Thursday, April 12, 2018

Oh, Alexandria...



I know I've probably shared this one before, but I thought it was rather timely to go with my recent review of The Library by Stuart Kells.

10 comments:

  1. Maybe I should've trained as a librarian...but what put me off was all the little brats making noise and causing trouble!

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    1. I always think this same thing; but I am currently a teacher and I love having the summers off to be home with my daughter o that would be reeeeeally hard to give up.

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  2. It makes me a little bit sad but, thinking about all of those irreplaceable manuscripts, it makes me very very angry about all of the knowledge and the insights we have lost forever.

    You are definitely not alone in being upset by this historic tragedy.

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    1. RIGHT??!! Who knows what we might have cured or solved if we had that knowledge? Ugh.

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  3. We should have an annual day of remembrance - for the Alexandria library and all the others that are being stupidly closed now. Is the actual date known? Google is being vague

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    1. I read a great book by Justin Pollard about Alexandria,

      https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/400064.The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Alexandria

      But I don't recall a date. The book is fantastic though, give it a read if you get the chance.

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    2. The library was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much of the library was actually destroyed and it may have been rebuilt shortly thereafter. [From Wiki]

      It appears that the argument is about how much of the library was destroyed (40K books are mentioned lost) but the date looks like 48 BC.

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  4. Carl Sagan has that tantalizing scene in the first episode of Cosmos where he pulls scrolls with author/title tags on them and muses what they contained -- but we'll never know because of the various fires.

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    1. It's in my Netflix Queue but I hardly have time for any tv right now. It is there, though! Isn't it so gut-wrenching to think what was lost?

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