Science Friday: The Great Library
by DarkSyde
Fri Aug 04, 2006 at 04:23:41 AM PDT
The Roman Empire is crumbling, the fragments of the classical world regrouping in Egypt when Thasos, son of an ill-fated scholar, meets Hypatia of Alexandria. Astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher at a time when women were shunned from learning, Hypatia is a daring visionary in a world about to change forever.
We take science for granted these days, we trust that knowledge hard won will not be lost. But it wasn't always so. There was a time when books were extremely expensive, no cheap form of large scale mass copying existed, few people could even read. And in those days, libraries contained manuscripts and work that was unavailable anywhere else. Once, millennia ago there were many such repositories.
The Greeks spread the seed of early science far and wide, following in the wake of blood and flesh carved through Eurasia by Alexander the Great. But as Greece was replaced by Rome, and Rome was brought down slowly and painfully by corruption and religious superstition, there came to be a time when only one library was left. It was the Great Library, in a Hellenistic city called Alexandria, in ancient Egypt.
The Great Library of Alexandria was founded in the 3rd century, BC, and stood for centuries. It was much more than an archive, it was a laboratory, a museum, a university, and research institution, in which some of the most advanced early science was stored, carried out, or refined.
The Great Library of Alexandria in reconstruction, as it may have once appeared. Illustration courtesy University of Texas.
One of the first librarians was Eratosthenes, a gifted geographer and mathematician who correctly computed the size and shape of the earth. He went on to propose a planetary grid of reference lines to aid navigation; longitude and latitude. Here was where Euclid derived the principles of modern geometry. The library may have contained further analysis on the work of Democritus, who proposed the atom, that the Milky Way was composed of distant stars, and that around these stars might be other, very different worlds:
"In some worlds there is no Sun and Moon, in others they are larger than in our world, and in others more numerous. In some parts there are more worlds, in others fewer ... There are some worlds devoid of living creatures or plants or any moisture."--Democritus
Later Alexandrian thinkers were likely busy approximating the volume of cones using thin slices, and studying the relationship between the volume of a sphere and the area of a circle. These individuals were standing on the doorstep of Calculus, physics, chemistry, engineering, and modern astronomy. Still others followed in the footstep of Hippocrates, wondering if disease was caused by tiny animals, or if afflictions would one day be understood and treated.
Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things -- Hippocrates
The last Librarian of Alexandria was Hypatia. She was by all accounts, a genius of mathematics and physics, one of the few widely admired female natural philosophers:
There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. ... Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.
Hypatia lectures in one of the many halls (Enlarge). Reconstruction of the library of Alexandria interior created by Stefan Viljoen using Moray and PovRay software, inspired by a reconstruction in Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Hypatia added by Karen Wehrstein, from a contemporary portrait painted on wood exclusively for this post and your enjoyment. Artist's Tip Jar
All these people and discoveries, and many more, are mentioned in passing as items which may have existed at the Great Library. Sadly, we will never know for sure. Of the library itself, only a few words and references have survived into our modern era: In 414 AD, so the story goes, a faction of fundamentalist Christians, led by a shadowy character named Peter, ostensibly endorsed by Cyril, Pope of Alexandria, dragged Hypatia through the streets by her hair, beat her to a pulp inside their Church, and then scraped the living flesh off her bones with broken tiles and abalone shells. Her remains were cremated; there is no grave. Cryril was made a Saint, a status he enjoys to this day.
The Great Library was ransacked and set afire shortly after Hypatia's murder. What little remained was finally destroyed by invading Muslims in 646 AD; the new conquerers burned the library's store of books to heat bathwater. Europe and the Mediterranean plunged headlong into the Dark Ages. The reputation of the Great Library fell into relative obscurity, some scholars even relegated it to the status of a myth, or opined that it was hyped to be larger than life.
In 2004, a team of Polish and Egyption archeologists found the remains of what is believed to be the Great Library. It is, if anything, larger than legend. Among the impressive ruins are thirteen sweeping lecture halls with raised podiums, estimated to be able to accomodate over 5,000 students. The last great bastion of early scientific thought it now seems was indeed a reality, the flicker of knowledge it preserved once burned brightly in the ancient city of Alexandria.
One has to wonder just where the human race would be today, if that flame had not been snuffed out. Would our planet now be a poisoned nuclear wasteland in which gangs of semi-feral children chase rats in the shadows of dilapidated glass and metal towers on the outskirts of Bartertown? Or would disease be a factum of history stored in the memory of immortal human/AI hybrids plying a sea of stars, our first interstellar ships unloading genetically engineered people onto the distant shores of new worlds? For better or for worse, and in part because of the destruction of places like the Great Library of Alexandria, the end of that story lays in our future, not in our past.
- ::