There is no podcast this week, it was just terrible and I'm not willing to publish it...

Introduction

Hello! Happy Friday… (kinda). Today’s theme is history and I’ll be talking about the Library of Alexandria and knowledge generally. I have this saying: “We have the Library of Alexandria at our fingertips.” - which I usually say when people are ignorant or just not willing to Google something - so I think this topic is apt.

If anyone is genuinely knowledgeable on this topic please send me an email - I’d love to have a chat.

History

Having done extensive digging and research, I’ve learnt that the factual history of this library is extremely hard to pinpoint. I’m going to do my best:

Founding of the Library

We know that the library was founded during the reign of Ptolemy I Soter, King of Ptolemaic Kingdom c. 305 – January 282 BC. Well, that was in somebody’s letter from which a lot of facts have been disproven. So maybe it wasn’t founded then? It was around that period though, anyway, probably..

Gathering of Books

I’ve read a lot of sources and watched some documentaries saying that there was this huge effort to gather books/scrolls from around the world and bring them to the library. Some sources even say that ships that docked in Alexandria would have their scrolls and knowledge copied. Is all this true? I don’t know.

I’m not joking finding anything factual about this is hard.

Disasters

There were so many natural disasters during the time that is said the Library of Alexandria existed - floods and earthquakes and fires. However I personally hold the belief that there was no “one big event” that caused the loss of the knowledge at the library, but a simple gradual decline which was not helped by all of these disasters.

Loss of knowledge

It is unlikely that we genuinely lost as much knowledge as the myth of the library would portray. We may have lost very specific personal accounts of philosophers and scientists of the time but anything significant would have been copied and spread to other libraries across the world.

I think there was a greater loss: the symbolism of the library as a place in which people would go to share ideas with each other - to bounce ideas and work with other philosophers and scientists of the era. There was clearly funding, initially, that allowed for this generation and archiving of knowledge which - in my previously uneducated opinion - is a very modern concept. The loss caused by the decline of the library in my opinion is the loss of shared knowledge and the generation of new ideas - not formal knowledge that was stored in books.

I don’t know what to title this section

That’s all I really wanted to write about the library. It’s fascinating but it’s - sort of - irrelevant unless we start to talk about knowledge generally, and the spread of information.

Modern age

You are reading this blog on a device that is quite frankly an absolute marvel of human creation and combined research that led to the point that this information is getting into your brain. Take a second to genuinely think about everything it has taken to get to this point.

Done? I hope you’re okay. We really are “standing on the shoulders of giants”. I have no idea how silicon processors work. I have a vague idea about the internet but honestly.. not really. I’ll get to all of this at some point during this series. But the important thing is that I can learn about all of this, and share it with you in a way that might have only been facilitated by places like the Library of Alexandria.

Misinformation

I’m not diving into this topic. I was going to, but I don’t have it in me.. It’s dangerous, it always has been. Be careful what you read, challenge everything that you do read, etc etc. (Including this blog!!!)

Conclusion

I’m sorry this post doesn’t talk a lot about the lost sciences of the Alexandria. What I did learn is we probably didn’t lose much knowledge as I couldn’t find any credible source that claims we did. (Please, please email me if I missed one.)

Hopefully my commentary is interesting.