At The Library Of Congress: Fill & Download for Free

Several, actually.For one thing, there is the British Library in London, England, which is the largest library in the entire world. The British Library houses over twenty-five million books, as well as millions of manuscripts, historical documents, recordings, and other media. These add up to somewhere between 150 and 200 million items in total.ABOVE: Photograph of the exterior of the British Library in London, the largest library in the world by number of books housedABOVE: Interior of the British LibraryThere is also the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., which houses around sixteen million books and around 120 million other documents. The Library of Congress is the closest competitor to the British Library in terms of overall collections. Personally, I think that, while it may not have as many books, the Library of Congress easily beats the British Library in terms of impressive architecture.ABOVE: Interior of the Great Hall of the Library of CongressABOVE: Interior of the main reading room in the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.The modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt is perhaps the closest direct analogue to the ancient Library of Alexandria. It was founded in 2002 and has enough space for eight million books, although it does not hold that many books currently.ABOVE: Exterior of the Bibliotheca AlexandrinaABOVE: Interior of the modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, EgyptHow do these libraries stack up against the ancient Library of Alexandria? Well, the ancient library of Alexandria is estimated to have possessed somewhere between 40,000 and 400,000 papyrus scrolls. These might be equivalent to roughly 100,000 modern printed books.By this measure, the modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina currently contains ten times as many books as the Great Library of Alexandria held at its height. By this same measure, the British Library currently houses roughly 250 times as many books as the Great Library of Alexandria at its height.

People say that the destruction of the Library of Alexandria “set humanity back hundreds of years” because, unfortunately, most people know very little about history and the idea of a single library being destroyed and setting back humanity centuries has a strong romantic appeal.This question is based on a number of false premises. You see, there are, unfortunately, a tremendous number of widespread misconceptions about what the Library of Alexandria was and what happened to it. Contrary to what so many would have you believe, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria is not the primary reason why so many texts from the ancient world have been lost.What people who believe this fail to realize is that the Library of Alexandria was not the only library in the ancient world. In fact, virtually every town in the Hellenistic world had a public library of some kind. The Library of Alexandria was undoubtedly one of the largest and most prestigious of all the libraries that existed during the Hellenistic Period, but this does not eradicate the fact that there were plenty of others that existed.The Library of Alexandria even had a rival: the Library of Pergamon, which, at its height, according to the Greek writer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46–after c. 119 AD), housed roughly 200,000 scrolls. Although none of the scrolls that were held in the Library of Pergamon have survived to the present day, the ruins of the building itself are still visible at the site of Pergamon in Turkey.ABOVE: Photograph from this website of the ruins of the Library of Pergamon. None of the scrolls have survived, but the remains of the building are still there.Another large, impressive library in the ancient world was the Library of Kelsos at Ephesos, which was constructed in the 110s AD under the commission of the Roman consul Gaius Julius Aquila as a monument to his father Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus. At its height, the Library of Kelsos is estimated to have held around 12,000 scrolls. Unfortunately, the Library of Kelsos’s entire collection was destroyed by a fire in 262 AD.Although none of the scrolls that were held in the Library of Kelsos at Ephesos have survived, the mostly intact façade of the building can still be seen at the site of Ephesos in Turkey today. It is widely considered to be one of the most beautiful surviving buildings from the ancient world.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the surviving façade of the Library of Kelsos at EphesosABOVE: Another photograph from Wikimedia Commons with a different view of the façade of the Library of Kelsos at EphesosABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons with a different view of the façade of the Library of Kelsos at EphesosMeanwhile, book collecting was also wildly popular among wealthy elites throughout the ancient Mediterranean world because it was seen as a way for them to display their wealth and erudition. In fact, it was so wildly popular for wealthy people to amass massive private collections of books and then not actually read them that multiple Greek and Roman writers actually complain about this practice, seeing it as an unnecessary extravagance.The Roman Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca the Younger (lived c. 4 BC – 65 AD) famously saw the Library of Alexandria itself as nothing more than yet another ostentatious display of wealth. In his treatise De Tranquillitate Animi (“On the Tranquility of the Mind“), he uses the partial destruction of the Library of Alexandria’s collection by the fire of Alexandria in 48 BC to scold his contemporaries for amassing enormous collections of scrolls just to show how rich and educated they were. In De Tranquillitate Animi chapter 9, Seneca proclaims, as translated by Aubrey Stewart:“Forty thousand books were burned at Alexandria: some would have praised this library as a most noble memorial of royal wealth, like Titus Livius, who says that it was ‘a splendid result of the taste and attentive care of the kings.’ It had nothing to do with taste or care, but was a piece of learned luxury, nay, not even learned, since they amassed it, not for the sake of learning, but to make a show, like many men who know less about letters than a slave is expected to know, and who uses his books not to help him in his studies but to ornament his dining-room. Let a man, then, obtain as many books as he wants, but none for show.”“‘It is more respectable,’ say you, ‘to spend one’s money on such books than on vases of Corinthian brass and paintings.’ Not so: everything that is carried to excess is wrong. What excuses can you find for a man who is eager to buy bookcases of ivory and citrus wood, to collect the works of unknown or discredited authors, and who sits yawning amid so many thousands of books, whose backs and titles please him more than any other part of them?”“Thus in the houses of the laziest of men you will see the works of all the orators and historians stacked upon bookshelves reaching right up to the ceiling. At the present day a library has become as necessary an appendage to a house as a hot and cold bath. I would excuse them straightway if they really were carried away by an excessive zeal for literature; but as it is, these costly works of sacred genius, with all the illustrations that adorn them, are merely bought for display and to serve as wall-furniture.”About a century later, the Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 AD) wrote a satirical letter in Greek titled Remarks Addressed to an Illiterate Book-Fancier. Here is how the letter opens, as translated by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler:“Let me tell you, that you are choosing the worst way to attain your object. You think that by buying up all the best books you can lay your hands on, you will pass for a man of literary tastes: not a bit of it; you are merely exposing thereby your own ignorance of literature. Why, you cannot even buy the right things: any casual recommendation is enough to guide your choice; you are as clay in the hands of the unscrupulous amateur, and as good as cash down to any dealer. How are you to know the difference between genuine old books that are worth money, and trash whose only merit is that it is falling to pieces? You are reduced to taking the worms and moths into your confidence; their activity is your sole clue to the value of a book; as to the accuracy and fidelity of the copyist, that is quite beyond you.”Clearly, wealthy people in ancient times had a hobby of collecting scrolls. As a matter of fact, the only library from the ancient world whose collection has survived to the present day nearly complete is the private library from the so-called “Villa of the Papyri” in the Roman city of Pompeii, which originally contained somewhere around 1,800 papyrus scrolls. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, these scrolls were carbonized and the entire villa was buried in ash.The Villa of the Papyri lay buried for nearly 1,700 years until it was accidentally rediscovered in 1750 by workers who were digging a well. Two years later, the Bourbon royal family ordered the excavation of the ruined villa. At first, the scrolls that were discovered were simply thrown away because they looked like merely lumps of charcoal and the excavators assumed they were worthless.After it was realized that the charred objects from the villa were scrolls with writing on them, experts began trying to unravel them. Unfortunately, early efforts to unravel the papyri were destructive and they generally revealed very little text that could be transcribed. Now, though, scholars are using X-rays and multispectral imaging to digitally unravel the papyri without completely destroying them.There were certainly many other private libraries in the ancient world just like the one in the Villa of the Papyri. These other private libraries, however, have not survived to the present day intact. The only reason why the collection from the Villa of the Papyri has survived is because it was preserved thanks to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which was an unbelievable, almost unique occurrence.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the entrance to the Villa of the Papyri, a villa in the Roman city of Pompeii that contained an enormous private library of roughly 1,800 scrollsAlthough there can be no doubt that scrolls were often very expensive in ancient times, they were nonetheless highly prized and widely collected, especially by the wealthy. It is therefore clear that the vast majority of the texts that were held in the Library of Alexandria were probably also held in at least several dozen other libraries and private collections.To use a rather crude modern analogy, think how much information would be lost if the Library of Congress were to burn down today and everything in it were to be completely destroyed. Sure, we would lose thousands of rare and priceless manuscripts and the cost of the damage would be beyond words, but how much actual information would be lost? Probably very little.Nearly all the books in the Library of Congress’s collection are also held in other libraries around the world and in private collections. The same thing is true about the texts that were held in the Library of Alexandria.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the main reading room of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.The real reason why so few manuscripts have survived from classical antiquity is not because one library was destroyed; instead, most texts have been lost due to a much more boring reason: entropy.In ancient times, people wrote on papyrus, which usually has about the same life expectancy as modern acid paper. Under normal conditions of continuous use, papyrus typically only survives for about fifty years or so before it breaks down into dust. The only way a manuscript could possibly be preserved was by copying the whole thing out by hand, which was an unbelievably tedious, time-consuming, and expensive task. In order for a text to be lost forever, you did not need to burn it; you just needed to decide not to copy it and, within a few decades, it would be gone.This meant that, in order for a text to be preserved from antiquity, roughly every fifty years or so, some rich person had to read it and say, “Huh, you know, I’d really like a copy of this text” and either pay someone an exorbitant amount of money to copy it or order a literate slave to devote countless hours of their time to the task of copying the manuscript. Copying a single manuscript could take months or even years, depending on the length. Many of the texts that have survived from antiquity have done so because they were commonly used in schools, where they were read and studied by students.This was how manuscripts were copied for over 2,000 years until the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. This means that, in order to survive, a manuscript of a text originally written in the fifth century BC had to be copied, not once or twice, but dozens of times. In point of fact, we are truly unbelievably fortunate that anything has survived from the classical world at all.ABOVE: Nineteenth-century fictional illustration by the German artist O. Van Corven depicting how he imagined the Library of Alexandria might have looked in its heydayAnother very important thing everyone needs to understand about the Library of Alexandria is that, even though people always seem to talk about how it “burned” or “was destroyed,” it actually suffered a very long, gradual decline over the course of many centuries. This decline began in around 145 BC, when Ptolemy VIII Physkon (ruled c. 145 – c. 116 BC) ordered the expulsion of all “foreign” (i.e. Greek) scholars from the city of Alexandria. The head librarian at the time, Aristarchos of Samothrake, a world-renowned literary scholar, fled to the island of Kypros and Ptolemy VIII replaced him with one of his bodyguards, a spearman by the name of Kydas who, as far as we know, did not know the first things about running a library.From 145 BC onwards, the history of the Library of Alexandria is one of inadequate funding and patronage, persistent mismanagement, and general decline. What really killed the Library was probably primarily lack of patronage and funding. The early Ptolemies had taken great pride in the reputation of Alexandrian scholarship and had done everything they could to incentivize reputable scholars to come study in Alexandria. They had been willing to go to extraordinary lengths to procure the earliest possible manuscripts of texts (because earlier texts had undergone less copying and were therefore less likely to contain errors).The later Ptolemies, and eventually the Romans, however, did very little to promote the Library and even used the position of head librarian as a political plum—the ideal meaningless but prestigious position for political supporters. As a result of this, while scholars continued to teach, conduct research, and write important treatises, they no longer felt the pressure to do so in Alexandria. Instead, they more often taught and conducted research elsewhere throughout the eastern Mediterranean.It is true that, in 48 BC, during the Siege of Alexandria, Julius Caesar’s men did accidentally set fire to the docks of Alexandria. The fire spread throughout part of the city, burning at least a portion of the Library’s collection, but the significance of this burning is often overstated. For one thing, an account by the Greek historian Kassios Dion (lived c. 155 – c. 235 AD) indicates that the fire only burned a portion of the Library’s collection housed in a warehouse near the docks and not the Library itself. Furthermore, regardless of how much of the Library’s collection was actually destroyed, the Library itself definitely continued to function afterwards.ABOVE: Imaginative modern illustration showing how the artist imagined the fire of Alexandria in 48 BC might have lookedThe Greek geographer Strabon of Amaseia (lived c. 64 BC – c. 24 AD) mentions having visited the Mouseion, the larger research institute which housed the Library, in around 20 BC, not long at all after Caesar’s fire. Also, around the same time, the scholar Didymos Chalkenteros (lived c. 63 BC–c. 10 AD) was making prodigious scholarly output in Alexandria, on a scale that most scholars believe would have been impossible unless he had access to at least some of the Library’s resources.The decline of the Library of Alexandria seems to have been closely linked with the more general decline in prominence of the city of Alexandria itself. Under Roman rule, Alexandria was not nearly as important nor as culturally prominent as it had been under Ptolemaic rule. By the second century AD, Alexandria, though still a thriving city, was only a shadow of the cultural capital it had once been.Another important point to add is that the decline of the Library of Alexandria corresponded with the growth and expansion of other libraries, both within the city of Alexandria and throughout the Mediterranean world. Once scholars had access to texts and manuscripts in their hometowns, they no longer felt the pressure to travel all the way to Alexandria. Likewise, many scrolls from the Library of Alexandria were removed and used to fill up other libraries, such as the one in the Serapeion, a temple to the god Serapis. In other words, part of what killed the Library of Alexandria may have actually been the expansion of knowledge.By the third century AD, contemporary Alexandrian scholarship was looked upon by many as the paragon of obsolescence; the scholars there were associated with the monotonous editing and correction of minute textual errors and the compiling of composite commentaries based on those of earlier scholars, not for cutting-edge original insight as they once had been. The last references to scholars having been members of the Mouseion date to the 260s AD. It is unclear what was left of the Library’s collection by this time, but it does not seem to have been anything to get people excited about. Most of the scrolls had probably already either rotted away or been transferred elsewhere.In the early 270s, Queen Zenobia of the Palmyrene Empire captured the city of Alexandria and, in 272, the forces of the emperor Aurelian fought to recapture the city. In the course of the fighting, the Brouchion quarter of Alexandria in which the Library was housed was completely demolished. Anything that remained of the Library at that point would have been utterly demolished.ABOVE: Gold aureus dated to between 270 and 275 AD depicting the emperor Aurelian, whose forces destroyed the Brouchion quarter of Alexandria in 272 ADNow, concerning what kinds of works of literature the Library of Alexandria actually contained, it is frankly rather bizarre reading online about all the different things that so many people seem to think could have been housed in the Library of Alexandria. The Library of Alexandria has attained an almost mythical status in our society. You can find all sorts of people online claiming that the Library of Alexandria might have contained the lost history of Atlantis or books about the histories of other lost civilizations. Other people are claiming that the Library could have contained information about amazing lost ancient technologies that we do not have any knowledge of.Although we do not know everything that was in the Library of Alexandria, we do know some of the works it contained and, more importantly, we know what sorts of works the Library generally collected. The Pinakes, the catalogue for the Library of Alexandria created by the great Greek scholar Kallimachos of Kyrene (lived c. 310 – c. 240 BC), which is the oldest known library catalogue in history, has been mostly lost, but several fragmentary portions of it have survived. Based on the available evidence, none of this wild speculation about the Library of Alexandria supposedly containing information about lost civilizations or lost ancient technologies that are currently unknown is plausible.While it is certainly possible that there could be other major ancient civilizations out there that have not yet been discovered, this prospect does grow less and less likely every year due to the advancement of the field of modern archaeology. Furthermore, if there are any major ancient civilizations that have not been discovered, it is highly unlikely that such civilizations would be advanced to a degree that would be abnormal for a civilization that existed in antiquity. In other words, there were almost certainly no ancient civilizations with anything even remotely approaching the level of technological sophistication we have today.Finally, it is highly improbable that the Library of Alexandria ever contained significant information about an ancient civilization that is currently completely unknown because we know that the Library of Alexandria mainly collected works of ancient Greek literature. While it is true that many works of ancient Greek literature have been lost, the number of surviving works is substantial enough that we can say with a high degree of certainty that, if the ancient Greeks knew of an older civilization that we do not, they would have most likely made some reference to it somewhere in the surviving corpus of Greek literature.The Library of Alexandria almost certainly did not contain a true history of Atlantis because, as I explain in this article from March 2019, all available evidence clearly indicates that the story of Atlantis is fiction and that it was invented by Plato to illustrate a philosophical point. There is currently no compelling evidence that would lead us to believe that Atlantis ever existed. Indeed, there is actually a great deal of evidence indicating that it did not exist. All the evidence that is currently available indicates that Atlantis is just as fictional as Westeros, Middle Earth, or Narnia. If the Library of Alexandria did contain a history of Atlantis, it would just be some ancient Greek writer’s fanfiction based on Plato and not an actual history of a real lost continent.ABOVE: Map by Athanasius Kircher showing the alleged location of Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The story of Atlantis is almost certainly fiction.So what do we know was in the Library of Alexandria that we do not have anymore? Well, according to the Greek medical writer Galenos of Pergamon (lived 129 – c. 200/c. 216 AD), the Library of Alexandria at one point housed the original, autograph manuscripts of all the tragedies of the Athenian playwrights Aischylos, Euripides, and Sophokles, but those were almost certainly lost to time long before the Library was destroyed. The chances that texts written on papyrus and kept in the Library of Alexandria managed to survive from the fifth century BC until the third century AD are extremely low.If the Library of Alexandria had survived longer, would we still have all those texts that were in it but are now lost? Perhaps some of them would have survived, but it is highly doubtful that all of them—or even most of them—would have survived. As I mentioned earlier, any texts that were held in the Library would have almost certainly been held in other libraries as well in different manuscripts and, if the other manuscripts of those texts were lost, we have no reason to believe the manuscripts from the Library of Alexandria would have fared any better. It was during the period of the Early Middle Ages (c. 476 – c. 800 AD), long after the Library of Alexandria was no longer in existence, when few people were copying ancient texts, that a large portion of ancient texts were lost.There were also several format shifts in late antiquity that resulted in a significant loss of texts. The slightly earlier of these shifts was the shift from writing on scrolls to writing on codices, which occurred roughly between the late first century AD and the fifth century AD. The codex provided a huge advantage over the scroll, because it saved a massive amount of storage space. The problem is that, when they switched over to codices, texts written on scrolls became seen as archaic and obsolete, in the same way that, today, printed books are becoming seen as archaic and obsolete. At a certain point, probably around 600 AD or thereabouts, any texts that had not already been copied over onto parchment were seen as not worth bothering with and so were lost.There was also another, concurrent format shift; over the course of late antiquity, people began gradually switching over from writing on papyrus to writing on parchment. Parchment is much more durable than papyrus and can last several times longer. The problem is that the same thing that happened when people switched over to codices happened when they switched over to parchment. Papyrus became looked upon as obsolete and archaic and not worth bothering with. If a text had not been copied over to parchment by around 800 AD, chances were it was not going to get copied. So, ironically, switching over to a more durable medium actually resulted in even greater loss of texts.ABOVE: Illustration from the Codex Amiatinus dating to c. 700 AD depicting an early medieval bookshelf containing around ten codicesMore texts were gradually lost over the course of the later Middle Ages up until the invention of the printing press, albeit at a slower rate. It is worth noting that not a single one of the large public libraries of classical antiquity survived intact past the Early Middle Ages. Many of the texts housed in them certainly did, but the libraries themselves did not, so the Library of Alexandria was far from unique in that regard. Instead, as the old libraries died out, newer, often smaller ones—many of them in monasteries—replaced them.For more information, here is a link to an article I published on my website on 3 July 2019 titled “Misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria,” from which this answer is partially excerpted.

It would be far worse. The destruction of the Library of Alexandria is arguably the most utterly overrated event in human history. It really was nowhere near as big of a deal as people keep making it out to be. I wrote an entire article back in July 2018 debunking misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria, which I highly suggest everyone read but which I will briefly summarize here.Almost everything that Carl Sagan’s Cosmos says about the Library of Alexandria is wrong. For one thing, the Library of Alexandria wasn’t destroyed by Christians. Instead, it faced a long slow decline that began in the middle of the second century BC. A portion of the Library’s collection was accidentally destroyed in 48 BC when Julius Caesar’s men accidentally set fire to the docks of Alexandria, but the Library itself seems to have survived.The Library of Alexandria vanishes from the historical record in around the mid-third century AD. If the Library still existed in 272 AD when the forces of the emperor Aurelian destroyed the entire Brouchion quarter where the Library was located, it must have been destroyed then. Carl Sagan’s idea that the Library was destroyed by Christians arose due to a conflation between the Library of Alexandria and the Serapeion, a temple to the god Serapis that was destroyed by Christians in 391 AD, but probably didn’t contain any scrolls at the time.ABOVE: Imaginative modern illustration showing how the artist imagined the fire of Alexandria in 48 BC might have lookedFurthermore, it is extremely unlikely that any important scientific information was lost when the Library was destroyed. First of all, there probably wasn’t much scientific information in the Library to begin with because, at the time of the Library’s destruction, scientific information wasn’t kept in libraries; it was passed down orally by tradesmen. The Library of Alexandria is known to have primarily housed Greek literary texts, not scientific works.Finally, the Library of Alexandria was just one of the dozens of libraries that flourished throughout the Mediterranean world. Virtually every major city and even many large towns had libraries. The vast majority of texts held in the Library of Alexandria would have certainly been held in other libraries and any texts that were held exclusively in the Library of Alexandria were probably doomed anyways.The destruction of the Library of Alexandria would be analogous not to the destruction of the internet, but rather more like the destruction of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress is a massive library that houses over 16 million books. Nearly all of those books, though, are held in other libraries across the country. If the Library of Congress were destroyed, it would be tragic, but it certainly wouldn’t set civilization back thousands of years. The exact same thing is true of the Library of Alexandria.ABOVE: Photograph of the main reading room of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.If the internet were destroyed, on the other hand, a great deal of information would be lost—or at the very least made no longer available to the public. The internet has had an immense democratizing effect on knowledge. A lot of information that was previously stored in university libraries that the public had very little access to has become freely available online.Yes, the internet has enabled the spread of conspiracy theories, fake news, New Age woo, and all kinds of other nonsense, but it has also made information that can be used to debunk those things available as well. The complete destruction of the internet would be a tremendous blow to civilization as we know it, especially since knowledge is increasingly becoming digital.That being said, the internet will certainly eventually be destroyed because all things must be destroyed eventually; it’s just a matter of how soon.ABOVE: Imaginative illustration of the internet connecting different parts of the world together