By the seventh century Alexandria had become an anomaly, a rebellious Christian outpost on the coast of North Africa. The Brucheum and Jewish quarters were long abandoned, and the museum and the tomb of Alexander lay in ruins. Christian communities clustered around the Caesareum and Serapeum, both of which had now become churches, and only the Heptastadion and the area around the Pharos remained densely populated. In 616 the city fell briefly to the Persian emperor Khosrau II, only to be regained a decade later by the Romans. But by this date a new force was already heading her way and was soon to overtake her.
The emperors had taken little notice of the unification of the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula under the prophet Muhammad; the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria records an almost certainly apocryphal, but telling, story of how Emperor Heraclius failed to see the signs: “And in those days Heraclius saw a dream in which it was said to him: ‘Verily there shall come against you a circumcised nation, and they shall vanquish you and take possession of the land’ ” (Severus of Al-Ashmunein, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, part 2, chapter 14).
Perhaps not surprisingly, Heraclius thought this must be a reference to the Jews and so ordered that all the long-suffering Jews and Samaritans in his empire were to be rounded up and compulsorily baptized. He soon realized, however, that he had made a mistake: “But after a few days there appeared a man of the Arabs, from the southern districts, that is to say, from Mecca or its neighbourhood, whose name was Muhammad” (Severus of Al-Ashmunein, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, part 2, chapter 14).
Under the prophet Muhammad the Arab world was uniting in a way it had never done before, and if the Roman world was unaware of it, it was not unaware of the Roman world. Under Muhammad’s successors, the caliphs, this new nation was already vigorously expanding through a program of military conquests across the Near East. In 639 Omar I ordered his general, Amr ibn al-Asi (better known as simply Amr), west to conquer in the name of Islam. Damascus, Syria, and Jordan had already fallen, and Egypt would be next.
Amr conquered Egypt with just four thousand cavalry. The Byzantine viceroy Cyrus, who was also patriarch of Alexandria, was found hiding in the citadel of Babylon (a Roman fortress in Cairo) and rapidly offered his country’s capitulation. John of Nikiu tells us that Amr congratulated him on coming forward. Cyrus replied, “God has delivered this land into your hands: let there be no enmity from henceforth between you and Rome: heretofore there has been no persistent strife with you” (R. H. Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, 120.17-20).
Cyrus was putting a brave face on a rather unequal situation. Amr would certainly agree to peace, but it would be entirely on his terms. First a tribute in gold was to be paid, and then the Roman garrison in Alexandria was to be disbanded, although the troops were allowed to leave with their possessions and “treasure” intact. The Romans would promise no further military intervention in Egypt, and Amr would take 150 soldiers and 50 civilians as hostages to ensure they kept to the deal. The final part of the peace was more evenhanded and perhaps offered a last chance for peace in Alexandria. John of Nikiu summed up the deal succinctly: The Romans were to cease warring against the Muslims, and the Muslims were to stop seizing Christian churches and interfering in Christian religious practice.
Sadly, this was not a peace that would last. The caliph’s forces did not immediately take Alexandria, partly because the Arabs chose to avoid the place. In their eyes it was dangerous and corrupt, an ancient town of evil fortune, filled with philosophers and monks—and the notoriously truculent city mob. By the time Amr did arrive in the city in September 642 the garrison was gone and there was little resistance as his cavalry rode in through the Gate of the Sun. The city he found still impressed him with its ancient temples converted into churches and the still-dazzling marble of the colonnades on the main streets, and he seems to have treated its people with the respect he had promised. Those who wished to leave were allowed to, while those who wished to remain were permitted to continue worshipping in their churches unmolested, provided of course that they paid the appropriate tribute.
Now as master of all Egypt Amr could write to the caliph telling him he had seized a city of 4,000 palaces, 4,000 baths, 12,000 dealers in fresh oil, 12,000 gardeners, 40,000 Jews who paid tribute, and 400 theaters or places of amusement. The caliph seemed unimpressed, perhaps wary of the somewhat inflated figures from his general. He reportedly just nodded nonchalantly at the messenger and rewarded him with a loaf of bread, a bottle of olive oil, and a handful of dates.
Perhaps Caliph Omar was right to be cautious, for the people of Alexandria did not keep to their side of the bargain. The Muslim writer Al-Baladhuri in his Conquest of Alexandria (The Origins of the Islamic State, volume 1, pp. 346-49) recorded that the Alexandrians wrote to Emperor Constantine (the son of Heraclius) explaining how his subjects were humiliated by the Muslims and forced to pay a poll tax—effectively making them second-class citizens. They then casually added that the Muslim garrison was rather understrength and hence vulnerable.
Constantine, roused to righteous indignation, immediately took advantage of the situation and sent an expeditionary force to recapture the city for the empire: “Constantine sent one of his men, called Manuwil, with three hundred ships full of fighters. Manuwil entered Alexandria and killed all the guard that was in it, with the exception of a few who by the use of subtle means took to flight and escaped” (Al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State, volume 1, p. 346).
When Amr returned to this situation around 646 he was no longer in a mood to deal generously with the inhabitants, nor were they foolish enough to think he would. Ancient Alexandria was about to fight its final battle. Al-Baladhuri finishes the tale:
Amr made a heavy assault, set the ballistae, and destroyed the walls of the city. He pressed the fight so hard until he entered the city by assault, killed the fathers and carried away the children as captives. Some of its Greek inhabitants left to join the Greeks somewhere else; and Allah’s enemy, Manuwil, was killed. Amr and the Moslems destroyed the wall of Alexandria in pursuance of a vow that Amr had made to that effect, in case he reduced the city. . . . Amr ibn-al-Asi conquered Alexandria.
Al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State, volume 1, pp. 346-49
The city had become a minor irritant in the Muslims’ conquest of Egypt, and its repeated calls on the Byzantine Empire for military help created unwanted friction. The solution of the Muslim general charged with bringing the city back to heel was simple: He tore it down. Flour once again flowed in the sands around the island of Pharos, as the city’s famous granaries were demolished.
It is at this point, with Amr back in control of the city’s remains, that the final legend associated with the great library is set. The story comes from a much later source, Bar-Hebraeus’s History of the Dynasties, written in the thirteenth century, and is almost certainly fictional, but it does prove that the fame of the library and the need to explain its terrible loss was still felt centuries after it had vanished. Bar-Hebraeus tells the story that John the Grammarian, a Coptic priest present at the destruction of the city, was, due to his great learning, on good terms with Amr and eventually plucked up the courage to ask him about the fate of the library. “‘You have examined the whole city, and have set your seal on every kind of valuable: I make no claim for aught that is useful to you, but things useless to you may be of service to us.’ ‘What are you thinking of?’ said Amr. ‘The books of wisdom,’ said John, ‘which are in the imperial treasuries’ ” (Bar-Hebraeus, quoted in E. A. Parsons, The Alexandrian Library, p. 416).
He then patiently described how the Ptolemies had collected books on all subjects from the four corners of the world, regardless of expense, and then rather extraordinarily claimed that they still existed in the warehouses of the city which Amr had sealed following his victory. While the city was now Amr’s to do with as he pleased, would he not consider leaving intact this
rare collection, as it could be of no use to either him or his soldiers?
Amr, renowned for his own scholarship, declared himself amazed at this news but warned that it was not in his power to hand such a library over to John. However, he would write to the caliph and seek his advice on the matter. In time the caliph wrote back with bad news: “Touching the books you mention, 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” (Bar-Hebraeus, quoted in E. A. Parsons, The Alexandrian Library, p. 416).
So Amr, faithful to his master’s decision, ordered the books distributed among the bathhouses of the city, where they provided fuel for the boilers for six months. “Listen and wonder,” concluded Bar-Hebraeus.
The origin of this story is uncertain, and it occurs in none of the earlier chronicles. By the thirteenth century, however, not long after the disastrous failure of the Third Crusade against Saladin, it suited a Christian writer like Bar-Hebraeus and his audience to characterize the Muslim world as barbaric and backward. And even if the enemy was wrong, there was a ring of truth to the idea that religious bigotry had after a thousand years of enlightenment finally dragged Alexandria into oblivion. Ironically, however, it was Muslim scholars who were even then preserving and translating the few great works from Alexandria’s library shelves that had survived.
What the story does powerfully demonstrate is that any conqueror might consider the contents of a library as dangerous as the contents of an arsenal. Building that arsenal of ideas had been a driving force behind Ptolemy I’s creation of Alexandria, and the insecurity of conquerors and the intolerance of extremists had been its downfall. Alexandria had been a city of ideas where the greatest freedom was the freedom to think, but Roman emperors, Christian patriarchs, and Muslim caliphs had all, in attempting to control those thoughts, whittled away at the library, the city, and the idea that lay behind them. A thousand years after the walls of Alexandria fell, the traveler George Sandys reached her sad remains and wrote her epitaph:
Queene of Cities and Metropolis of Africa: who now hath nothing left but her ruines; and those ill witnesses of her perished beauties: declaring that Townes as well as men, have their ages and destinies.
George Sandys, The Relation of a
Journey Begun An. Dom. 1610, book 2
EPILOGUE
A Distant Shore
I picked up a bottle half buried in the wet sand, covered with barnacles, but stoppled tight, and half full of red ale, which still smacked of juniper,—all that remained I fancied from the wreck of a rowdy world,—that great salt sea on the one hand, and this little sea of ale on the other, preserving their separate characters. What if it could tell us its adventures over countless ocean waves! Man could not be man through such ordeals as it had passed. But as I poured it slowly out on to the sand, it seemed to me that man himself was like a half-emptied bottle of pale ale, which Time had drunk so far, yet stoppled tight for a while, and drifting about in the ocean of circumstances, but destined ere-long to mingle with the surrounding waves, or be spilled amid the sands of a distant shore.
Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod
As the monk Maximos Planudes lifted the copy of Ptolemy’s Geographia from the tomes piled around the book dealer’s stall in Constantinople, that day back in 1294, one piece of the wreckage of Alexandria began a new journey.
Planudes had turned the ancient words into maps, which were added to and improved on by the Byzantine court. One of these had itself found its way from the edges of Asia to a wealthy Florentine with the time and money to translate its Greek text back into the Latin that the scholars of Europe still understood. From Florence that map found its way to Rome, to the Apostolic Library of the pope, then the most powerful man on earth. And from there copies made their way across Europe, to the palaces and castles of the princes of Christendom.
One of those would reach the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, where in 1484 a young explorer named Christopher Columbus was, like Ptolemy before him, beginning to think the unthinkable. What if the world was indeed a sphere? What if he could sail west to Cathay? What if the book he held in his hands that day was correct? A book called the Geographia by Claudius Ptolemy. A book from the library at Alexandria.
CHRONOLOGY
APPENDIX
GENERAL PERIODS OF ALEXANDRIA
THE PTOLEMAIC LAGID DYNASTY, 305-30 BC
All dates are BC.
ROMAN EMPERORS
All dates are AD unless BC is stated.
Julio-Claudian Dynasty
Year of the Four Emperors
Flavian Dynasty
The Five Good Emperors
Severan Dynasty
Crisis of the Third Century (Emperors During the Height of the Crisis)
Gallic Empire, 260-274
Illyrian Emperors
Tetrarchy and Constantinian Dynasty
Britannic Empire, 286-297
Valentinian Dynasty
Theodosian Dynasty
Western Empire
BYZANTINE EMPERORS
All dates are AD.
EARLY ISLAMIC CALIPHS
All dates are AD.
(570-632) (The prophet Muhammad) 632-634 First caliph Abu Bakr 634-644 Second caliph Omar 644-656 Third caliph Uthman
LIBRARIANS OF ALEXANDRIA
All dates are BC and all are uncertain.
Uncertain librarians following the persecution of scholars by Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is a synthesis of many people’s work, so our first debt is to all those scholars who, for so many generations, have striven to recover ancient Alexandria from the ashes. Though only fragmentary today, the great corpus of knowledge gathered and nurtured in the libraries of Alexandria, and the scholarly titans who both studied and contributed to it, are the source of our inspiration in this book. We still find it hard to conceive of the breathtaking scope and originality of minds like those of Callimachus and Claudius Ptolemy.
It is now more than six centuries since scholars began to rediscover Alexandria’s unique heritage, and successive generations have labored to translate the originals and to take up the torch themselves in pushing forward the frontiers of learning. Our bibliography names those whose works we have relied upon, and we wish to thank all of them for providing us with the bread and butter of this work. On a rather narrower stage, several living scholars’ works have been especially helpful in orienting us with regards specifically to Alexandria. The writings of Alan Bowman on Egypt after the pharaohs are seminal, as is the work of Gunther Holbl on the Ptolemaic Empire. Theodore Vettros’s work on Alexandria itself, and in particular on Neoplatonism and early Christianity, opened our eyes to the crucial role Alexandria played in the formulation of theology in general, and Christianity in particular. We therefore acknowledge our debt to these scholars. We would also like to thank Dr. Christopher Kelly of Cambridge University for reading the manuscript and suggesting many changes that have not only greatly improved it but saved us from many an error. Away from the ivory tower, out there in the big wide world, the author Bill Bryson has recently shown the reading public that you don’t have to be an academic to write about the history of knowledge and ideas. His work has encouraged us to think as widely and deeply as possible in this book, pursuing the notion that we too could write A Short Classical History of Nearly Everything.
At the conception of this book we received generous enthusiasm and support from John Lloyd of Quite Interesting Limited, for which we are extremely grateful. Our agents Mark Lucas and Julian Alexander of the LAW agency in London and George Lucas at Inkwell Management in New York have provided unstinting support and keen editorial insights throughout, and we’d like also to thank Hilary Redmon and Wendy Wolf at Viking Penguin in New York for excellent editorial input throughout the project.
Finally, we want to thank our wives and families—for Howard, Val, Amie, Leila, and Maya; for Justin, Stephanie and Constance�
��for their patient support and tolerance as we waded our way through the huge amount of reading and writing this book has required. Last of all, we’d like to acknowledge each other, for getting through this considerable undertaking with ne’er a crossed word, all undertaken in a spirit of scholarly adventure which has been a great pleasure for us both!
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aelian. Varia Historia. Translated by D. O. Johnson. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997.
Al-Baladhuri. The Origins of the Islamic State. Translated by P. K. Hitti. New York: Columbia University Press, 1916.
Anonymous. Historia Augusta. Translated by D. Magie. London: Heinemann, 1921-32.
Apollonius of Rhodes. Jason and the Golden Fleece [The Argonautica]. Translated by R. L. Hunter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Appian. The Civil Wars. Translated by John Carter. London: Penguin, 1996.
———. Roman History. Translated by H. White. London: Bohn’s Classical Library, 1899.
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by H. Lawson-Tancred. London: Penguin, 1998.
———. Politics. Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932.
———. Politics and Economics. Edited by E. Walford. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002.
Arrian. Anabasis. Translated by E. I. Robson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929.
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