The Universe 08

Sustaining the legacy of wisdom

Today, Alexandria shows few traces of its ancient glory of the days when Eratosthenes walked its broad avenues. Over the centuries, waves of conquerors converted its palaces and temples into castles and churches, then into minarets and mosques. The city was chosen to be the capital of his empire by Alexander the Great on a winter’s afternoon in 331 B.C. A century later, it had become the greatest city of the world. Each successive civilization has left its mark.

But what now remains of the marvel city of Alexander’s dream? Alexandria is still a thriving marketplace, still a crossroads for the peoples of the Near East. But once, it was radiant with self-confidence; certain of its power. Can you recapture a vanished epoch from a few broken statues and scraps of ancient manuscripts?

In Alexandria, there was an immense library and an associated research institute. And in them worked the finest minds in the ancient world. Of that legendary library, all that survives is this dank and forgotten cellar. It’s in the library annex, the Serapeum, which was once a temple but was later reconsecrated to knowledge. These few moldering shelves, probably once in a basement storage room, are its only physical remains. But this place was once the brain and glory of the greatest city on the planet Earth.

If I could travel back into time, this is the place I would visit. The Library of Alexandria at its height, 2,000 years ago. Here, in an important sense, began the intellectual adventure which has led us into space. All the knowledge in the ancient world was once within these marble walls. In the great hall, there may have been a mural of Alexander with the crook and flail and ceremonial headdress of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. This library was a citadel of human consciousness; a beacon on our journey to the stars.

It was the first true research institute in the history of the world. And what did they study? They studied everything. The entire cosmos. “Cosmos” is a Greek word for the order of the universe. In a way, it’s the opposite of chaos. It implies a deep interconnectedness of all things: the intricate and subtle way that the universe is put together. Genius flourished here. In addition to Eratosthenes, there was the astronomer Hipparchus who mapped the constellations and established the brightness of the stars. And there was Euclid who brilliantly systematized geometry, who told his king—who was struggling with some difficult problem in mathematics—that there was no royal road to geometry. There was Dionysius of Thrace, the man who defined the parts of speech—nouns, verbs, and so on—who did for language, in a way, what Euclid did for geometry. There was Herophilos, a physiologist who identified the brain, rather than the heart, as the seat of intelligence. There was Archimedes, the greatest mechanical genius until the time of Leonardo da Vinci. And there was the astronomer Ptolemy, who compiled much of what today is the pseudoscience of astrology. His Earth-centered universe held sway for 1,500 years, showing that intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong. And among these great men there was also a great woman. Her name was Hypatia. She was a mathematician and an astronomer, the last light of the library whose martyrdom is bound up with the destruction of this place seven centuries after it was founded.

Look at this place! The Greek kings of Egypt who succeeded Alexander regarded advances in science, literature and medicine as among the treasures of the empire. For centuries, they generously supported research and scholarship. An enlightenment shared by few heads of state, then or now. Off this great hall were ten large research laboratories. There were fountains and colonnades, botanical gardens, and even a zoo with animals from India and sub-Saharan Africa. There were dissecting rooms and an astronomical observatory.

But the treasure of the library—consecrated to the god Serapis, built in the city of Alexander—was its collection of books. The organizers of the library combed all the cultures and languages of the world for books. They sent agents abroad to buy up libraries. Commercial ships docking in Alexandria harbor were searched by the police—not for contraband, but for books. The scrolls were borrowed, copied, and returned to their owners. Until studied, these scrolls were collected in great stacks called “books from the ships.” Accurate numbers are difficult to come by, but it seems that the library contained at its peak nearly one million scrolls.

The papyrus reed grows in Egypt. It’s the origin of our word for “paper.” And each of those million volumes which once existed in this library were handwritten on papyrus manuscript scrolls. What happened to all those books? Well, the classical civilization that created them disintegrated. The library itself was destroyed. Only a small fraction of the works survived. And as for the rest, we’re left only with pathetic scattered fragments. But how tantalizing those remaining bits and pieces are!

For example, we know that there once existed here a book by the astronomer Aristarchus of Samos, who apparently argued that the Earth was one of the planets that, like the other planets, it orbits the sun, and that the stars are enormously far away. All absolutely correct. But we had to wait nearly 2,000 years for these facts to be rediscovered.

The astronomy stacks of the Alexandria Library. Hipparchus. Ptolomeus. Here we are. Aristarchus. This is the book. How I’d love to be able to read this book! To know how Aristarchus figured it out. But it’s gone. Utterly and forever. If we multiply our sense of loss for this work of Aristarchus by 100,000, we begin to appreciate the grandeur of the achievement of classical civilization, and the tragedy of its destruction.

We have far surpassed the science known to the ancient world, but there are irreparable gaps in our historical knowledge. Imagine what mysteries of the past could be solved with a borrower’s card to this library. For example, we know of a three-volume history of the world now lost, written by a Babylonian priest named Berossus. Volume I dealt with the interval from the creation of the world to the Great Flood. A period that he took to be 432,000 years, or about a hundred times longer than the Old Testament chronology. What wonders were in the books of Berossus!

But why have I brought you across 2,000 years to the Library of Alexandria? Because this was when and where we humans first collected seriously and systematically the knowledge of the world. This is the Earth as Eratosthenes knew it. A tiny, spherical world, afloat in an immensity of space and time. We were, at long last, beginning to find our true bearings in the cosmos. The scientists of antiquity took the first and most important steps in that direction before their civilization fell apart. But after the Dark Ages, it was by and large the rediscovery of the works of these scholars done here that made the Renaissance possible, and thereby powerfully influenced our own culture. When, in the 15th century, Europe was at last ready to awaken from its long sleep, it picked up some of the tools, the books, and the concepts laid down here more than a thousand years before.

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