The amazing history of the library of Alexandria

The François Mitterrand library in Paris celebrated its 25th anniversary this spring. If its reputation is important it is in no way comparable to that which was the most famous library of Antiquity. In this new episode of "At the heart of history", produced by Europe 1 Studio, Jean des Cars invites you to discover the history of the library of Alexandria.

Our story begins on August 9, 48 before the Christian era. Julius Caesar pursues his rival Pompey whom he defeated in the Greek city of Pharsale. And this pursuit takes him to Egypt. When his boat entered the harbor of Alexandria on September 30, 48, Caesar did not yet know that Pompey had been assassinated two days earlier by one of his former soldiers at Pélise, a port on the eastern arm of the Nile Delta. The assassin of Pompey goes on board and presents to Caesar the head of his victim .... No one knows what Caesar thought at this tragic moment. Maybe their old friendship? Perhaps also to the fact that even if he was dead, Rome still had many supporters of Pompey.

César arrives in Alexandria with his two legions, 3,200 men and 800 Gallic and German horsemen. The winner of Pompey - and now the master of Rome - settles in the royal citadel. He summons the occupants of the Egyptian throne: Cleopatra, 16 years old and his brother Ptolemy Dionysus, 10 years old. They dispute the throne because the young king, manipulated by his tutor, Pothin, had expelled his sister in Syria to reign alone over Egypt.

Caesar quickly settles the case: he awards the crown to the brother and sister who, according to the tradition of the Ptolemies, are married. Having resolved this dynastic question, Caesar claims his due: a large backlog of taxes. The people of Alexandria do not appreciate Caesar's behavior. He decides everything, settles in the royal palace, treats the Egyptian sovereigns as vassals: to pay off the Egyptian debt, he forces them to empty the treasures of the temples, to melt the dishes of gold. Even the occupying Roman army, which was there and included many of Pompey's veterans, thinks like the people who are starting to whisper. Some legionaries are murdered in the streets. Caesar is worried. He cannot leave because the winds are contrary and then it is not his kind to flee at the first difficulty.

Alexandria revolts against Caesar: the library burns

However, he called in troops from Asia Minor for reinforcement, changing nothing in his way of life until their arrival. His new existence is rather pleasant: they are only parties and banquets because César fell in love with Cleopatra. He is 43 years old, she is 16 ... For him, she displays all the attractions. He thinks only of spinning the perfect love until he learns that the Roman occupation body of Egypt has just entered Alexandria. He came to attack Caesar and the Alexandrians make common cause with him. 

In all haste, Caesar gathers his troops and locks himself in the royal citadel and the nearby theater. As he cannot secure the Egyptian occupation fleet, he sets it on fire. The fire will spread throughout the city and damage its greatest treasures, starting with the famous Library of Alexandria. 

Caesar lived a few difficult days until the arrival of reinforcements from Syria. This army confronts Egyptian troops led by the little king Ptolemy while Caesar and his soldiers succeed in joining with those from Syria. As all battles have a name, this is called "the battle of the Nile". The young king Ptolemy tries to flee in an overloaded boat. He disappears in the waters of the Nile, like many of his soldiers.

Caesar wins a complete victory and returns again as the winner in Alexandria. Let us listen to the German historian Mommsen tell us about his return: "He held in his hands the fate of the city which had dared to thwart the designs of the master of the world, and had put him himself on the verge of his loss: but always a clever politician and always oblivious to insults, he treated Alexandrians with measure, showing them their war-ravaged city, their rich wheat stores, their library, the Wonder of the World, and all the other great buildings destroyed during the fleet fire. He enjoins them to think only of the arts of peace and to heal their wounds today. "

César settles in Alexandria with Cleopatra. For the beautiful eyes of the very beautiful Queen of Egypt, he will rebuild the library. But who then built the magnificent city of Alexandria? What is this Ptolemy dynasty that made it the new capital of Egypt?

Alexandria, new wonder of the world 

The man who is going to found Alexandria is called Ptolemy 1st Soter, "the Savior". Born in Macedonia, he was said to be the son of a mistress of King Philippe. She would then have married Lagos, a Macedonian nobleman, hence the name Lagides given to the Ptolemy dynasty. General and perhaps half-brother of Alexander the Great, Ptolemy follows the conqueror in Asia and saves his life on several occasions. 

On the death of Alexander in 323 BC, when the Empire was divided, he received Egypt and established the capital there in Alexandria. This city had been founded about 10 years earlier by Alexander the Great on the site of a simple fishing village called Rhakotis. It is built on a tongue of land that extends between the Mediterranean and Lake Maréotis. It offers the most modern realization of ancient town planning. 

Its first architect Dinocrates gave it the shape of a parallelepiped divided by streets intersecting all at right angles. It has two ports, one large in the East, another in the West. The most magnificent district created by Ptolémée 1er extends to the east of the large port, on a peninsula. There were the Ptolemy's Palace, the museum, the mausoleum of Alexander the Great, the temples of Poseidon and the great theater. And of course, stood the famous lighthouse of the architect Sostratos de Cnide, completed three years after the death of Ptolemy I. This monument, a 150 m high marble tower whose fire was visible 50 km away, was one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

The city will become the main center of commerce between East and West. Let us listen to the French historian Michel Mourre: "Marshy plains, of difficult crossing, isolated it from the interior Egypt, which directed it towards the Mediterranean world although affluent with it the richnesses of East Africa and Arabia, mainly exporting wheat, papyrus, Egyptian perfumes, importing oil from Greece and the precious metals which kept up the activity of the famous Alexandrian luxury workshops, as well as wood and wool. estimated its population at 300,000, not counting slaves. It was very cosmopolitan, mixing the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Jews and, much later, the Romans. "

Alexandria library contains only papyrus

Ptolemy also wanted to make Alexandria an intellectual capital. The king will offer Alexandria the most prestigious library of Antiquity. It will be organized by the Greek Démétrios de Phalère. It will collect up to 700,000 volumes, most of them Greek. Obviously, these are not books but papyrus. 

The papyrus is an aquatic plant which then grew in abundance on the banks of the Nile and in the marshy waters of the Delta. According to Herodotus, the Egyptians fed on the stem of this plant. They made it a lily bread, a much sought-after treat. But above all, the papyrus was used to make a medium suitable for receiving writing. The Egyptians removed the marrow from the stem of the plant and formed with it a sort of cloth which was first dried, beaten with a hammer, pressed and beaten a second time. Then, we glued the dried papyrus with a very fine porridge, crumb of soggy bread in hot water. This operation made the sheet waterproof without depriving it of its flexibility and gave it a brilliant whiteness. This amazing process had been invented in the 16th century BC.

Apart from the papyrus, the only writing supports were the tablets of stone or clay. However, paper had been invented in China, a hundred years before the Christian era. But the Chinese kept it secret for eight centuries. It was not until the Battle of Samarkand in 751 that Arabs who captured Chinese mercenaries knew about the existence of paper through them. It will not be introduced in Sicily, by Arabs, that in the 12th century of our era. Coming back to the Library of Alexandria, it was therefore filled with magnificent papyrus.

Pergamon invents the parchment 

If the library of Alexandria was the largest and most famous in the ancient world, it was not the only one. Pergamon, in Asia Minor, had become thanks to its king Eumenes II one of the great capitals of the Hellenistic world. Allied with Rome, it was a splendid city, of Greek type with an acropolis, a royal palace, temples, a theater but especially a library. Eumenes II wanted to compete with the Ptolemies of Egypt. Soon, it will have 200,000 volumes. 

But King Ptolemy does not support this potential rivalry. He is jealous and forbids the export of papyrus. The king of Pergamos will then imagine replacing the papyrus with sheep skins, prepared and polished with pumice stone. They are called "pergamina" and this word will become, for us, the parchment. In Pergamon, we also make scrolls with goat, calf and pig skins. It is a new medium for writing. Certainly it is expensive. But until the arrival, in the 13th century, of paper invented by the Chinese fourteen centuries earlier, all of Western Europe would use parchments. 

How Cleopatra will recover Pergamon's library

We left Cleopatra in the midst of an idyll in Alexandria in the year 47 BC. Alas for Cleopatra, César was assassinated in Rome, in the Senate, in March 44, three years later. Meanwhile, Cleopatra had a son of Caesar, Caesarion or Ptolemy XV for the Egyptians. In the year 41, in Sicily, she meets Antoine, one of the heirs of Caesar, in rivalry with Octave for the succession. Seduced, he lets himself be dragged into Egypt towards the dream of a great oriental empire. Antoine will spend the winter 41-40 with her in Alexandria. The Latin historian Plutarch tells that for the beautiful eyes of Cleopatra, Antoine will confiscate the library of Pergamos to allow the queen of Egypt to thus reconstitute the fund of the library of Alexandria, badly damaged in 47. 

We know that the loves of Antoine and Cleopatra will end badly. Octave declares war on the sovereign of Egypt. Antoine is defeated at the battle of Actium. He kills himself after receiving the false news of Cleopatra's suicide. She will try to seduce Octave but he is adamant. He wants to take the Queen of Egypt to Rome so that she figures in her triumph as a trophy. While learning it, Cleopatra commits suicide by being bitten by an asp. She was 36 years old.

The library of Alexandria will survive all these dramas until the end of the 3rd century. She was then definitively ravaged by a fire during a riot. Its annex, the library of the temple of Serapis, will also be destroyed but this time by the Christians, in the year 391. What had been a beacon of intellectual life in the Mediterranean basin no longer exists. How could the memory of all these treasures be preserved?

Monasteries, memory of ancient culture 

In the 3rd century, we see the birth of Christian libraries like that of Bishop Alexander in Jerusalem, that of Pamphile in Caesarea, which included 30,000 rolls of papyrus. Not much, if you compare it to what the library of Alexandria had been. From Saint Benedict, in the 4th century, it was the monasteries that played a vital role in the preservation of the writings. Throughout the Middle Ages, that is to say several centuries, Europe had only monastic libraries. We can cite Saint-Wandrille, Pontivy, Saint-Gall, York. These libraries were modest, on average 500 volumes of scrolls or scrolls, 2,000 for the largest.  

It is thanks to the monasteries and the patient work of the monks' copyists that we owe the great period of the Renaissance. They did not keep only the sacred texts. They also kept the works of philosophers, historians, poets and playwrights from the Greco-Roman era. This miraculous rediscovery allowed the intellectual and artistic development of the 16th century in Europe. It was at this time that private, princely and royal libraries flourished, for example that of the Medici in Florence or the Duke of Berry and Philippe de Bourgogne in France. Louis XI constitutes a library which is enriched with his successor François 1er because this one decides, by the Ordinance of Montpellier in 1537, that each book published in France will have to enter the Royal Library.

François 1er installed his library in Fontainebleau in 1544. Gradually, in the last quarter of the 16th century, it was transferred to Paris. The Royal Library, considerably enriched by Louis XIV and the royal power, was opened to the public in 1692. At that time it was installed in the current rue Vivienne. Then, Colbert bought the hotel in Nevers, which became free after the bankruptcy of the financier Law. It is a part of the Palais Mazarin to which will be added, thereafter, the Hôtel de Givry then the Hôtel de Tuboeuf, constituting an immense architectural ensemble. The Royal Library became National during the Revolution, then Imperial under Napoleon, then definitively National. From 1854 to 1875, the architect Labrouste remodeled most of these constructions. He notably created the Salle des Imprimés where iron architecture triumphs.

But the National Library exploded within its walls. She was forced to have reservations in several places in Paris. President François Mitterrand, a lover of books, entrusts the architect Dominique Perrault with the construction of the Very Large Library. Four buildings in the form of open books frame a huge garden courtyard. The project was interesting. Unfortunately, the very tall buildings wanted to be transparent, completely covered with glass. However, books don't like light or heat. Too bad for transparency, we had to invent the yellow shutters behind the windows. Effective but less attractive!

After a rather laborious start, notably for the delivery of works, the François Mitterrand Library has established itself in the totally remodeled landscape of the 13th arrondissement of Paris. But what is now called the Richelieu Site, the old address, still exists and is currently undergoing a very good restoration. The works will be completed in 2021.

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"At the heart of history" is a Europe 1 Studio podcast

Author and presentation: Jean des Cars 

Project manager: Adèle Ponticelli

Realization: Guillaume Vasseau

Diffusion and edition: Clémence Olivier

Graphics: Europe 1 Studio