Introduction

Abstract

The most popular of all parables of book burning is the story of the burning of the library at Alexandria by the Caliph Omar in 642 AD. The basic story is familiar: after the fall of the city, the Caliph was approached by an unfrocked priest called John the Grammarian, who requested the unwanted books of the library. Omar is alleged to have replied: ‘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.’¹ Some versions of the story even say that the books were used as fuel in the fires of the city’s bathhouses for months. It is an arresting scene and a fascinating moment of clarity, with its implication that one great fire could remove the distraction and clutter of books. It is also almost certainly apocryphal, as the story is not mentioned by any contemporary sources, and appears to date from the thirteenth century. Even so, fires did take their toll on the Alexandrian library: it is thought that some part was lost during Caesar’s conquest in 48 BC; there were significant losses during the conquest of the city by the Emperor Aurelian in the late third century; the Serapeum or ‘Daughter’ library was burned during the suppression of pagan works by the Emperor Theodosius in 391 AD; and there may have been more damage during the Muslim conquest of 642 AD.² At different times each of these fires has been singled out to represent the definitive collapse of the library (Gibbon, for example, was infuriated by the ‘mischievous bigotry of the Christian’ Theodosius). While each clearly had an impact on the library, modern scholarship suggests that rather than a great conflagration, it more likely simply went into decline, and was lost through neglect rather than catastrophe.

When you have thrown the ancients into the fire, it will be time to denounce the moderns.

Lord Byron