Bleeding Fiction

The Library of Alexandria was discovered recently. That bears repeating: The Library of Alexandria was discovered recently. As in the Great Library. As in the most celebrated center of learning the world has ever seen.

Imagine it, a single light in a sea of dark ignorance, a school that drew bright students and brilliant teachers from across the known world, a library that held a copy of every book that then existed, standing proud two millenia before men could even send telegrams. The grounds that the archaeologists have found cover thirteen lecture halls that could hold some five thousand students. Imagine a young boy, no more than fifteen years old, leaving his father's manor in Roman Spain, the only home he's ever known. Imagine the three weeks of rough riding it took him to reach the shore and the two weeks more rocking on the water in a small oar-driven galleon. Imagine his lonliness, his fear, his discomfort, the world of suffering he endures so that, at the end of his journey, he can learn.

The Great Library of Alexandria is the school. Every school that has come since, every college and university, every institute of technology or member of the Ivy League, but dimly reflects its light. It was there that Euclid developed his geometry, there that Eratosthenes correctly calculated the circumference of the earth, there that Galen wrote a treatise on medicine that carried doctors through the Renaissance and there that Archimedes developed many of his mechanical principles and devices. The Library was home to books that were ancient by the time it was built twenty four hundred years ago. It is largely because of The Library that we have the Old Testament as it exists today.

Such a wonderful place, you may ask how it was lost to begin with. Not hard, really. The place was filled with paper and it burned. Possibly THREE times. The first in 48 B.C.E. when Julius Caesar came to take the city for Rome in his bid for power. The second in 490 C.E. by mobs of rioting Christians. The third in 640 C.E. when an Arab army seized the city.

Sophocles wrote more than a hundred plays, all of them stored for posterity on The Library's shelves; only seven survive. There are volumes that we know of only by their titles, great authors of whom we have only their names, tantalizing fragments of wisdom quoted sparsely in the pages of still-existing texts. Picture what we lost. Imagine the world if, of all Shakespeare's plays, only A Winter's Tale survived; if, of all of Michelangelo's works we only had the Battle of the Centaurs; if, of all of Beethoven's compositions we could only listen to sonata number twenty seven. Imagine an empty world and you'll have some idea of what died when The Library burned.

This find, to paraphrase Indiana Jones, is everything I got into archaeology for. This is important, it pulls at my heart. I'm breathless with just the thought of standing at one of the podiums in one of the lecture halls. I think I need to lay down.