I was doing a little research this morning for a comment I was posting on Ron's Blog where he was lamenting that what children are taught about Columbus today is much the same as what they were taught 20 years ago.  (Interesting article by the way, check it out: Columbian Lies.)  Doing research often takes me to further information that it is not directly related, but just as interesting. This time was no exception...

I was led to a lengthy discussion on the destruction of the Library of Alexandria--one of the most grievous moments in the history of humanity IMHO.  In high school I had been taught that the library was burned by fundamentalist Christians in an effort to combat paganism.

It turns out this is one of three different stories describing the destruction of the library, another maintains that the library was burned by Muslims, and still another maintains that the library burned when Julius Caesar attacked Alexandria and set fire to the fleet of ships in its harbor.

All three stories maintain that the library burned, but each takes place in a different time frame, Caesar in or around 48 BC, Theophilus and the Christians in or around 391 AD, and Omar and the Muslims in or around 640 AD.

There is a lot of debate on this subject, apparently, and different people reach different conclusions.  The site I found (The Mysterious Fate of the Great Library of Alexandria) concludes that the library burned during Julius Caesar's attack on the port of Alexandria.  This article was authored by Christian historian James Hannam.

The verdict on Caesar

...Although we cannot prove his guilt with first hand evidence, it seems justified to claim that the book stacks of the Royal Library were burnt down by Julius Caesar. Perhaps the reading rooms, which in any case were part of the Museum, survived but, as Seneca and all the other sources tell us, the books themselves perished. That scholarship continued in Alexandria after this time cannot be doubted but I can find no explicit mention of the Royal Library after Caesar's ill-fated visit. Indeed as Athenaeus of Naucratis (died after 200AD) mournfully wrote in the Deipnosophistai "And concerning the number of books and the establishment of libraries and the collection in the Museum, why need I even speak when they are all the memory of men."...

The wikipedia, on the other hand, lays the blame squarely at the feet of Theophilus and the Christians, stating that there is plenty of evidence that the great library existed well past the Caesar's invasion of Alexandria:

...There is a growing consensus among historians that the Library of Alexandria likely suffered from several destructive events, but that the destruction of Alexandria's pagan temples in the late 4th century was probably the most severe and final one. The evidence for that destruction is the most definitive and secure. Caesar's invasion may well have led to the loss of some 40,000-70,000 scrolls in a warehouse adjacent to the port (as Luciano Canfora argues, they were likely copies produced by the Library intended for export), but it is unlikely to have affected the Library or Museum, given that there is ample evidence that both existed later....

Whatever the cause, something my favorite history professor said to me in high school has stuck with me my entire life, I'm paraphrasing, but it was basically "The loss of the Great Library easily set humanity back fifteen hundred years.  Had the library not burned, we would likely be star-hopping today."

It was just one man's opinion of course, but it made quite an impression on me in my early teens.  And it is funny I should run across an article about it these days, where fundie-Christians seem to be having their moment in the sun again, trying to stamp out evolution, birth control education, and other forms of knowledge that don't jive with their ideology.

Have we learned nothing?