Or: HOW IGNORANCE & RELIGOUS BIGOTRY SET BACK THE CLOCK OF HUMAN PROGRESS BY MANY HUNDREDS OF YEARS
By GRET RACINE
Once upon a time -- no, this isn't a fairytale, although I suppose it may sound like one on occasion -- there lived a man named Herodotus. He was Greek and lived at that golden time of Greek history when so many other great men lived -- Pythagorus the mathematician, Aristotle the philosopher, Eratosthenes the astronomer, Socrates, Euclid, ?schylus, Aristophanes, Ptolemy, Euripides -- the list's as long as my arm and I could go on all day, except I won't, of course.
Herodotus, however, was an historian. He travelled the world as it was recognised in his day writing about the people he saw, their cultures, their beliefs, their customs, a kind of anthropologist of his time. And all this information eventually found its way into a series of books simply entitled "The Histories."
As Herodotus travelled around, he saw many great and truly awesome constructions which drove him, eventually, to call them ?wonders of the world'. In his eyes, such famous creations of the mind and hands of humanity were so completely breathtaking in their splendour that no other epithet would suffice.
He had to trim his list several times because he saw so many wonderful constructions during his travels, but he eventually got it down to seven. And just so I can't be accused of not remembering Herodotus' Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, here they are: the great pyramid of Pharaoh Kheops at Giza in Egypt, the hanging gardens of King Nebukhadnezzar at Babylon, the great golden statue of Zeus at Olympia, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the mausoleum of King Mausollos at Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, the giant colossus at Rhodes, also in Asia Minor, dedicated to the sun, and finally the very famous lighthouse, or Pharos, at Alexandria in Egypt.
Today, only the great pyramid has stood the test of time and indeed, an Arab proverb even says this: "Man fears Time, but Time fears the Pyramids," which, in the case of the seven wonders has become only too true. Now, much as I agree with Herodotus' final choices, I honestly believe there is one more wonder which should have been added to the list -- eight wonders instead of seven. I suppose most of us could add at least one other, or even several, except we'd be falling into the same quagmire as Herodotus himself did when he first began compiling his list. Too many would be just too top-heavy, even to the point of diminishing the awe in which these great constructions were held.
So, you may ask, what's my choice for the eighth wonder of the ancient world? It's not too hard to guess, I suppose, given by background, and it's also in the same city as the lighthouse. It's the Great Library of Alexandria. When Alexander the Great died at the tragically early age of 33 in 323 BCE, his infant son was only days old, so the enormous empire he had carved out was divided equally between four of his most trusted generals. Ptolemy Soter inherited the quarter containing Egypt.
Fortunately for history, Ptolemy was a classically educated and highly literate scholar on many subjects as well as being a soldier, and he saw a need for everyone to have access to what he had received. So he devised an incredible plan, and that was to build the greatest repository of manuscripts the world had ever seen, a glorious temple to scholarship and learning in the very city his master lay buried, a memorial to Alexander and a monument to knowledge the world over. So in the dying years of the fourth century before the common era, the project was commenced.
The library was the centre of this great undertaking, but in reality, it was much more. A research institute adjoined the library, and lecture halls were built to accommodate the growing number of students who arrived to hear all the world's greatest minds expound on their theories and gadgets. A huge scriptorium and bookstore for sale of extra books adjoined the library's other side as well.
Some of the greatest scholars of the day came to work and lecture at the Library. Many were brought to Alexandria specifically by Ptolemy himself, others came as the fame and glory of the place spread from one end of the known world to the other. Demetrios of Phaleron was the first chief librarian, his task being to organise the library and begin to collect the books.
At the height of the library's fame, there were upwards of a million books there. Not books as we know them, of course, but scrolls, written on the papyrus paper for which Egypt was famous. The library even boasted its own squad of customs' officials, who searched every incoming boat for rare books, had them copied and then returned to their owners with thanks. Demetrios alone secured nearly a quarter of a million books for the library.
The library's nearly ten centuries of domination over the scholarly world was roughly divided into five phases. The first two centuries were given over to the many great scholars who came to teach or carry out research there, living on generous pensions from the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt who succeeded Ptolemy Soter. The second phase, characterised by a radical shift from Aristotelian empirical research to the greater idealism of Plato, lasted until almost the beginning of the common era.
Religion and metaphysics gradually grew stronger as time passed across the divide, dominated by the Jewish philosopher, Philo Jud?us, the rise of Christian thinking not far behind. Religious philosophy slowly strengthened even more over the next phase, until about 400 CE, wherein a whole plethora of religious thought struggled for domination in Alexandria: Christianity, of course, the Hellenistic Judaism of Philo Jud?us, the paganism of Rome, Gnosticism, the Roman version of Persian Mithraism and the Hellenistic Neoplatonism of Greece.
Of the latter, one of the greatest exponents was Hypatia, last great chief librarian. One morning when she was on her way to work in the library, a mob, mostly Christians, led by the Bishop of Alexandria no less, got out of control, Christianity being completely opposed to Neoplatonism. The one regarded the Bible as containing everything one ever needed to know about life, the other espoused freedom of choice, of learning and scholarship. Hypatia, as a practitioner of the latter, found herself surrounded by the angry mob and was assassinated forthwith.
How were the books stored? Scrolls are best stored lying down, especially when there are a great many of them. Over ten enormous halls, in compartments signifying either subject or author, every scroll was clearly marked with the writer's name and the subject under review. The great task of arranging all these scrolls in such meticulous order had fallen to Callimachus of Cyrene, whose life parallelled the first seventy years of the library. He established the first comprehensive library catalogue, called the "pinakes." Nothing remains of it today, but what a boon it would be for today's libraries if it had.
Who taught or studied at the library? Demetrios himself was an Homeric scholar, and produced the first critical editions of both the Iliad and the Odyssey in the format we know them today. Zenodotus, who succeeded Demetrios as the chief librarian, was a brilliant Greek grammarian, literary critic, poet and editor. He updated Demetrios' work on Homer. Eratosthenes of Cyrene, a student of Callimachus who eventually also became chief librarian, was an accomplished mathematician, geographer, astronomer, philologist, philosopher, historian and poet.
He founded both the sciences of astronomy and geography, and was known as the most learned person of his day after Plato. Small wonder with such scholarship! He worked out a calendar with a leap year long before Julius C?sar and Sesosthenes, calculated the tilt of the earth's axis -- yes, in those days they knew the earth was round -- accurately measured the circumference of the earth and created a remarkably accurate map of the then-known world. And where did it all go? The final phase of the library's existence, after Hypatia's assassination and up to the time of the Arab conquest in 642 CE, was a time of slow decline where once knowledge and learning had dominated. The rise of Christianity across the world was principly to blame, the tenets of Neoplatonism and indeed all the other myriad philosophies that had flourished during the prime of the great institution, stamped out by the new religion's utter dismissal of any knowledge which did not adhere to their way of thinking.
A sad mistake. After all, when read carefully, the Bible espouses a flat earth, for instance, which was the current thinking during the time it was written. Had the Christians succeeded in their killing of all knowledge save their own, that's what we'd be believing today! But they didn't. Many of the students and teachers still remaining at the library saw the end coming and fled with as many books as they could. The rest, alas, were burnt beyond recognition in the great fire that destroyed the library in 642 when the Muslim Arabs overran Alexandria.
But not all was lost. If the Arabs were great warriors in the name of their new religion, then they were also great scholars, intellectual and sophisticated. Many of the scrolls came into Arab hands over the following decades known in the west as the dark ages. And when light once again began to filter into Europe during the reformation, western scholars, hungry for information, found these translations, soaking up the wonders they contained. Again, many swapped languages and were translated into Latin, English, other vernacular tongues of the region. Knowledge slowly returned and was built upon. Giant minds surfaced again?Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Bacon, Shakespeare, Harvey, Galileo, Newton, to name only a few?not everything had been destroyed.
And yet, it's so easy to imagine that, had not this wonderful storehouse of knowledge been wiped out by such ignorance as existed then, we may have had automobiles shortly after the commencement of the first millennium, for instance, planes and jet fighters a thousand years ago, and Galileo and Newton may have been the first men to walk on the moon. Which would put us in this generation perhaps on the very edge of exploring our own galaxy, reaching out to others, colonising new worlds! All this and much, much more!
I do not blame Herodotus for failing to include the Great Library of Alexandria on his list of ancient wonders of the world. Those he chose were indeed wonderful enough, magnificent tributes to the ingenuity of the human mind. It was what they stood for that really mattered. Only the great pyramid remains to remind us of what went before. But tombs and monuments to gods no longer worshipped, even beauty such as King Nebukhadnezzar's gardens, do nothing more than to awe.
The Great Library, although destroyed, was quite different, however. Yes, it no doubt awed those who saw it, but it was what it stood for that was far more important than any edifice of brick and stone, marble and gold could ever be. It held our heritage, our inheritance of a world that should have been. We had to re-discover so much that was lost that we are probably many centuries, even millennia, from where we should be in our development.
It was a wonderful achievement for its time and a tragic loss for our future -- the Great Library of Alexandria, the eighth wonder of the ancient world. (Ken ye he ratzon) I rest my case.
