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33 reviews for:
The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind
Howard Reid, Justin Pollard
4.07 AVERAGE
33 reviews for:
The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind
Howard Reid, Justin Pollard
4.07 AVERAGE
This book: So-and-so wrote such-and-such...
Me: Oh?
This book: But it is now lost/was burned.
Me: Ohhhhh...
We've lost/destroyed a lot of knowledge/art. It is distressing.
But this book was pretty great! It covers the founding of the city by Alexander through it's fall to Muslim forces in 641 (a fine demarcation for when the city ceased to be a part of western civ, I guess?). Pollard does a solid job of providing an overview of the city's history with wonderful diversions into the individual, essential scientific and philosophical discoveries that took place because Alexandria existed (I'm sure it's not comprehensive). Some of these stories are rapturous: for instance, I didn't know prior to this the story of how Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the globe, but it gave me chills. I was also glad Pollard covered the role Alexandria played in the development of early Christianity (which I've only recently started to appreciate) - for some reason, at the outset, I thought this book's history might end prior to that.
Ultimately, this is a tragedy. Even with the most sober of historical accounts, I'm sure the Alexandria we think we know is more romantic than life there ever was, but the development of the West's hostility towards intellectual pursuits/science that the city's history represents is still heartbreaking.
Me: Oh?
This book: But it is now lost/was burned.
Me: Ohhhhh...
We've lost/destroyed a lot of knowledge/art. It is distressing.
But this book was pretty great! It covers the founding of the city by Alexander through it's fall to Muslim forces in 641 (a fine demarcation for when the city ceased to be a part of western civ, I guess?). Pollard does a solid job of providing an overview of the city's history with wonderful diversions into the individual, essential scientific and philosophical discoveries that took place because Alexandria existed (I'm sure it's not comprehensive). Some of these stories are rapturous: for instance, I didn't know prior to this the story of how Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the globe, but it gave me chills. I was also glad Pollard covered the role Alexandria played in the development of early Christianity (which I've only recently started to appreciate) - for some reason, at the outset, I thought this book's history might end prior to that.
Ultimately, this is a tragedy. Even with the most sober of historical accounts, I'm sure the Alexandria we think we know is more romantic than life there ever was, but the development of the West's hostility towards intellectual pursuits/science that the city's history represents is still heartbreaking.
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
The story of Alexandria, particularly the great minds that were associated with the city, is a very interesting tale. The amount of knowledge these men were able to learn and the great works of literature that are now forever lost is one of history's great forgotten tragedies. As for the book itself, there was much historical details that didn't interest me much. Aside from biographies of the great minds like Archimedes, Euclid, and others that lived in Alexandria the book was rather dull, but the wonder and intrigue that comes from these ancient geniuses is enough to make the book a very valuable read.
an informative ode to one of humanity's greatest triumphs and tragedies.
I was sorry to finish this book, though its trumpetingly sonorous tone sometimes got on my nerves; especially when Alexandria was at its height, the authors sometimes sounded like they had been employed by the Ancient Alexandria Tourism Board (if such a thing existed). It's so exciting to think about all of the startling new ideas that were generated in this one place, spanning the fields of philosophy, logic, mathematics, geography, engineering, physics, bibliography, literature and more. The book excels in mini-portraits of the geniuses associated with the city (Alexander himself, Euclid, Archimedes, Galen, Ptolemy, Strabo, et al) and tracing their collective influence through the ages to the modern era.
Beautiful and lovely and depressing. 4 stars, rounded up to 5 purely because of my love for all things academic and library-ish.
Full review to come.
+++++++++++
My book blog ---> http://allthebookblognamesaretaken.blogspot.com
I never knew how little I actually knew about Alexandria until I read this book. The first book I read of Pollard's was about Alfred the Great and I absolutely loved it, it was well-researched and beautifully written. The Rise and Fall of Alexandria is no different. It is truly so beautiful and lovely and depressing to read about this great center of academia, and THAT library, and after centuries of surviving, it's just gone. Based solely on the book's content, I would give this a solid four stars, but given my love of all things academic and library-ish, I had to go with five stars.
There are so many directions I might go with this review, so many things to discuss and dissect, to relate to our modern world, I don't think I would have the space or time to even attempt that. So instead I will just touch briefly on some of the things that were most intriguing to me.
The book begins where you would expect - with the founding of the city. There is a solid foundation, figuratively, to build the rest of the book on. We are given a background of Alexander and Ptolemy take-over after Alexander's death. As time went on, the library accumulated more and more knowledge, just imagine all those scrolls, all that history in one place.
"Alexandria was built on knowledge, and at its heart was not a treasury but the greatest library and museum of antiquity" (introduction).
But, Alexandria was so much more than just the library and museums, if that is even possible. Truth be told, that is really all I knew of the great city prior to picking this one up, aside from knowledge too of its famous founder - who did not live long enough to see the glorious crown jewel of his empire reach its full potential.
I found the medical information to be among the most interesting facts (I mean seriously, despite the plethora of mathematicians who lived and worked in Alexandria, we all should know by now how I feel about math. I think it is a testament to how enthralling Alexandria is that I was able to muster through those sections - I am NOT a number gal!) Given my love for all things medieval England/Ireland/Scotland, I was familiar with the idea of the four humors, but did not know much about what they represented or how this information was used. Here the author goes into a bit of detail when discussing medical practices that were developed in Alexandria, including the understanding of anatomy. The disturbing way they came about this knowledge was that doctors were given LIVE condemned prisoners to experiment and operate on, so...not all was perfect in the city.
One of the both high- and low-lights of this one for me was a whole chapter dedicated to Hypatia. It's a highlight because she is such a fascinating figure in history, and while there is not a lot of information known about her, there is enough that tells us she is certainly someone who was held in esteem. The low-light of course would be her cruel and violent death, and the fact that Cyril played such a role in it and that later he was even raised to sainthood. That is a travesty to me.
"With the death of Hypatia, her city also began to die. Philosophers were still to found in the city's streets and the 'Alexandrian school' continued quietly - ever more quietly - to refine pagan Neoplatonism" (page 280).
Overall, I really loved this one. I can highly recommend it to anyone who has an interest in non-fiction. Even if you do not know much about this time period, the people, this city, the library, it is a great starting point. It is also great for those who already have a knowledge of any of those topics, as the detail and research is quite evident.
And oh, what I would not give to see that library in its full glory.
"And what of the books? The fate of the libraries of Alexandria is one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world. It would still be tragic, but at least convenient, if a single moment of their destruction could be found, a moment at which the curtain came down on the classical world and a new and darker age commenced" (page 281).
Full review to come.
+++++++++++
My book blog ---> http://allthebookblognamesaretaken.blogspot.com
I never knew how little I actually knew about Alexandria until I read this book. The first book I read of Pollard's was about Alfred the Great and I absolutely loved it, it was well-researched and beautifully written. The Rise and Fall of Alexandria is no different. It is truly so beautiful and lovely and depressing to read about this great center of academia, and THAT library, and after centuries of surviving, it's just gone. Based solely on the book's content, I would give this a solid four stars, but given my love of all things academic and library-ish, I had to go with five stars.
There are so many directions I might go with this review, so many things to discuss and dissect, to relate to our modern world, I don't think I would have the space or time to even attempt that. So instead I will just touch briefly on some of the things that were most intriguing to me.
The book begins where you would expect - with the founding of the city. There is a solid foundation, figuratively, to build the rest of the book on. We are given a background of Alexander and Ptolemy take-over after Alexander's death. As time went on, the library accumulated more and more knowledge, just imagine all those scrolls, all that history in one place.
"Alexandria was built on knowledge, and at its heart was not a treasury but the greatest library and museum of antiquity" (introduction).
But, Alexandria was so much more than just the library and museums, if that is even possible. Truth be told, that is really all I knew of the great city prior to picking this one up, aside from knowledge too of its famous founder - who did not live long enough to see the glorious crown jewel of his empire reach its full potential.
I found the medical information to be among the most interesting facts (I mean seriously, despite the plethora of mathematicians who lived and worked in Alexandria, we all should know by now how I feel about math. I think it is a testament to how enthralling Alexandria is that I was able to muster through those sections - I am NOT a number gal!) Given my love for all things medieval England/Ireland/Scotland, I was familiar with the idea of the four humors, but did not know much about what they represented or how this information was used. Here the author goes into a bit of detail when discussing medical practices that were developed in Alexandria, including the understanding of anatomy. The disturbing way they came about this knowledge was that doctors were given LIVE condemned prisoners to experiment and operate on, so...not all was perfect in the city.
One of the both high- and low-lights of this one for me was a whole chapter dedicated to Hypatia. It's a highlight because she is such a fascinating figure in history, and while there is not a lot of information known about her, there is enough that tells us she is certainly someone who was held in esteem. The low-light of course would be her cruel and violent death, and the fact that Cyril played such a role in it and that later he was even raised to sainthood. That is a travesty to me.
"With the death of Hypatia, her city also began to die. Philosophers were still to found in the city's streets and the 'Alexandrian school' continued quietly - ever more quietly - to refine pagan Neoplatonism" (page 280).
Overall, I really loved this one. I can highly recommend it to anyone who has an interest in non-fiction. Even if you do not know much about this time period, the people, this city, the library, it is a great starting point. It is also great for those who already have a knowledge of any of those topics, as the detail and research is quite evident.
And oh, what I would not give to see that library in its full glory.
"And what of the books? The fate of the libraries of Alexandria is one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world. It would still be tragic, but at least convenient, if a single moment of their destruction could be found, a moment at which the curtain came down on the classical world and a new and darker age commenced" (page 281).
An extraordinarily enjoyable and illuminative history of Alexandria, albeit with some occasional jumping in the timeline that doesn't detract from the authors' enthusiasm at sharing the story of Alexandria. Who knew (well, probably most of you) how incredibly important Alexandria was as a center of philosophy, education, and culture during its heyday? It was not just the well-known library of Alexandria, but it was a crossroads and center of learning for much of its history. The destruction of the library didn't end the city's importance-- instead the long final demise took, with a ghostly echo of modern times, the narcissistic power-hungry machinations of St Cyril whose actions so weakened the city under the guise of spreading christianity that the remaining scholars and learned were forced to flee, taking the few remaining books with them. That weakened city, no longer a cultural or scholarly center, further decayed over the following decades and eventually fell to islamic expansion.
For some reason I just couldn’t get caught up in the narrative like I usually do, even though this was an interesting read.
I had heard snippets about the Ptolemaic era before but didn’t have much context to put it in. Now I do, and among other things I learned that the Ptolemaic family dynasty was one of the more ruthlessly dysfunctional ones around, despite its interest in fostering philosophy and the advancement of knowledge. It was also amazing to read about how the ancient Alexandrians had correctly deduced the shape of the earth and extensively mapped almost all of the known world at the time. While their original maps have been lost, their books left such detailed descriptions and instructions for creating them that Renaissance scholars were able to reconstruct them. They also invented the water clock, an analog computer (the Antikythera mechanism is worth Googling), and the forerunner of the steam engine. The scholar Aristarchus had even discovered heliocentrism, and Copernicus’s handwritten manuscripts contain references to Aristarchus’s work, although for unknown reasons he later removed these from the printed version of his text.
I also really enjoyed learning more about the Library of Alexandria. At its peak the library held 750,000 scrolls. I am going to use “books” and “scrolls” interchangeably here, not least because this book does the same. To my mind, a library by definition has books and I’m not sure what I’d call a collection of scrolls.
I actually have a substantially lower opinion of the legendary library than when I started, because it turns out that many of its books were actually stolen from other libraries in the ancient world, and a book-stealing library – especially in the days before the printing press – is no library for me. For example, books that a library in Athens had sent to be copied were never returned and neither were any of the copies, meaning that when the library was destroyed all of material the Athens library had sent was lost forever. It gave me some insight into the reasoning behind creating the famous “chained libraries” of the Middle Ages, some of which still exist. Not only that, but all the books coming in to Alexandria were confiscated for copying; the originals went into the library while the copies were given to the original owners. I am glad that today’s libraries have substantially different acquisitions policies. In fact, the Library of Congress has been known to repatriate valuable antique books upon learning that the sellers had fraudulently acquired them.
No one knows for sure how the Library of Alexandria, both its main collection and a smaller “daughter” collection most likely kept at the Serapeum temple, were lost. But it is likely that most or even all of the main collection was destroyed during the Alexandrine War, when Julius Caesar burned the Egyptian fleet in the Great Harbor and the wind swept the flames toward the city. After this event, there were no more explicit references to the main library, suggesting that it may have been destroyed altogether. But even if it wasn’t, the loss would have been a disaster; Livy stated that as many as four hundred thousand scrolls were lost in the fire. However, the smaller collection is known to have survived the Alexandrine War. The Serapeum temple is known to have survived into the fourth century and would have been the logical home of the books, since it was designed to appeal to Egyptians and the ancient Egyptian practice had been to combine temples with libraries and colleges. However, there is no definitive evidence that the books were still actually there. Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis, who died in 402, claimed in his Weights and Measures that the daughter library was still there, but his work is the only source that claims this, and all other descriptions of the destruction of the temple make no reference to the books. Even the virulently anti-Christian Eunapius of Antioch, who might be expected to blame Christians for any possible atrocity, does not mention the destruction of the library. And so, “the fate of one of Alexandria’s great libraries again slips through our fingers.” (Page 264).
Finally, some food for thought from the introduction: “Other libraries have held more books; indeed, today the Library of Congress in Washington and the British Library in London hold between them nearly every book printed in the last two hundred years and many more besides. But they are not complete, not least because most of the knowledge of the first thousand years of Western civilization is missing. These were the books that formed the library of Alexandria, and only a handful have been seen since that library’s tragic destruction. All that remains is perhaps 1 percent of the works that were once lodged there, the chance survivors of that shipwreck of human achievement.” But this also made me start wondering in what sense any library is “complete,” because in some ways there are two different kinds of books – those already written and those waiting to be written. And we need them all.
I had heard snippets about the Ptolemaic era before but didn’t have much context to put it in. Now I do, and among other things I learned that the Ptolemaic family dynasty was one of the more ruthlessly dysfunctional ones around, despite its interest in fostering philosophy and the advancement of knowledge. It was also amazing to read about how the ancient Alexandrians had correctly deduced the shape of the earth and extensively mapped almost all of the known world at the time. While their original maps have been lost, their books left such detailed descriptions and instructions for creating them that Renaissance scholars were able to reconstruct them. They also invented the water clock, an analog computer (the Antikythera mechanism is worth Googling), and the forerunner of the steam engine. The scholar Aristarchus had even discovered heliocentrism, and Copernicus’s handwritten manuscripts contain references to Aristarchus’s work, although for unknown reasons he later removed these from the printed version of his text.
I also really enjoyed learning more about the Library of Alexandria. At its peak the library held 750,000 scrolls. I am going to use “books” and “scrolls” interchangeably here, not least because this book does the same. To my mind, a library by definition has books and I’m not sure what I’d call a collection of scrolls.
I actually have a substantially lower opinion of the legendary library than when I started, because it turns out that many of its books were actually stolen from other libraries in the ancient world, and a book-stealing library – especially in the days before the printing press – is no library for me. For example, books that a library in Athens had sent to be copied were never returned and neither were any of the copies, meaning that when the library was destroyed all of material the Athens library had sent was lost forever. It gave me some insight into the reasoning behind creating the famous “chained libraries” of the Middle Ages, some of which still exist. Not only that, but all the books coming in to Alexandria were confiscated for copying; the originals went into the library while the copies were given to the original owners. I am glad that today’s libraries have substantially different acquisitions policies. In fact, the Library of Congress has been known to repatriate valuable antique books upon learning that the sellers had fraudulently acquired them.
No one knows for sure how the Library of Alexandria, both its main collection and a smaller “daughter” collection most likely kept at the Serapeum temple, were lost. But it is likely that most or even all of the main collection was destroyed during the Alexandrine War, when Julius Caesar burned the Egyptian fleet in the Great Harbor and the wind swept the flames toward the city. After this event, there were no more explicit references to the main library, suggesting that it may have been destroyed altogether. But even if it wasn’t, the loss would have been a disaster; Livy stated that as many as four hundred thousand scrolls were lost in the fire. However, the smaller collection is known to have survived the Alexandrine War. The Serapeum temple is known to have survived into the fourth century and would have been the logical home of the books, since it was designed to appeal to Egyptians and the ancient Egyptian practice had been to combine temples with libraries and colleges. However, there is no definitive evidence that the books were still actually there. Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis, who died in 402, claimed in his Weights and Measures that the daughter library was still there, but his work is the only source that claims this, and all other descriptions of the destruction of the temple make no reference to the books. Even the virulently anti-Christian Eunapius of Antioch, who might be expected to blame Christians for any possible atrocity, does not mention the destruction of the library. And so, “the fate of one of Alexandria’s great libraries again slips through our fingers.” (Page 264).
Finally, some food for thought from the introduction: “Other libraries have held more books; indeed, today the Library of Congress in Washington and the British Library in London hold between them nearly every book printed in the last two hundred years and many more besides. But they are not complete, not least because most of the knowledge of the first thousand years of Western civilization is missing. These were the books that formed the library of Alexandria, and only a handful have been seen since that library’s tragic destruction. All that remains is perhaps 1 percent of the works that were once lodged there, the chance survivors of that shipwreck of human achievement.” But this also made me start wondering in what sense any library is “complete,” because in some ways there are two different kinds of books – those already written and those waiting to be written. And we need them all.
informative
slow-paced
informative
slow-paced