidence that 700,000 volumes, brought together by the sleepless Ptolemies, went up in flames under the dictator Caesar, when the city was sacked in the Alexandrine war” (History, 22.16.12). In the minds of these ancients, the Great Library and the vast collection of books housed in the main facility had perished during Julius Caesar’s Alexandrian War. Yet, there was still a branch of Alexandria’s Great Library that survived the fire and destruction—the Serapeum book collection.

The Serapeum and Mouseion
Dating back to the reign of Ptolemy III in the 3rd century BCE, large amounts of books from the Great Library of Alexandria began to be collected in the city’s Serapeum temple compound. This Temple Library, with its Great Library overflow collection, survived the fires of Julius Caesar and served as the ancient city’s main library while the damaged Mouseion area was repaired. New libraries were built in connection to the Mouseion compound, such as the Caesareum temple and library founded by Cleopatra and the Claudian Institute or Wing built by Emperor Claudius (r. 41–54). Nevertheless, the Mouseion and its libraries never regained the glory known before the fire.



War, Christianization, And Destruction of the Temples
Alexandria and its public buildings faced great danger in the 3rd century, when the Roman Empire was struggling to fend off invasions from peoples along the Rhine and Danube rivers while also waging major wars against the Persians. In particular, chaos reigned during the time of Emperor Gallienus (r. 253- 268), whose father (and co-ruler) Emperor Valerian was captured by the Persians and died as a prisoner in 260. It was around that same year that massive breakouts of hostile forces occurred across the Rhine and Danube, placing the empire on the precipice of collapse. In that crisis, Emperor Gallienus empowered the leader of Rome’s Palmyra colony, Odaenathus, to be his Governor of all the East. Odaenathus successfully repelled the Persians, but Palmyra’s power over all the East later tempted Odaenathus’ widow, Zenobia, to declare independence from Rome in 269. In regard to Alexandria, Zenobia conquered Egypt in 269, but Emperor Aurelian (r. 270-275) quashed the independence of Palmyra in 271, making Zenobia and her realm subject to Rome once more. Zenobia and her supporters rose in rebellion again in 273, but were defeated a second time by Aurelian, who was much harsher in his punishment against the repeat offenders.

Alexandria was one of the cities garrisoned with Zenobia’s loyalists, and it was subjected to punitive devastation. According to the historian, Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 4th century), “the crown of all cities is Alexandria…during the reign of Aurelian, the quarrels of the citizens reached the proportions of a civil war. The walls were destroyed and it lost the greater part of the district called Bruchion, which for a long time had been the chosen abode of outstanding men” (History, 22.16.7-15). Given that Alexandria’s Mouseion and the original Great Library compound had been within the Bruchion palatial quarter, Aurelian’s destruction of the district would have devastated whatever remained of the vestiges of the Great Library that may have remained in the original Mouseion campus. This damage to Alexandria was further compounded around two decades later when a usurper named Achilleus led an Egyptian rebellion in 296 against Emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305). The rebellion, however, was crushed by Diocletian and his deputy ruler, Galerius, by 298, when Alexandria was reportedly once more ravaged by flames. This fiery detail was recorded by Bishop John of Nikiu (c. 7th century), who wrote, “Diocletian set fire to the city and burnt it completely, and he established his authority over it.” (Chronicle, 77.6). Consequently, it is safe to say that the Mouseion compound and the original Library facility would have been in a state of thorough disrepair or destruction after the reigns of Aurelian and Diocletian. Yet, once again, the Serapeum temple had been spared from the ravages of these imperial attacks, meaning that the temple’s own book collection and its selection of surviving texts from the Great Library of Alexandria would survive a little longer.

Over the course of the next century, Alexandria would play a reduced role in imperial history, but changes were occurring in Roman society that would threaten the Serapeum. Christianity, despite centuries of persecution, was spreading through the Roman Empire, and Emperor Constantine (r. 306–337) became the first Christian emperor. Intriguingly, the last emperor of the Constantinian Dynasty was Constantine’s nephew, Julian ‘the Apostate” (r. 361-363), who converted back to the traditional Greco-Roman religious beliefs and began discriminating against Christians in the empire. A noted academic, Julian was interested in preserving, duplicating, and teaching from ancient texts such as those housed in the Serapeum. Yet, Julian’s championing of Paganism and oppression of Christians backfired, for after Julian subsequently died in battle while fighting the Persians, the imperial throne immediately swung back to Christian emperors who became increasingly hostile to pagans and pagan literature, such as the texts housed in Alexandria’s Serapeum.

With the exception of Emperor Valentinian I (r. 364-375), who generally practiced toleration, the rest of the emperors who came after Julian started to implement varying levels of oppression against the worshippers of Rome’s traditional gods. Emperor Jovian (r.363-364) banned certain pagan practices. Emperor Valens (r. 364-378) curiously persecuted both pagans and non-Arian denominations of Christianity. Emperor Gratian (r. 367-383) and Emperor Valentinian II (r. 375-392), despite fierce opposition from Roman pagans (notably Senator Symmachus), were convinced by Bishop Ambrose of Milan to strip the Roman Senate building of its Altar of Victory due to its depiction of the goddess, Victoria. This precedent of emperors targeting imagery of pagan deities did not bode well for Alexandria’s Serapeum, which was a temple of the ancient god, Serapis, after all. But removing the Altar of Victory was nothing compared to actions taken during the reign of Emperor Theodosius (r. 379-395), whose rule saw true intolerance and persecution, some of which was ordered personally, while other incidents were spontaneously committed by riled mobs. Theodosius targeted both pagans and Christian sects unaligned with the edited Nicene Creed presented by the Council of Constantinople in 381, which was convened by the emperor.  This Theodosius would be the emperor who would ultimately bring about the destruction of the Serapeum temple in Alexandria.

In 391, Emperor Theodosius began releasing edicts that weaponized the government and the Christian church against the followers of the traditional gods of the ancient Roman Empire. Pagan sacrifices and temple access was oppressed, and the emperor gave Christian bishops discretion over demolishing ancient temples. In Alexandria, Bishop Theophilus—the leading Christian figure in the region—zealously began a destructive campaign across North Africa, defacing temples, shrines, and statues of Greco-Roman deities. Yet, the bishop’s war on traditional Roman holy places incited great unrest and violence, eventually culminating in fighting within the streets of Alexandria. In response to this violence, Emperor Theodosius gave Bishop Theophilus and local officials permission to destroy the Serapeum of Alexandria. Bishop Theophilus, equipped with imperial backing, was ruthlessly thorough in his eradication of the temple and all of the vestiges of paganism that was housed within it. Eunapius (c. 345-420), a contemporaneous pagan scholar, described the devastation wrought by Bishop Theophilus against the Serapeum and other structures with links to ancient gods:

“[T]he cult of the temples in Alexandria and at the shrine of Serapis was scattered to the winds, and not only the ceremonies of the cult but the buildings as well, and everything happened as in the myths of the poets when the Giants gained the upper hand. The temples at Canobus also suffered the same fate in the reign of Theodosius, when Theophilus presided over the abominable ones like a sort of Eurymedon [‘]Who ruled over the proud Giants[‘] [Homer, Odyssey, vii. 59], and Evagrius was prefect of the city, and Romanus in command of the legions in Egypt. For these men, girding themselves in their wrath against our sacred places as though against stones and stone-masons, made a raid on the temples, and though they could not allege even a rumour of war to justify them, they demolished the temple of Serapis and made war against the temple offerings, whereby they won a victory without meeting a foe or fighting a battle. In this fashion they fought so strenuously against the statues and votive offerings that they not only conquered but stole them as well, and their only military tactics were to ensure that the thief should escape detection. Only the floor of the temple of Serapis they did not take, simply because of the weight of the stones which were not easy to move from their place” (Eunapius, Vitae Sophistarum, Wilmer Cave Wright translation, pgs. 421-423).

During the defacing, looting, and razing to the ground of the Serapeum, the last remnants of the Great Library of Alexandria would have been destroyed, damaged, or lost to theft and relocation. The following year, in 392, Emperor Theodosius made the worship of the traditional gods of the Roman Empire a punishable offense. Both public and private forms of ancient worship were prohibited, leading to imperial proscriptions against divination, wine libations, burnt offerings, household shrines, and other symbols (such as suspended wreaths and ribbons) that were associated with the old gods. Violators of the ban on paganism could face criminal prosecution (in the most egregious cases) or civil asset forfeiture. In such an environment, anyone who may have gained possession of one of the Serapeum’s texts may have been disincentivized from maintaining or copying the texts of the old pagan authors, furthering the doom of the old volumes.



Islam, Crusades, And Book-Sale Fundraising
In the early 7th century, Islam was coming into being while the Roman Empire and Persia were squandering each other’s resources and manpower in their latest long war (lasting from 602-628). With perfect timing, Arab armies poured out of Arabia and wreaked havoc on the exhausted empires of Constantinople and Persia, resulting in the conquest of huge swaths of land. During the reign of the first caliph, Abū Bakr (r. 632-634), Arab armies expanded into the regions of Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Iraq, and these expansionist wars increased dramatically during the reign of the second caliph, Umar I (r. 634-644). In that time, the city of Alexandria was occupied by ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ in 642, and contemporaneous and near-contemporaneous accounts from that era made no mention of him interacting in any way with any Alexandrian libraries or books.

Several centuries later, around the era of the Crusades, the Fatimid Dynasty had collected its own Great Library at its capital of Cairo. Like the Library of Alexandria, the estimates of the Fatimid Library varied greatly, with differing claims asserting that its book ranged between hundreds of thousands and millions in number. Treasury troubles forced the Fatimid Caliph al-Mustanṣir (r. 1036-1094) to start selling off many thousands of books around 1070 to pay his expenses and debts. This practice was continued by the famed leader, Saladin (r. 1169/1171-1193), whose Ayyūbid Dynasty supplanted the Fatimids. After formally overthrowing the previous dynasty in 1171, Saladin exponentially increased the sale of books from the Fatimid Library. Writers such as al-Maqrīzī, Abū Shāmah, and Ibn Abī Ṭayy reported that Saladin, in effect, subjected the library to liquidation, with untold numbers of books being carted off by camel caravans to the residences of buyers in distant lands.

Refocusing on the ancient Mouseion of Alexandria, Saladin’s sale of the Fatimid Library evidently sparked enough outrage that Saladin’s supporters had to scramble to produce propaganda that would defend the book sales. In that context, Saladin-aligned writers—notably Ibn al-Qifṭī (c. 1172–1248)—began disseminating a fictitious myth that Caliph Umar and ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ had burned books from the Library of Alexandria after the conquest of the city in 642. The propaganda was effective, with many people believing the false tale for many centuries. Yet, modern scholars, after sober review of the ancient sources, have since then firmly returned to the consensus that the ancient Mouseion and Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed long before the Arab conquest of the city in the 7th century.

Who Destroyed the Library of Alexandria?
Romans hold the most responsibility for the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. Julius Caesar, through the fire and demolition of urban warfare, devastated the Library and its books during the winter of 48-47 BCE. Emperor Aurelian ravaged whatever had been rebuilt in the Mouseion campus of the city in 273, and Emperor Diocletian further burned Alexandria in 298. Finally, Emperor Theodosius and Bishop Theophilus destroyed the Great Library’s Serapeum sister facility in 391. Again, it is a Ship of Theseus thought experiment. Was Caesar most to blame for burning the Library’s original book storage facilities? Does Aurelian receive equal blame for destroying later libraries of the Mouseion, such as the Claudian Institute? And how does one compare Theodosius’ destruction of the Serapeum temple to the larger scale damage inflicted on Alexandria by Caesar and Aurelian? Whatever the case, the Romans destroyed the Library of Alexandria, with Julius Caesar inflicting a fatal wound, and Emperor Theodosius delivering the final deathblow.

Written by C. Keith Hansley

Picture Attribution: (The Library of Pergamus Given to Cleopatra, attributed to Francesco Allegrini (c. 17th century), [Public Domain] via the MET.jpg).

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