The Logic Off Topic list

GA Moore wrote:

>  > > Euclid's books were
>  > > famous for millenia but some were destroyed in the fire in the 
> library in
>  > > Alexandria.

Kool Musick wrote:
>  > Not to put too fine a point on it, this was a most heinous crime against
>  > humanity for which Christians and Muslims were jointly responsible. At 
> one
>  > of those burnings they were stoking the fires for over a week!! 
> Imagine!!!
>  > All those books and manuscripts lovingly gathered over the centuries just
>  > GONE in wanton acts of sheer savagery.

GA Moore wrote:
>Mr. Kool, would you care to explain that statement? I never heard that
>before.

I'll do my best!!

The first really big disaster that befell the Great Library seems to have 
been Julius Caesar. Unfortunately, the earliest descriptions we have of the 
Alexandrine War are simply toadying, were written by his family, and simply 
do not mention anything, good or bad, about his escapades in Alexandria. He 
does seem to have destroyed a good part of it, however, as a stratagem in 
the war. According to Livy 400,000 scrolls and books, all house in grain 
depots near the harbor became ashes when Caesar decided to torch Cleopatra 
and her brother's brother fleet. Plutarch, Gellius, Seneca and Livy all 
agree that Caesar burnt those stacks. There's a lot of justifiable 
finger-pointing but admittedly no hard evidence ... probably because he and 
his cronies had the good sense to destroy it. It seems that some Reading 
Rooms survived, but very many books perished. Much of this loss seems to 
have been made good by Anthony, who gave Cleopatra some 200,000 books and 
rolls from the library then based in Pergamum.

The next great disaster was at the hands of the Christians under the 
Emperor Theodosius. However, defenders of the Catholic Church say that this 
is a fiction perpetrated by Edward Gibbon who was certainly no lover of the 
Church and who lambasted it somewhat unmercifully in his history. Christian 
apologetics have argued that Gibbon not only wanted to attack Christians, 
but absolve the Arabs (who also engaged in book-burning) of all possible 
blame for anything. Unfortunately, a lot of other Western sources used 
Gibbon, knowingly or unknowingly, as their primary reference.

The flash-point seems to have been the attempt by Patriarch Cyril to expel 
the Jews. The prefect (can't remember his name) objected to the order and 
an army of monks promptly ran riot and laid the entire city to the sword. 
One of the things they did was kill Hypatia, one of the very few notable 
women mathematicians in history never mind in antiquity. The mob of monks 
happened to see her driving home alone and without her attendants (her 
father was himself a famous mathematician of the day and also an official 
of the city. By all accounts Hypatia was a great beauty as well as one of 
the better mathematicians of that era. She apparently had many suitors but 
rejected them all. To the mob she epitomized everything they hated about 
pagans and their heretical mathematics and science. She was dragged from 
her chariot and stripped. The monks then armed themselves with abalone 
shells and flayed her flesh from her bones. She was then burned and had her 
ashes spread in the Library. Patriarch Cyril was eventually made a saint 
for all of this.

The library was ransacked for its gold and silver ... and then torched so 
that later generations of Christians would never have to face being led 
astray from the one true path by the teachings in the ancient books. Not 
all the books were destroyed (enough were left for the Arabs to do much the 
same thing a while later), but one archaeologist who worked a dig there 
recently (I cannot remember his name) said that of the few things that were 
found, if they had remained in existence then the Industrial Revolution 
would certainly have occurred about 1500 years before it did. Amongst the 
documents lost in this particular escapade were, apparently, complete 
details on how to build a pyramid. Of the 123 plays that Sophocles was 
known to have written and that are now known to have been in the Library, 
only seven have survived. Luckily, one of those is Oedipus Rex. Emperor 
Theodosius wanted all non-Christian destroyed. Only the works of Aristotle 
survived because he was essential in that Christian scholars had decided 
that his syllogistic and other logical principles were a gift directly to 
them, via the pagans, in order that they could prove the existence of 
Christ and His plan for humanity.

Next, we get to the Arabs. This one's a bit confusing. Until Gibbon wrote, 
the generally accepted story was that when the Muslims captured Alexandria 
somewhere around 640, a Greek scholar who happened to be a friend of the 
conquering general, Amrou, sent a message to his friend asking if he could 
please receive the gift of the library so that he could carry on with his 
scholarship. Amrou felt unable to make the decision and consulted with 
Caliph Omar who gave the famous answer:

If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Koran then they are useless, 
and so do not need to be preserved; and if they disagree with the Koran 
then they are pernicious and should be destroyed.

Caliph Omar then instructed that the remaining books be used to stoke the 
fires of all the Alexandria baths because they were short of wood. The Arab 
historian Ibn al-Kifti said:

'the number of baths was well known, but I have forgotten it. 'They say 
that it took six months to burn all that mass of material.'

A Greek scholar called Eutychius estimated, however, that there were four 
thousand.

Obviously, some of the tales that have come down through the ages about the 
library and the various ways in which it and its contents were destroyed do 
not meet present day standards of accuracy or veracity. Particularly when 
you have good reason to throw scepticism on them all for some agenda of 
your own. Something, however, happened to all those books because there was 
definitely a library, and there are compendiums of what was in it. We do 
not have those books today, and there were rather a lot to bet rid of. 
Something happened. Personally, my money's on the sheer stupidity and 
short-sightedness of various idiots and bigots. But ... that's just me.

Kool Musick
Keep Musick Kool


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