It was an affront to Islam. Everything they needed was in the Koran.
Posted on 12/27/2019 5:42:49 PM PST by wildbill
I learned that steel is a non-ferrous metal!
I think they call stuff like that ‘OOPArts’ - ‘out of place artifacts’, q.v.
I’m sure I’ve proven that true often enough. LOL
It was an affront to Islam. Everything they needed was in the Koran.
I thought it was pretty well agreed that the destruction was devastating to the information of the past, to that point.
Thought Islam came along about about 600 years later.
Library burnt in 50 BC, and Islam’s inception about 600 AD.
I know. I worked in public libraries in the 1970s, and they were already discarding classics to make room for the latest best-selling potboiler.
But, we have the Internet, now - until they decide to censor it, and take all of the good old stuff off of Gutenberg, archive.org, etc. ;-)
The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed and it seems to have either survived or been rebuilt shortly thereafter; the geographer Strabo mentions having visited the Mouseion in around 20 BC and the...
Seems your thoughts on it may be right on target. I was unaware of this angle on it. Thanks for mentioning it.
I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But I know how intelligent people, concerned about the preservation of knowledge, tend to think. I don’t believe it was all ‘lost’.
Man beating drum. Message sent to warriors.
He said “Everything in the explicate universe was found within the implicate universe. Except Cheetos and Bud Light.”
Thanks for the follow-up.
https://ehistory.osu.edu/articles/burning-library-alexandria
...The final individual to get blamed for the destruction is the Moslem Caliph Omar. In 640 AD the Moslems took the city of Alexandria. Upon learning of “a great library containing all the knowledge of the world” the conquering general supposedly asked Caliph Omar for instructions. The Caliph has been quoted as saying of the Library’s holdings, “they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.” So, allegedly, all the texts were destroyed by using them as tinder for the bathhouses of the city. Even then it was said to have taken six months to burn all the documents. But these details, from the Caliph’s quote to the incredulous six months it supposedly took to burn all the books, weren’t written down until 300 years after the fact. These facts condemning Omar were written by Bishop Gregory Bar Hebræus, a Christian who spent a great deal of time writing about Moslem atrocities without much historical documentation.
So who did burn the Library of Alexandria? Unfortunately most of the writers from Plutarch (who apparently blamed Caesar) to Edward Gibbons (a staunch atheist or deist who liked very much to blame Christians and blamed Theophilus) to Bishop Gregory (who was particularly anti-Moslem, blamed Omar) all had an axe to grind and consequently must be seen as biased. Probably everyone mentioned above had some hand in destroying some part of the Library’s holdings. The collection may have ebbed and flowed as some documents were destroyed and others were added. For instance, Mark Antony was supposed to have given Cleopatra over 200,000 scrolls for the Library long after Julius Caesar is accused of burning it.
Thanks for the mention of those thoughts on the destruction.
I found it interesting. I’ll bet there’s a lot of truth in it too.
Thanks for the follow-up.
Frank, I think my thirty-one was intended for another contributor.
Sorry about that...
Always terribly upsetting to me when ignorant fools in power destroy the hard won knowledge of their betters of the past.
Happening again when Muslims take dynamite and air hammers to ancient sculpture as well as destroying books. In Biblical Archeology Review (I subscribe) it said an innocent white-haired curator was tortured to make him tell under duress the hidden locations of precious artifacts and chiseled words on tablets so the Muslims could raid the hiding places. Which they soon did. Disgusting.
A Season 12 episode of Ancient Aliens showed two possibilities of the Catholic Church with some irreplaceable artifacts and information: some said they destroyed the relics and writings to win against non-Catholic cultures, the others said Catholics "hide" rather than destroy (as in the top secret Vatican Library vaults.) Behind their forty foot walled Vatican----a model for Texas and Arizona to use for wall building, by the way.
How the ancients cut stone with microwave ovens
There fixed it
I don’t know how everything happened. But I know that men concerned with Knowledge and aware of the import of findings and discoveries, find ways to preserve and protect those.
(And I don’t think we need ‘Outer Space Visitor’ stories, to explain human accomplishment on Earth.)
No, I don’t think so either.
It is interesting to me who the same structures pop up in Africa, South America, and on out into the Pacific.
I suspect possible tectonic shifts to answer for part of it.
Not sure if that’s even possible considering the time frames, but possibly.
At any rate, I agree with your premise.
Thanks for those thoughts. I find all of that to be interesting. Appreciated the mention.
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