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Library of Alexandria
(Redirected from Library at Alexandria)
This article is about the ancient library founded by the Ptolemaic dynasty. For the modern library in Alexandria named after it, see Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
"Great Library" redirects here. For the library of Quebec in Montreal, see Grande Bibliothèque. For the library of Bagdad during the Islamic Golden Age, see House of Wisdom.
one of the largest libraries in the ancient world, located in Alexandria, Egypt
Nineteenth century artistic rendering of the Library of Alexandria by the German artist O. Von Corven, based partially on the archaeological evidence available at that time[1]
Ptolemaic Kingdom
Probably during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BC)[2][3]
Items collected
Any written works[4][5]
Estimates vary; somewhere between 40,000 and 400,000 scrolls,[6] perhaps equivalent to roughly 100,000 books[7]
Estimated to have employed over 100 scholars at its height[8][9]
The Great Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world. The Library was part of a larger research institution called the Mouseion, which was dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts.[10] The idea of a universal library in Alexandria may have been proposed by Demetrius of Phalerum, an exiled Athenian statesman living in Alexandria, to Ptolemy I Soter, who may have established plans for the Library, but the Library itself was probably not built until the reign of his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus. The Library quickly acquired many papyrus scrolls, due largely to the Ptolemaic kings' aggressive and well-funded policies for procuring texts. It is unknown precisely how many such scrolls were housed at any given time, but estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 at its height.
Alexandria came to be regarded as the capital of knowledge and learning, in part because of the Great Library.[11] Many important and influential scholars worked at the Library during the third and second centuries BC, including, among many others: Zenodotus of Ephesus, who worked towards standardizing the texts of the Homeric poems; Callimachus, who wrote the Pinakes, sometimes considered to be the world's first library catalogue; Apollonius of Rhodes, who composed the epic poem the Argonautica; Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who calculated the circumference of the earth within a few hundred kilometers of accuracy; Aristophanes of Byzantium, who invented the system of Greek diacritics and was the first to divide poetic texts into lines; and Aristarchus of Samothrace, who produced the definitive texts of the Homeric poems as well as extensive commentaries on them. During the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes, a daughter library was established in the Serapeum, a temple to the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis.
Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries, starting with the purging of intellectuals from Alexandria in 145 BC during the reign of Ptolemy VIII Physcon, which resulted in Aristarchus of Samothrace, the head librarian, resigning from his position and exiling himself to Cyprus. Many other scholars, including Dionysius Thrax and Apollodorus of Athens, fled to other cities, where they continued teaching and conducting scholarship. The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed and it seems to have either survived or been rebuilt shortly thereafter; the geographer Strabo mentions having visited the Mouseion in around 20 BC and the prodigious scholarly output of Didymus Chalcenterus in Alexandria from this period indicates that he had access to at least some of the Library's resources.
The Library dwindled during the Roman Period, due to lack of funding and support. Its membership appears to have ceased by the 260s AD. Between 270 and 275 AD, the city of Alexandria saw a rebellion and an imperial counterattack that probably destroyed whatever remained of the Library, if it still existed at that time. The daughter library of the Serapeum may have survived after the main Library's destruction. The Serapeum was vandalized and demolished in 391 AD under a decree issued by Coptic Christian Pope Theophilus of Alexandria, but it does not seem to have housed books at the time and was mainly used as a gathering place for Neoplatonist philosophers following the teachings of Iamblichus.
1 Historical background
2 Under Ptolemaic patronage
2.1 Founding
2.2 Early expansion and organization
2.3 Early scholarship
2.4 Later scholarship and expansion
2.5 Peak of literary criticism
3 Decline
3.1 After Ptolemy VIII's expulsions
3.2 Burning by Julius Caesar
3.3 Roman Period and destruction
4 Successors to the Mouseion
4.1 Serapeum
4.2 School of Theon and Hypatia
4.3 Later schools and libraries in Alexandria
5 Collection
6.1 In antiquity
6.2 Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Historical background[edit]
A Hellenistic bust depicting Ptolemy I Soter, 3rd century BC, the Louvre, Paris
A Roman copy of an original 3rd century BC Greek bust depicting Alexander the Great, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen
The Library of Alexandria was not the first library of its kind.[12][3] A long tradition of libraries existed in both Greece and in the ancient Near East.[13][3] The earliest recorded archive of written materials comes from the ancient Sumerian city-state of Uruk in around 3400 BC, when writing had only just begun to develop.[14] Scholarly curation of literary texts began in around 2500 BC.[14] The later kingdoms and empires of the ancient Near East had long traditions of book collecting.[15][3] The ancient Hittites and Assyrians had massive archives containing records written in many different languages.[15] The most famous library of the ancient Near East was the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, founded in the seventh century BC by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (ruled 668–c. 627 BC).[14][3] A large library also existed in Babylon during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II (c. 605–c. 562 BC).[15] In Greece, the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos was said to have founded the first major public library in the sixth century BC.[16] It was out of this mixed heritage of both Greek and Near Eastern book collections that the idea for the Library of Alexandria was born.[17][3]
The Macedonian kings who succeeded Alexander the Great as rulers of the Near East wanted to promote Hellenistic culture and learning throughout the known world.[18] Historian Roy MacLeod calls this "a programme of cultural imperialism".[4] These rulers, therefore, had a vested interest to collect and compile information from both the Greeks and from the far more ancient kingdoms of the Near East.[18] Libraries enhanced a city's prestige, attracted scholars, and provided practical assistance in matters of ruling and governing the kingdom.[4][19] Eventually, for these reasons, every major Hellenistic urban center would have a royal library.[4][20] The Library of Alexandria, however, was unprecedented due to the scope and scale of the Ptolemies' ambitions;[4][21] unlike their predecessors and contemporaries, the Ptolemies wanted to produce a repository of all knowledge.[4][5]
Under Ptolemaic patronage[edit]
Founding[edit]
Bust excavated at the Villa of the Papyri depicting Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who is believed to have been the one to establish the Library as an actual institution, although plans for it may have been developed by his father Ptolemy I Soter[2]
The Library was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world, but details about it are a mixture of history and legend.[17] The earliest known surviving source of information on the founding of the Library of Alexandria is the pseudepigraphic Letter of Aristeas, which was composed between c. 180 and c. 145 BC.[22][23][15] The Letter of Aristeas claims that the Library was founded during the reign of Ptolemy I Soter (c. 323–c. 283 BC) and that it was initially organized by Demetrius of Phalerum, a student of Aristotle who had been exiled from Athens and taken refuge in Alexandria within the Ptolemaic court.[23][15][24] Nonetheless, the Letter of Aristeas is very late and it contains information that is now known to be inaccurate.[23] Other sources claim that the Library was instead created under the reign of Ptolemy I's son Ptolemy II Philadelphus (283–246 BC).[3]
Modern scholars agree that, while it is possible that Ptolemy I may have laid the groundwork for the Library, it probably did not come into being as a physical institution until the reign of Ptolemy II.[23] By that time, Demetrius of Phalerum had fallen out of favor with the Ptolemaic court and could not, therefore, have had any role in establishing the Library as an institution.[2] Stephen V. Tracy, however, argues that it is highly probable that Demetrius played an important role in collecting at least some of the earliest texts that would later become part of the Library's collection.[2] In around 295 BC or thereabouts, Demetrius may have acquired early texts of the writings of Aristotle and Theophrastus, which he would have been uniquely positioned to do, since he was a distinguished member of the Peripatetic school.[25]
The Library was built in the Brucheion (Royal Quarter) as part of the Mouseion.[26][a] Its main purpose was to show off the wealth of Egypt, with research as a lesser goal,[22] but its contents were used to aid the ruler of Egypt.[28] The exact layout of the library is not known, but ancient sources describe the Library of Alexandria as comprising a collection of scrolls, Greek columns, a peripatos walk, a room for shared dining, a reading room, meeting rooms, gardens, and lecture halls, creating a model for the modern university campus.[29] A hall contained shelves for the collections of papyrus scrolls known as bibliothekai (βιβλιοθῆκαι). According to popular description, an inscription above the shelves read: "The place of the cure of the soul."[30]
Early expansion and organization[edit]
Map of ancient Alexandria. The Mouseion was located in the royal Broucheion quarter (listed on this map as "Bruchium") in the central part of the city near the Great Harbor ("Portus Magnus" on the map).[31]
The Ptolemaic rulers intended the Library to be a collection of all knowledge[28] and they worked to expand the Library's collections through an aggressive and well-funded policy of book purchasing.[32] They dispatched royal agents with large amounts of money and ordered them to purchase and collect as many texts as they possibly could, about any subject and by any author.[32] Older copies of texts were favored over newer ones, since it was assumed that older copies had undergone less copying and that they were therefore more likely to more closely resemble what the original author had written.[32] This program involved trips to the book fairs of Rhodes and Athens.[33] According to the Greek medical writer Galen, under the decree of Ptolemy II, any books found on ships that came into port were taken to the library, where they were copied by official scribes.[34][3][35][8][19] The original texts were kept in the library, and the copies delivered to the owners.[34][9][8][19] The Library particularly focused on acquiring manuscripts of the Homeric poems, which were the foundation of Greek education and revered above all other poems.[36] The Library therefore acquired many different manuscripts of these poems, tagging each copy with a label to indicate where it had come from.[36]
In addition to collecting works from the past, the Mouseion which housed the Library also served as home to a host of international scholars, poets, philosophers, and researchers, who, according to the first-century BC Greek geographer Strabo, were provided with a large salary, free food and lodging, and exemption from taxes.[37][38][39] They had a large, circular dining hall with a high domed ceiling in which they ate meals communally.[39] There were also numerous classrooms, where the scholars were expected to at least occasionally teach students.[39] Ptolemy II Philadelphus is said to have had a keen interest in zoology, so it has been speculated that the Mouseion may have even had a zoo for exotic animals.[39] According to classical scholar Lionel Casson, the idea was that if the scholars were completely freed from all the burdens of everyday life they would be able to devote more time to research and intellectual pursuits.[32] Strabo called the group of scholars who lived at the Mouseion a σύνοδος (synodos, "community").[39] As early as 283 BC, they may have numbered between thirty and fifty learned men.[39]
Early scholarship[edit]
The Library of Alexandria was not affiliated with any particular philosophical school and, consequently, scholars who studied there had considerable academic freedom.[9] They were, however, subject to the authority of the king.[9] A probably apocryphal story is told of a poet named Sotades who wrote an obscene epigram making fun of Ptolemy II for marrying his sister Arsinoe II.[9] Ptolemy II is said to have jailed him and, after he escaped, sealed him in a lead jar and dropped him into the sea.[9] As a religious center, the Mouseion was directed by a priest of the Muses known as an epistates, who was appointed by the king in the same manner as the priests who managed the various Egyptian temples.[40] The Library itself was directed by a scholar who served as head librarian, as well as tutor to the king's son.[39][41][42][43]
The first recorded head librarian was Zenodotus of Ephesus (lived c. 325–c. 270 BC).[42][43] Zenodotus's main work was devoted to the establishment of canonical texts for the Homeric poems and the early Greek lyric poets.[42][43] Most of what is known about him comes from later commentaries that mention his preferred readings of particular passages.[42] Zenodotus is known to have written a glossary of rare and unusual words, which was organized in alphabetical order, making him the first person known to have employed alphabetical order as a method of organization.[43] Since the collection at the Library of Alexandria seems to have been organized in alphabetical order by the first letter of the author's name from very early, Casson concludes that it is highly probable that Zenodotus was the one who organized it in this way.[43] Zenodotus's system of alphabetization, however, only used the first letter of the word[43] and it was not until the second century AD that anyone is known to have applied the same method of alphabetization to the remaining letters of the word.[43]
Meanwhile, the scholar and poet Callimachus compiled the Pinakes, a 120-book catalogue of various authors and all their known works.[42][41][9] The Pinakes has not survived, but enough references to it and fragments of it have survived to allow scholars to reconstruct its basic structure.[44] The Pinakes was divided into multiple sections, each containing entries for writers of a particular genre of literature.[9][44] The most basic division was between writers of poetry and prose, with each section divided into smaller subsections.[44] Each section listed authors in alphabetical order.[45] Each entry included the author's name, father's name, place of birth, and other brief biographical information, sometimes including nicknames by which that author was known, followed by a complete list of all that author's known works.[45] The entries for prolific authors such as Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, and Theophrastus must have been extremely long, spanning multiple columns of text.[45] Although Callimachus did his most famous work at the Library of Alexandria, he never held the position of head librarian there.[41][9] Callimachus's pupil Hermippus of Smyrna wrote biographies, Philostephanus of Cyrene studied geography, and Istros (who may have also been from Cyrene) studied Attic antiquities.[46] In addition to the Great Library, many other smaller libraries also began to spring up all around the city of Alexandria.[9]
According to legend, the Syracusan inventor Archimedes invented the Archimedes' screw, a pump for transporting water, while studying at the Library of Alexandria.[47]
After Zenodotus either died or retired, Ptolemy II Philadelphus appointed Apollonius of Rhodes (lived c. 295–c. 215 BC), a native of Alexandria and a student of Callimachus, as the second head librarian of the Library of Alexandria.[42][46][47] Philadelphus also appointed Apollonius of Rhodes as the tutor to his son, the future Ptolemy III Euergetes.[46] Apollonius of Rhodes is best known as the author of the Argonautica, an epic poem about the voyages of Jason and the Argonauts, which has survived to the present in its complete form.[48][47] The Argonautica displays Apollonius's vast knowledge of history and literature and makes allusions to a vast array of events and texts, while simultaneously imitating the style of the Homeric poems.[48] Some fragments of his scholarly writings have also survived, but he is generally more famous today as a poet than as a scholar.[42]
According to legend, during the librarianship of Apollonius, the mathematician and inventor Archimedes (lived c. 287 –c. 212 BC) came to visit the Library of Alexandria.[47] During his time in Egypt, Archimedes is said to have observed the rise and fall of the Nile, leading him to invent the Archimedes' screw, which can be used to transport water from low-lying bodies into irrigation ditches.[47] Archimedes later returned to Syracuse, where he continued making new inventions.[47]
According to two late and largely unreliable biographies, Apollonius was forced to resign from his position as head librarian and moved to the island of Rhodes (after which he takes his name) on account of the hostile reception he received in Alexandria to the first draft of his Argonautica.[49] It is more likely that Apollonius's resignation was on account of Ptolemy III Euergetes's ascension to the throne in 246 BC.[48]
Later scholarship and expansion[edit]
Illustration showing a portion of the globe showing a part of the African continent. The sunbeams shown as two rays hitting the ground at Syene and Alexandria. Angle of sunbeam and the gnomons (vertical pole) is shown at Alexandria, which allowed Eratosthenes' estimates of radius and circumference of Earth.
The third head librarian, Eratosthenes of Cyrene (lived c. 280–c. 194 BC), is best known today for his scientific works, but he was also a literary scholar.[41][50][47] Eratosthenes's most important work was his treatise Geographika, which was originally in three volumes.[51] The work itself has not survived, but many fragments of it are preserved through quotation in the writings of the later geographer Strabo.[51] Eratosthenes was the first scholar to apply mathematics to geography and map-making[52] and, in his treatise Concerning the Measurement of the Earth, he calculated the circumference of the earth and was only off by less than a few hundred kilometers.[52][47][53] Eratosthenes also produced a map of the entire known world, which incorporated information taken from sources held in the Library, including accounts of Alexander the Great's campaigns in India and reports written by members of Ptolemaic elephant-hunting expeditions along the coast of East Africa.[53]
Eratosthenes was the first person to advance geography towards becoming a scientific discipline.[54] Eratosthenes believed that the setting of the Homeric poems was purely imaginary and argued that the purpose of poetry was "to capture the soul", rather than to give a historically accurate account of actual events.[51] Strabo quotes him as having sarcastically commented, "a man might find the places of Odysseus's wanderings if the day were to come when he would find the leatherworker who stitched the goatskin of the winds."[51] Meanwhile, other scholars at the Library of Alexandria also displayed interest in scientific subjects.[55][56] Bacchius of Tanagra, a contemporary of Eratosthenes, edited and commented on the medical writings of the Hippocratic Corpus.[55] The doctors Herophilus (lived c. 335–c. 280 BC) and Erasistratus (c. 304–c. 250 BC) studied human anatomy, but their studies were hindered by protests against the dissection of human corpses, which was seen as immoral.[57]
According to Galen, around this time, Ptolemy III requested permission from the Athenians to borrow the original manuscripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, for which the Athenians demanded the enormous amount of fifteen talents (1,000 lb, 450 kg) of a precious metal as guarantee that he would return them.[58][39][5][59] Ptolemy III had expensive copies of the plays made on the highest quality papyrus and sent the Athenians the copies, keeping the original manuscripts for the library and telling the Athenians they could keep the talents.[58][39][5][59] This story may also be construed erroneously to show the power of Alexandria over Athens during the Ptolemaic dynasty. This detail arises from the fact that Alexandria was a man-made bidirectional port between the mainland and the Pharos island, welcoming trade from the East and West, and soon found itself to be an international hub for trade, the leading producer of papyrus and, soon enough, books.[60] As the Library expanded, it ran out of space to house the scrolls in its collection, so, during the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes, it opened a satellite collection in the Serapeum of Alexandria, a temple to the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis located near the royal palace.[9][32][8]
Peak of literary criticism[edit]
Present-day ruins of the Serapeum of Alexandria, where the Library of Alexandria moved part of its collection after it ran out of storage space in the main building[9]
Aristophanes of Byzantium (lived c. 257–c. 180 BC) became the fourth head librarian sometime around 200 BC.[61] According to a legend recorded by the Roman writer Vitruvius, Aristophanes was one of seven judges appointed for a poetry competition hosted by Ptolemy III Euergetes.[61][62] All six of the other judges favored one competitor, but Aristophanes favored the one whom the audience had liked the least.[61][63] Aristophanes declared that all of the poets except for the one he had chosen had committed plagiarism and were therefore disqualified.[61][63] The king demanded that he prove this, so he retrieved the texts that the authors had plagiarized from the Library, locating them by memory.[61][63] On account of his impressive memory and diligence, Ptolemy III appointed him as head librarian.[63]
The librarianship of Aristophanes of Byzantium is widely considered to have opened a more mature phase of the Library of Alexandria's history.[42][64][57] During this phase of the Library's history, literary criticism reached its peak[42][64] and came to dominate the Library's scholarly output.[65] Aristophanes of Byzantium edited poetic texts and introduced the division of poems into separate lines on the page, since they had previously been written out just like prose.[66] He also invented the system of Greek diacritics,[67][57] wrote important works on lexicography,[42] and introduced a series of signs for textual criticism.[68] He wrote introductions to many plays, some of which have survived in partially rewritten forms.[42] The fifth head librarian was an obscure individual named Apollonius, who is known by the epithet Greek: ὁ εἰδογράφος ("the classifier of forms").[42][69] One late lexicographical source explains this epithet as referring to the classification of poetry on the basis of musical forms.[69]
During the early second century BC, several scholars at the Library of Alexandria studied works on medicine.[55] Zeuxis the Empiricist is credited with having written commentaries on the Hippocratic Corpus[55] and he actively worked to procure medical writings for the Library's collection.[55] A scholar named Ptolemy Epithetes wrote a treatise on wounds in the Homeric poems, a subject straddling the line between traditional philology and medicine.[55] However, it was also during the early second century BC that the political power of Ptolemaic Egypt began to decline.[70] After the Battle of Raphia in 217 BC, Ptolemaic power became increasingly unstable.[70] There were uprisings among segments of the Egyptian population and, in the first half of the second century BC, connection with Upper Egypt became largely disrupted.[70] Ptolemaic rulers also began to emphasize the Egyptian aspect of their nation over the Greek aspect.[70] Consequently, many Greek scholars began to leave Alexandria for safer countries with more generous patronages.[42][70]
Aristarchus of Samothrace (lived c. 216–c. 145 BC) was the sixth head librarian.[42] He earned a reputation as the greatest of all ancient scholars and produced not only texts of classic poems and works of prose, but full hypomnemata, or long, free-standing commentaries, on them.[42] These commentaries would typically cite a passage of a classical text, explain its meaning, define any unusual words used in it, and comment on whether the words in the passage were really those used by the original author or if they were later interpolations added by scribes.[71] He made many contributions to a variety of studies, but particularly the study of the Homeric poems,[42] and his editorial opinions are widely quoted by ancient authors as authoritative.[42] A portion of one of Aristarchus's commentaries on the Histories of Herodotus has survived in a papyrus fragment.[42][71] In 145 BC, however, Aristarchus became caught up in a dynastic struggle in which he supported Ptolemy VII Neos Philopator as the ruler of Egypt.[72] Ptolemy VII was murdered and succeeded by Ptolemy VIII Physcon, who immediately set about punishing all those who had supported his predecessor, forcing Aristarchus to flee Egypt and take refuge on the island of Cyprus, where he died shortly thereafter.[72][42] Ptolemy VIII expelled all foreign scholars from Alexandria, forcing them to disperse across the Eastern Mediterranean.[42][70]
Decline[edit]
After Ptolemy VIII's expulsions[edit]
Ptolemy VIII Physcon's expulsion of the scholars from Alexandria brought about a shift in the history of Hellenistic scholarship.[73] The scholars who had studied at the Library of Alexandria and their students continued to conduct research and write treatises, but most of them no longer did so in association with the Library.[73] A diaspora of Alexandrian scholarship occurred, in which scholars dispersed first throughout the eastern Mediterranean and later throughout the western Mediterranean as well.[73] Aristarchus's student Dionysius Thrax (c. 170–c. 90 BC) established a school on the Greek island of Rhodes.[74][75] Dionysius Thrax wrote the first book on Greek grammar, a succinct guide to speaking and writing clearly and effectively.[75] This book remained the primary grammar textbook for Greek schoolboys until as late as the twelfth century AD.[75] The Romans based their grammatical writings on it, and its basic format remains the basis for grammar guides in many languages even today.[75] Another one of Aristarchus's pupils, Apollodorus of Athens (c. 180–c. 110 BC), went to Alexandria's greatest rival, Pergamum, where he taught and conducted research.[74] This diaspora prompted the historian Menecles of Barce to sarcastically comment that Alexandria had become the teacher of all Greeks and barbarians alike.[76]
Meanwhile, in Alexandria, from the middle of the second century BC onwards, Ptolemaic rule in Egypt grew less stable than it had been previously.[77] Confronted with growing social unrest and other major political and economic problems, the later Ptolemies did not devote as much attention towards the Library and the Mouseion as their predecessors had.[77] The status of both the Library and the head librarian diminished.[77] Several of the later Ptolemies used the position of head librarian as a mere political plum to reward their most devoted supporters.[77] Ptolemy VIII appointed a man named Cydas, one of his palace guards, as head librarian[78][77] and Ptolemy IX Soter II (ruled 88–81 BC) is said to have given the position to a political supporter.[77] Eventually, the position of head librarian lost so much of its former prestige that even contemporary authors ceased to take interest in recording the terms of office for individual head librarians.[78]
A shift in Greek scholarship at large occurred around the beginning of the first century BC.[74][79] By this time, all major classical poetic texts had finally been standardized and extensive commentaries had already been produced on the writings of all the major literary authors of the Greek Classical Era.[74] Consequently, there was little original work left for scholars to do with these texts.[74] Many scholars began producing syntheses and reworkings of the commentaries of the Alexandrian scholars of previous centuries, at the expense of their own originalities.[74][79][b] Other scholars branched out and began writing commentaries on the poetic works of postclassical authors, including Alexandrian poets such as Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes.[74] Meanwhile, Alexandrian scholarship was probably introduced to Rome in the first century BC by Tyrannion of Amisus (c. 100–c. 25 BC), a student of Dionysius Thrax.[74]
Burning by Julius Caesar[edit]
The Roman general Julius Caesar was forced to set fire to his own ships during the Siege of Alexandria in 48 BC.[8] Many ancient writers report that the fire spread and destroyed at least part of the Library of Alexandria's collections;[8] however, the Library seems to have either at least partially survived or been quickly rebuilt.[8]
In 48 BC, during Caesar's Civil War, Julius Caesar was besieged at Alexandria. His soldiers set fire to his own ships while trying to clear the wharves to block the fleet belonging to Cleopatra's brother Ptolemy XIV.[80][81][57][8] This fire spread to the parts of the city nearest to the docks, causing considerable devastation.[81][78][8] The first-century AD Roman playwright and Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger quotes Livy's Ab Urbe Condita Libri, which was written between 63 and 14 BC, as saying that the fire started by Caesar destroyed 40,000 scrolls from the Library of Alexandria.[57][78][8][82] The Greek Middle Platonist Plutarch (c. 46–120 AD) writes in his Life of Caesar that, "[W]hen the enemy endeavored to cut off his communication by sea, he was forced to divert that danger by setting fire to his own ships, which, after burning the docks, thence spread on and destroyed the great library."[83][84][8] The Roman historian Cassius Dio (c. 155 –c. 235 AD), however, writes: "Many places were set on fire, with the result that, along with other buildings, the dockyards and storehouses of grain and books, said to be great in number and of the finest, were burned."[84][78][8] However, Florus and Lucan only mention that the flames burned the fleet itself and some "houses near the sea".[85]
Scholars have interpreted Cassius Dio's wording to indicate that the fire did not actually destroy the entire Library itself, but rather only a warehouse located near the docks being used by the Library to house scrolls.[84][78][8][86] Whatever devastation Caesar's fire may have caused, the Library was evidently not completely destroyed.[84][78][8][86] The geographer Strabo (c. 63 BC–c. 24 AD) mentions visiting the Mouseion, the larger research institution to which the Library was attached, in around 20 BC, several decades after Caesar's fire, indicating that it either survived the fire or was rebuilt soon afterwards.[84][8] Nonetheless, Strabo's manner of talking about the Mouseion shows that it was nowhere near as prestigious as it had been a few centuries prior.[8] Despite mentioning the Mouseion, Strabo does not mention the Library separately, perhaps indicating that it had been so drastically reduced in stature and significance that Strabo felt it did not warrant separate mention.[8] It is unclear what happened to the Mouseion after Strabo's mention of it.[57]
Furthermore, Plutarch records in his Life of Marc Antony that, in the years leading up to the Battle of Actium in 33 BC, Mark Antony was rumored to have given Cleopatra all 200,000 scrolls in the Library of Pergamum.[84][78] Plutarch himself notes that his source for this anecdote was sometimes unreliable and it is possible that the story may be nothing more than propaganda intended to show that Mark Antony was loyal to Cleopatra and Egypt rather than to Rome.[84] Casson, however, argues that, even if the story was made up, it would not have been believable unless the Library still existed.[84] Edward J. Watts argues that Mark Antony's gift may have been intended to replenish the Library's collection after the damage to it caused by Caesar's fire roughly a decade and a half prior.[78]
Further evidence for the Library's survival after 48 BC comes from the fact that the most notable producer of composite commentaries during the late first century BC and early first century AD was a scholar who worked in Alexandria named Didymus Chalcenterus, whose epithet Χαλκέντερος (Chalkénteros) means "bronze guts".[87][84] Didymus is said to have produced somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 books, making him the most prolific known writer in all of antiquity.[87][79] He was also given the nickname βιβλιολάθης (Biblioláthēs), meaning "book-forgetter" because it was said that even he could not remember all the books he had written.[87][88] Parts of some of Didymus's commentaries have been preserved in the forms of later extracts and these remains are modern scholars' most important sources of information about the critical works of the earlier scholars at the Library of Alexandria.[87] Lionel Casson states that Didymus's prodigious output "would have been impossible without at least a good part of the resources of the library at his disposal."[84]
Roman Period and destruction[edit]
This Latin inscription regarding Tiberius Claudius Balbilus of Rome (d. c. AD 79) mentions the "ALEXANDRINA BYBLIOTHECE" (line eight).
Very little is known about the Library of Alexandria during the time of the Roman Principate (27 BC–284 AD).[78] The emperor Claudius (ruled 41–54 AD) is recorded to have built an addition onto the Library,[89] but it seems that the Library of Alexandria's general fortunes followed those of the city of Alexandria itself.[90] After Alexandria came under Roman rule, the city's status and, consequently that of its famous Library, gradually diminished.[90] While the Mouseion still existed, membership was granted not on the basis of scholarly achievement, but rather on the basis of distinction in government, the military, or even in athletics.[77]
The same was evidently the case even for the position of head librarian;[77] the only known head librarian from the Roman Period was a man named Tiberius Claudius Balbilus, who lived in the middle of the first century AD and was a politician, administrator, and military officer with no record of substantial scholarly achievements.[77] Members of the Mouseion were no longer required to teach, conduct research, or even live in Alexandria.[91] The Greek writer Philostratus records that the emperor Hadrian (ruled 117–138 AD) appointed the ethnographer Dionysius of Miletus and the sophist Polemon of Laodicea as members of the Mouseion, even though neither of these men are known to have ever spent any significant amount of time in Alexandria.[91]
Meanwhile, as the reputation of Alexandrian scholarship declined, the reputations of other libraries across the Mediterranean world improved, diminishing the Library of Alexandria's former status as the most prominent.[90] Other libraries also sprang up within the city of Alexandria itself[78] and the scrolls from the Great Library may have been used to stock some of these smaller libraries.[78] The Caesareum and the Claudianum in Alexandria are both known to have had major libraries by the end of the first century AD.[78] The Serapeum, originally the "daughter library" of the Great Library, probably expanded during this period as well, according to classical historian Edward J. Watts.[92]
By the second century AD, the Roman Empire grew less dependent on grain from Alexandria and the city's prominence declined further.[90] The Romans during this period also had less interest in Alexandrian scholarship, causing the Library's reputation to continue to decline as well.[90] The scholars who worked and studied at the Library of Alexandria during the time of the Roman Empire were less well known than the ones who had studied there during the Ptolemaic Period.[90] Eventually, the word "Alexandrian" itself came to be synonymous with the editing of texts, correction of textual errors, and writing of commentaries synthesized from those of earlier scholars—in other words, taking on connotations of pedantry, monotony, and lack of originality.[90] Mention of both the Great Library of Alexandria and the Mouseion that housed it disappear after the middle of the third century AD.[93] The last known references to scholars being members of the Mouseion date to the 260s.[93]
In 272 AD, the emperor Aurelian fought to recapture the city of Alexandria from the forces of the Palmyrene queen Zenobia.[93][77][3] During the course of the fighting, Aurelian's forces destroyed the Broucheion quarter of the city in which the main library was located.[93][77][3] If the Mouseion and Library still existed at this time, they were almost certainly destroyed during the attack as well.[93][77] If they did survive the attack, then whatever was left of them would have been destroyed during the emperor Diocletian's siege of Alexandria in 297.[93]
Successors to the Mouseion[edit]
Drawing from the Alexandrian World Chronicle depicting Pope Theophilus of Alexandria, gospel in hand, standing triumphantly atop the Serapeum in 391 AD[94]
Serapeum[edit]
Scattered references indicate that, sometime in the fourth century, an institution known as the "Mouseion" may have been reestablished at a different location somewhere in Alexandria.[93] Nothing, however, is known about the characteristics of this organization.[93] It may have possessed some bibliographic resources, but whatever they may have been, they were clearly not comparable to those of its predecessor.[95] For much of the late fourth century AD, the library of the Serapeum was probably the largest collection of books in the city of Alexandria.[96] In the 370s and 380s, the Serapeum was still a major pilgrimage site for many pagans.[97]
In addition to possessing the largest library in Alexandria, the Serapeum remained a fully functioning temple and it even had classrooms for philosophers to teach in.[97] It naturally tended to attract followers of Iamblichean Neoplatonism.[97] Most of these philosophers were primarily interested in theurgy, the study of cultic rituals and esoteric religious practices.[97] The Neoplatonist philosopher Damascius (lived c. 458–after 538) records that a man named Olympus came from Cilicia to teach at the Serapeum, where he enthusiastically taught his students the rules of traditional divine worship and ancient religious practices.[98] He enjoined his students to worship the old gods in traditional ways, and he may have even taught them theurgy.[99]
In 391 AD, a group of Christian workmen in Alexandria uncovered the remains of an old Mithraeum.[99] They gave some of the cult objects to the Christian bishop of Alexandria, Theophilus.[99] Theophilus had the cult objects paraded through the streets so they could be mocked and ridiculed.[99] The pagans of Alexandria were incensed by this act of desecration, especially the teachers of Neoplatonic philosophy and theurgy at the Serapeum.[99] The teachers at the Serapeum took up arms and led their students and other followers in a guerrilla attack on the Christian population of Alexandria, killing many of them before being forced to retreat.[99] In retaliation, the Christians vandalized and demolished the Serapeum,[100][101] although some parts of the colonnade were still standing as late as the twelfth century.[100] However, none of the accounts of the Serapeum's destruction mention anything about it having a library and sources written before its destruction speak of its collection of books in the past tense, indicating that it probably did not have any significant collection of scrolls in it at the time of its destruction.[102][103][101]
School of Theon and Hypatia[edit]
Hypatia (1885) by Charles William Mitchell, believed to be a depiction of a scene in Charles Kingsley's 1853 novel Hypatia[104]
The Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia, calls the mathematician Theon of Alexandria (c. AD 335–c. 405) a "man of the Mouseion".[105] According to classical historian Edward J. Watts, however, Theon was probably the head of a school called the "Mouseion", which was named in emulation of the Hellenistic Mouseion that had once included the Library of Alexandria, but which had little other connection to it.[105] Theon's school was exclusive, highly prestigious, and doctrinally conservative.[106] Neither Theon nor Hypatia seem to have had any connections to the militant Iamblichean Neoplatonists who taught in the Serapeum.[100] Instead, Theon seems to have rejected the teachings of Iamblichus[106] and may have taken pride in teaching a pure, Plotinian Neoplatonism.[106] In around 400 AD, Theon's daughter Hypatia (born c. 350–370; died 415 AD) succeeded him as the head of his school.[107] Like her father, she rejected the teachings of Iamblichus and instead embraced the original Neoplatonism formulated by Plotinus.[106]
Theophilus, the same bishop who ordered the destruction of the Serapeum, tolerated Hypatia's school and even encouraged two of her students to become bishops in territory under his authority.[108] Hypatia was extremely popular with the people of Alexandria[109] and exerted profound political influence.[109] Theophilus respected Alexandria's political structures and raised no objection to the close ties Hypatia established with Roman prefects.[108] Hypatia was later implicated in a political feud between Orestes, the Roman prefect of Alexandria, and Cyril of Alexandria, Theophilus's successor as bishop.[110][111] Rumors spread accusing her of preventing Orestes from reconciling with Cyril[110][112] and, in March of 415 AD, she was murdered by a mob of Christians, led by a lector named Peter.[110][113] She had no successor and her school collapsed after her death.[114]
Later schools and libraries in Alexandria[edit]
Nonetheless, Hypatia was not the last pagan in Alexandria, nor was she the last Neoplatonist philosopher.[115][116] Neoplatonism and paganism both survived in Alexandria and throughout the eastern Mediterranean for centuries after her death.[115][116] British Egyptologist Charlotte Booth notes that many new academic lecture halls were built in Alexandria at Kom el-Dikka shortly after Hypatia's death, indicating that philosophy was clearly still taught in Alexandrian schools.[117] The late fifth-century writers Zacharias Scholasticus and Aeneas of Gaza both speak of the "Mouseion" as occupying some kind of a physical space.[93] Archaeologists have identified lecture halls dating to around this time period, located near, but not on, the site of the Ptolemaic Mouseion, which may be the "Mouseion" to which these writers refer.[93]
In AD 642, Alexandria was captured by the Muslim army of 'Amr ibn al-'As. Several later Arabic sources describe the library's destruction by the order of Caliph Omar.[118][119] Bar-Hebraeus, writing in the thirteenth century, quotes Omar as saying to Yaḥyā al-Naḥwī: "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them."[120] Later scholars, including Father Eusèbe Renaudot in 1793, are skeptical of these stories, given the range of time that had passed before they were written down and the political motivations of the various writers.[121][122][123][124][125]
Collection[edit]
It is not possible to determine the collection's size in any era with certainty. Papyrus scrolls constituted the collection, and although codices were used after 300 BC, the Alexandrian Library is never documented as having switched to parchment, perhaps because of its strong links to the papyrus trade. (The Library of Alexandria in fact was indirectly causal in the creation of writing on parchment—due to the library's critical need for papyrus, little was exported and thus an alternate source of copy material became essential.)[126]
A single piece of writing might occupy several scrolls, and this division into self-contained "books" was a major aspect of editorial work. King Ptolemy II Philadelphus (309–246 BC) is said to have set 500,000 scrolls as an objective for the library.[127] The library's index, Callimachus's Pinakes, has only survived in the form of a few fragments, and it is not possible to know with certainty how large and how diverse the collection may have been. At its height, the library was said to possess nearly half a million scrolls, and, although historians debate the precise number, the highest estimates claim 400,000 scrolls while the most conservative estimates are as low as 40,000,[6] which is still an enormous collection that required vast storage space.[128]
As a research institution, the library filled its stacks with new works in mathematics, astronomy, physics, natural sciences and other subjects. Its empirical standards were applied in one of the first and certainly strongest homes for serious textual criticism. As the same text often existed in several different versions, comparative textual criticism was crucial for ensuring their veracity. Once ascertained, canonical copies would then be made for scholars, royalty, and wealthy bibliophiles the world over, this commerce bringing income to the library.[37]
Legacy[edit]
Illustration by Yahyá al-Wasiti from 1237 depicting Arab scholars at an Abbasid library in Baghdad
In antiquity[edit]
The Library of Alexandria was one of the largest and most prestigious libraries of the ancient world, but it was far from the only one.[7][129][130] By the end of the Hellenistic Period, almost every city in the Eastern Mediterranean had a public library and so did many medium-sized towns.[7][4] During the Roman Period, the number of libraries only proliferated.[131] By the fourth century AD, there were at least two dozen public libraries in the city of Rome itself alone.[131]
In late antiquity, as the Roman Empire became Christianized, Christian libraries modeled directly on the Library of Alexandria and other great libraries of earlier pagan times began to be founded all across the Greek-speaking eastern part of the empire.[131] Among the largest and most prominent of these libraries were the Theological Library of Caesarea Maritima, the Library of Jerusalem, and a Christian library in Alexandria.[131] These libraries held both pagan and Christian writings side-by-side[131] and Christian scholars applied to the Judeo-Christian scriptures the same philological techniques that the scholars of the Library of Alexandria had used for analyzing the Greek classics.[131] Nonetheless, the study of pagan authors remained secondary to the study of the Christian scriptures until the Renaissance.[131]
Ironically, the survival of ancient texts owes nothing to the great libraries of antiquity and instead owes everything to the fact that they were exhaustingly copied and recopied, at first by professional scribes during the Roman Period onto papyrus and later by monks during the Middle Ages onto parchment.[1][132]
Bibliotheca Alexandrina[edit]
Main article: Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Interior of the modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina
The idea of reviving the ancient Library of Alexandria in the modern era was first proposed in 1974, when Lotfy Dowidar was president of the University of Alexandria.[133] In May 1986, Egypt requested the Executive Board of UNESCO to allow the international organization to conduct a feasibility study for the project.[133] This marked the beginning of UNESCO and the international community's involvement in trying to bring the project to fruition.[133] Starting in 1988, UNESCO and the UNDP worked to support the international architectural competition to design the Library.[133] Egypt devoted four hectares of land for the building of the Library and established the National High Commission for the Library of Alexandria.[134] Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak took a personal interest in the project, which greatly contributed to its advancement.[135] Completed in 2002, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina now functions as a modern library and cultural center, commemorating the original Library of Alexandria.[136] In line with the mission of the Great Library of Alexandria, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina also houses the International School of Information Science (ISIS), a school for students preparing for highly specialized post-graduate degrees, whose goal is to train professional staff for libraries in Egypt and across the Middle East.[137]
Egypt portal
^ "Mouseion" means "House of Muses", whence the term "museum".[27]
^ This shift paralleled a similar, concurrent trend in philosophy, in which many philosophers were beginning to synthesize the views of earlier philosophers rather than coming up with original ideas of their own.[79]
^ a b Garland 2008, p. 61.
^ a b c d Tracy 2000, pp. 343–344.
^ a b c d e f g h i j Phillips 2010.
^ a b c d e f g MacLeod 2000, p. 3.
^ a b c d Casson 2001, p. 35.
^ a b Wiegand & Davis 2015, p. 20.
^ a b c Garland 2008, p. 60.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Haughton 2011.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l MacLeod 2000, p. 5.
^ Murray, S. A., (2009). The library: An illustrated history. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, p.17
^ Murray, Stuart (2009). The library : an illustrated history. New York, NY: Skyhorse Pub. p. 17. ISBN 978-1-61608-453-0. OCLC 277203534.
^ MacLeod 2000, pp. 1–2, 10–11.
^ MacLeod 2000, pp. 13.
^ a b c MacLeod 2000, p. 11.
^ a b c d e MacLeod 2000, p. 2.
^ MacLeod 2000, pp. 1.
^ a b MacLeod 2000, pp. 1–2.
^ a b c Fox 1986, p. 341.
^ Fox 1986, p. 340.
^ Fox 1986, pp. 340–341.
^ a b David C. Lindberg (15 March 1980). Science in the Middle Ages. University of Chicago Press. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-226-48233-0. Retrieved 11 January 2013.
^ a b c d Tracy 2000, p. 343.
^ Letter of Aristeas, 9–12 Archived 17 September 2010 at the Wayback Machine.
^ Tracy 2000, pp. 344–345.
^ Wiegand & Davis 2015, p. 19.
^ Entry Μουσείον Archived 12 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine at Liddell & Scott.
^ a b MacLeod 2000, pp. 1–.
^ Lyons 2011, p. 26.
^ Manguel, Alberto (2008).The Library at Night. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 26.
^ Barnes 2000, p. 62.
^ a b c d e Casson 2001, p. 34.
^ Erksine, Andrew (1995). "Culture and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Museum and Library of Alexandria". Greece & Rome, 2nd ser., 42(1), 38–48.
^ a b Galen, xvii.a, p. 606 Archived 14 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine.
^ a b Casson 2001, p. 36.
^ a b Kennedy, George. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Classical Criticism, New York: University of Cambridge Press, 1999.
^ Casson 2001, pp. 33–34.
^ a b c d e f g h i MacLeod 2000, p. 4.
^ a b c d Staikos 2000, p. 66.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Dickey 2007, p. 5.
^ a b c d e f g Casson 2001, p. 37.
^ a b c Casson 2001, pp. 39–40.
^ a b c Casson 2001, p. 40.
^ a b c Montana 2015, p. 109.
^ a b c d e f g h MacLeod 2000, p. 6.
^ Montana 2015, pp. 109–110.
^ Montana 2015, p. 114.
^ a b c d Montana 2015, p. 115.
^ a b Montana 2015, p. 116.
^ a b c d e f Montana 2015, p. 117.
^ a b c d e f MacLeod 2000, p. 7.
^ a b McKeown 2013, pp. 147–148.
^ Trumble & MacIntyre Marshall 2003.
^ McKeown 2013, pp. 148–149.
^ a b c d McKeown 2013, p. 149.
^ Dickey 2007, pp. 5, 93.
^ Dickey 2007, pp. 5, 92–93.
^ Dickey 2007, p. 93.
^ a b c d e f Meyboom 1995, p. 173.
^ a b c Dickey 2007, pp. 5–6.
^ a b c d e f g h Dickey 2007, p. 6.
^ Meyboom 1995, p. 373.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Casson 2001, p. 47.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Watts 2008, p. 149.
^ a b c d Fox 1986, p. 351.
^ Pollard, Justin, and Reid, Howard. 2006. The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, Birthplace of the Modern World.
^ a b Aulus Gellius. Attic Nights book 7 chapter 17.
^ McKeown 2013, p. 150.
^ Plutarch, Life of Caesar, 49.6.
^ a b c d e f g h i j Casson 2001, p. 46.
^ Cherf, William J. (2008). "Earth Wind and Fire: The Alexandrian Fire-storm of 48 B.C.". In El-Abbadi, Mostafa; Fathallah, Omnia Mounir (eds.). What Happened to the Ancient Library of Alexandria?. Leiden: Brill. p. 70. ISBN 978-90-474-3302-6.
^ a b Tocatlian 1991, p. 256.
^ a b c d Dickey 2007, p. 7.
^ a b Watts 2008, p. 148.
^ Watts 2008, pp. 149–150.
^ a b c d e f g h i j Watts 2008, p. 150.
^ Watts 2017, p. 60.
^ Watts 2008, pp. 150, 189.
^ a b c d Watts 2008, p. 189.
^ a b c d e f Watts 2008, p. 190.
^ a b c Watts 2008, p. 191.
^ a b Theodore 2016, pp. 182–183.
^ Paulus Orosius, vi.15.32 Archived 17 September 2010 at the Wayback Machine
^ El-Abbadi, Mostafa (1990), The Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria (2nd, illustrated ed.), Unesco/UNDP, pp. 159, 160, ISBN 978-92-3-102632-4
^ Booth 2017, pp. 21–22.
^ a b Watts 2008, pp. 191–192.
^ Oakes 2007, p. 364.
^ a b c Novak 2010, p. 240.
^ Cameron, Long & Sherry 1993, pp. 58–61.
^ Cameron, Long & Sherry 1993, p. 59.
^ Watts 2017, p. 117.
^ a b Booth 2017, pp. 151–152.
^ Booth 2017, p. 151.
^ De Sacy, Relation de l'Egypte par Abd al-Latif, Paris, 1810: "Above the column of the pillars is a dome supported by this column. I think this building was the portico where Aristotle taught, and after him his disciples; and that this was the academy that Alexander built when he built this city, and where was placed the library which Amr ibn-Alas burned, with the permission of Omar." Google books here [books.google.com/books?id=NGrRAAAAMAAJ]. Translation of De Sacy from here [1] Archived 11 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine. Other versions of Abd-el-Latif in English here [2] Archived 15 September 2010 at the Wayback Machine.
^ Samir Khalil, «L'utilisation d'al-Qifṭī par la Chronique arabe d'Ibn al-'Ibrī († 1286)», in: Samir Khalil Samir (Éd.), Actes du IIe symposium syro-arabicum (Sayyidat al-Bīr, septembre 1998). Études arabes chrétiennes, = Parole de l'Orient 28 (2003) 551–598. An English translation of the passage in Al-Qifti by Emily Cottrell of Leiden University is at the Roger Pearse blog here [3] Archived 11 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine
^ Ed. Pococke, p. 181, translation on p. 114. Online Latin text and English translation here [4] Archived 15 September 2010 at the Wayback Machine. Latin: "Quod ad libros quorum mentionem fecisti: si in illis contineatur, quod cum libro Dei conveniat, in libro Dei [est] quod sufficiat absque illo; quod si in illis fuerit quod libro Dei repugnet, neutiquam est eo [nobis] opus, jube igitur e medio tolli". Jussit ergo Amrus Ebno'lAs dispergi eos per balnea Alexandriae, atque illis calefaciendis comburi; ita spatio semestri consumpti sunt. Audi quid factum fuerit et mirare."
^ E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chapter 51: "It would be endless to enumerate the moderns who have wondered and believed, but I may distinguish with honour the rational scepticism of Renaudot, (Hist. Alex. Patriarch, p. 170: ) historia ... habet aliquid ut απιστον ut Arabibus familiare est." However Butler says: "Renaudot thinks the story has an element of untrustworthiness: Gibbon discusses it rather briefly and disbelieves it." (ch. 25, p. 401)
^ The civilisation of Arabs, Book no III, 1884, reedition of 1980, p. 468
^ "The Vanished Library by Bernard Lewis". nybooks.com. Archived from the original on 16 November 2006. Retrieved 26 November 2006.
^ Trumble & MacIntyre Marshall 2003, p. 51. "Today most scholars have discredited the story of the destruction of the Library by the Muslims."
^ MacLeod 2000, p. 71. "The story first appears 500 years after the Arab conquest of Alexandria. John the Grammarian appears to be John Philoponus, who must have been dead by the time of the conquest. It seems, as shown above, that both of the Alexandrian libraries were destroyed by the end of the fourth century, and there is no mention of any library surviving at Alexandria in the Christian literature of the centuries following that date. It is also suspicious that Omar is recorded to have made the same remark about books found by the Arab during their conquest of Iran."
^ Murray, S.A. (2009). The Library: An illustrated history. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, p. 14
^ Tarn, W.W. (1928). "Ptolemy II". The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 14(3/4), 246–260. The Byzantine writer Tzetzes gives a similar figure in his essay On Comedy Archived 20 January 2008 at the Wayback Machine.
^ Murray, Stuart (2009). The Library: An Illustrated History. Skyhorse Publishing. ISBN 978-1-60239-706-4.
^ MacLeod 2000, pp. 3, 10–11.
^ Casson 2001, p. 48.
^ a b c d e f g Nelles 2010, p. 533.
^ Nelles 2010, pp. 533–534.
^ a b c d Tocatlian 1991, p. 265.
^ Tocatlian 1991, pp. 265–266.
^ Tocatlian 1991, p. 266.
^ "About the BA – Bibliotheca Alexandrina". www.bibalex.org. Archived from the original on 29 January 2017. Retrieved 16 February 2017.
Barnes, Robert (2000), "3. Cloistered Bookworms in the Chicken-Coop of the Muses: The Ancient Library of Alexandria", in MacLeod, Roy (ed.), The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World, New York City, New York and London, England: I.B.Tauris Publishers, pp. 61–78, ISBN 978-1-85043-594-5
Booth, Charlotte (2017), Hypatia: Mathematician, Philosopher, Myth, London, England: Fonthill Media, ISBN 978-1-78155-546-0
Cameron, Alan; Long, Jacqueline; Sherry, Lee (1993), Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-06550-5
Casson, Lionel (2001), Libraries in the Ancient World, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-09721-4
Dickey, Eleanor (2007), Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises from Their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-531293-5
Fox, Robert Lane (1986), "14: Hellenistic Culture and Literature", in Boardman, John; Griffin, Jasper; Murray, Oswyn (eds.), The Oxford History of the Classical World, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, pp. 338–364, ISBN 978-0198721123
Garland, Robert (2008), Ancient Greece: Everyday Life in the Birthplace of Western Civilization, New York City, New York: Sterling, ISBN 978-1-4549-0908-8
Gibbon, Edward (1776–1789). The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Haughton, Brian (1 February 2011), "What happened to the Great Library at Alexandria?", Ancient History Encyclopedia
Lyons, Martyn (2011). Books: A Living History. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications. ISBN 978-1-60606-083-4.
MacLeod, Roy (2000), "Introduction: Alexandria in History and Myth", in MacLeod, Roy (ed.), The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World, New York City, New York and London, England: I.B.Tauris Publishers, pp. 1–18, ISBN 978-1-85043-594-5
Meyboom, P. G. P. (1995), The Nile Mosaic of Palestrina: Early Evidence of Egyptian Religion in Italy, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World, Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, p. 373, ISBN 978-90-04-10137-1
McKeown, J. C. (2013), A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Cradle of Western Civilization, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-998210-3
Montana, Fausto (2015), "Hellenistic Scholarship", in Montanari, Franco; Matthaios, Stephanos; Rengakos, Antonios (eds.), Brill's Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship, 1, Leiden, The Netherlands and Boston, Massachusetts: Koninklijke Brill, pp. 60–183, ISBN 978-90-04-28192-9
Nelles, Paul (2010), "Libraries", in Grafton, Anthony; Most, Glenn W.; Settis, Salvatore (eds.), The Classical Tradition, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 532–536, ISBN 978-0-674-03572-0
Novak, Ralph Martin, Jr. (2010), Christianity and the Roman Empire: Background Texts, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Bloomsbury Publishing, pp. 239–240, ISBN 978-1-56338-347-2
Oakes, Elizabeth H. (2007), "Hypatia", Encyclopedia of World Scientists, New York City, New York: Infobase Publishing, p. 364, ISBN 978-1-4381-1882-6
Phillips, Heather (2010). "The Great Library of Alexandria?". Library Philosophy and Practice. University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Archived from the original on 18 April 2012. Retrieved 26 July 2012.
Staikos, Konstantinos Sp. (2000), The Great Libraries: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, New Castle, Delaware and London, England: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, ISBN 978-1-58456-018-0
Theodore, Jonathan (2016), The Modern Cultural Myth of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Manchester, England: Palgrave, Macmillan, ISBN 978-1-137-56997-4
Tocatlian, Jacques (September 1991), "Bibliotheca Alexandrina – Reviving a legacy of the past for a brighter common future", International Library Review, Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier, 23 (3): 255–269, doi:10.1016/0020-7837(91)90034-W
Tracy, Stephen V (2000), "Demetrius of Phalerum: Who was He and Who was He Not?", in Fortenbaugh, William W.; Schütrumpf, Eckhart (eds.), Demetrius of Phalerum: Text, Translation and Discussion, Rutgers University Studies in Classical Humanities, IX, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, England: Transaction Publishers, ISBN 978-1-3513-2690-2
Trumble, Kelly; MacIntyre Marshall, Robina (2003). The Library of Alexandria. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-395-75832-8.
Watts, Edward J. (2008) [2006], City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, ISBN 978-05-2025-816-7
Watts, Edward J. (2017), Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-1906-5914-1
Wiegand, Wayne A.; Davis, Donald G. Jr. (2015), Encyclopedia of Library History, New York dan London: Routledge, ISBN 9781135787578
Berti, Monica; Costa, Virgilio (2010). La Biblioteca di Alessandria: storia di un paradiso perduto. Tivoli (Roma): Edizioni TORED. ISBN 978-88-88617-34-3.
Canfora, Luciano (1990). The Vanished Library. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-07255-8.
El-Abbadi, Mostafa (1992). Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria (2nd ed.). Paris: UNESCO. ISBN 978-92-3-102632-4.
Jochum, Uwe. "The Alexandrian Library and Its Aftermath" from Library History vol, pp. 5–12.
Orosius, Paulus (trans. Roy J. Deferrari) (1964). The Seven Books of History Against the Pagans. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America. (No ISBN).
Olesen-Bagneux, O. B. (2014). The Memory Library: How the library in Hellenistic Alexandria worked. Knowledge Organization, 41(1), 3–13.
Parsons, Edward. The Alexandrian Library. London, 1952. Relevant online excerpt.
Stille, Alexander: The Future of the Past (chapter: "The Return of the Vanished Library"). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. pp. 246–273.
James Hannam: The Mysterious Fate of the Great Library of Alexandria.
Krasner-Khait, Barbara (October–November 2001). "Survivor: The History of the Library". History Magazine. Retrieved 6 May 2012.
Papyrus fragment (P.Oxy.1241): An ancient list of head librarians.
The BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time discussed The Library of Alexandria 12 March 2009
Hart, David B. "The Perniciously Persistent Myths of Hypatia and the Great Library," First Things, 4 June 2010
Texts on Wikisource:
"Alexandrian Library" . Encyclopedia Americana. 1920.
"Alexandrian Library". New International Encyclopedia. 1905.
"Alexandrian Library" . The American Cyclopædia. 1879.
Ancient Greek mathematics
(timeline)
Archytas
Aristaeus the Elder
Apollonius
Callippus
Chrysippus
Ctesibius
Dicaearchus
Diocles
Diophantus
Dinostratus
Dionysodorus
Domninus
Eudemus
Eudoxus
Geminus
Hippasus
Hippias
Hypsicles
Isidore of Miletus
Marinus
Menaechmus
Menelaus
Metrodorus
Nicomachus
Nicomedes
Nicoteles
Oenopides
Pappus
Philolaus
Philon
Posidonius
Serenus
Sporus
Theon of Alexandria
Theon of Smyrna
Thymaridas
Xenocrates
Zeno of Elea
Zeno of Sidon
Zenodorus
Treatises
Almagest
Archimedes Palimpsest
Conics (Apollonius)
Elements (Euclid)
On the Sizes and Distances (Aristarchus)
On Sizes and Distances (Hipparchus)
On the Moving Sphere (Autolycus)
The Sand Reckoner
Problem of Apollonius
Doubling the cube
Angle trisection
Cyrene
Platonic Academy
Ancient Egypt topics
Glossary of artifacts
Architecture (Egyptian Revival architecture)
Cities (list)
Funerary practices
Great Royal Wives
Pharaohs (list)
Egyptologists
Egypt topics
Battle of Actium
Lighthouse of Alexandria
Diocese of Egypt
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Muslim conquest
Fustat
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Identification card controversy
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Buildings and structures completed in the 3rd century BC
Archaeological sites in Egypt
Ancient libraries
Libraries in Egypt
Former buildings and structures in Egypt
3rd-century BC establishments in Egypt
Hellenistic architecture
History of museums
Ptolemaic Alexandria
Destroyed landmarks in Egypt
Use dmy dates from October 2019
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OTTAWA, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - June 9, 2009) - Canadian Zinc Corporation (TSX:CZN)(OTCBB:CZICF) (the "Company" or "Canadian Zinc") welcomes the announcement of the Government of Canada's decision and the introduction today in Parliament of new special legislation on the proposed expansion of Nahanni National Park Reserve, which excludes the Prairie Creek Mine, and supports the balanced approach to resource development and conservation.
The proposed Park expansion announced today in Ottawa by The Honourable Jim Prentice, Canada's Environment Minister and Minister responsible for Parks Canada, will see the area of Nahanni Park expanded by 30,000 square kilometers, making it the third largest National Park in Canada. The enlarged Park will cover most of the South Nahanni River watershed and will completely encircle the Prairie Creek Mine. However, the Mine itself and a large surrounding area of approximately 300 square kilometers is specifically excluded from the Park and will not be part of the expanded Park.
In making the announcement The Honourable Chuck Strahl, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, said that the Government recognizes the importance of resource development in Canada's North and the decision on the expansion of Nahanni National Park reflects a balanced approach to conservation and to potential future economic benefits that development of the Prairie Creek Mine can bring to the people of the Dehcho.
A new Bill, introduced by the Government in the House of Commons today, entitled "An Act to amend the Canada National Parks Act to enlarge Nahanni National Park Reserve of Canada" provides for the expansion of Nahanni National Park and, crucially from CZN's point of view, proposes at Section 7(1) amendments to the Canada National Parks Act to enable the Minister for the Environment to enter into leases or licences of occupation of, and easements over, public lands situated in the expansion area for the purposes of a mining access road leading to the Prairie Creek Area, including the sites of storage and other facilities connected with that road.
Heretofore, an access road to a mine through a National Park is not permitted under the Canada National Parks Act, and the Act is now to be amended solely for Nahanni National Park Reserve and specifically for the purpose of providing access to the Prairie Creek Mine area.
"Canadian Zinc Corporation welcomes the long anticipated expansion of Nahanni National Park Reserve, with the exclusion of the Prairie Creek Mine area and the guarantee of access to the Mine through the enlarged Park."
"Canadian Zinc, and indeed the entire Canadian mining and exploration industry, supports a balanced approach to resource development and conservation, which in the proposed expansion of the Park has now been achieved," Mr. Kearney added.
Following the statements made by Prime Minister Harper, in announcing the interim withdrawal of lands for the purposes of park expansion in August 2007, where the Government committed to consultations to determine how to balance the interests of various stakeholders, including "the commercial interests whose existing investments must be recognized and respected", Canadian Zinc has been working closely with officials at Indian and Northern Affairs Canada and at Parks Canada, and in consultation with the Government of the Northwest Territories, to achieve this balanced solution.
In July 2008 Canadian Zinc and the Parks Canada Agency entered into a Memorandum of Understanding in which they agreed to work collaboratively, within their respective areas of responsibility, authority and jurisdiction, to achieve their respective goals of an expanded Nahanni National Park Reserve and an operating Prairie Creek Mine.
Canadian Zinc supports the proposed expansion of Nahanni National Park and has agreed to manage the development of the Prairie Creek Mine so the mine does not, in its own right, negatively affect the expansion of the Nahanni Park.
The balanced approach to development and conservation achieved today also acknowledges the aspirations of the communities of the Dehcho First Nations in that most of the South Nahanni watershed will be preserved and protected while also facilitating the development of the Prairie Creek Mine which will bring much needed jobs, benefits, business opportunities and economic stimulus to the Dehcho Region and to this part of the Northwest Territories.
Enactment of the new legislation introduced today will be a "win- win" for the Park, for the Prairie Creek Mine and for the Dehcho and will facilitate all parties achieving their respective objectives.
"Canadian Zinc believes that the Prairie Creek Mine and the enlarged Nahanni National Park can co-exist and that, properly planned and managed, the enlarged Park will not interfere with the operation of the Prairie Creek Mine and similarly that the operation of the Mine will not adversely impact upon the Park or its ecological integrity," said John Kearney.
"We are very pleased to be part of this unique and historic solution to the compatibility of mine development and environmental protection and conservation." Mr. Kearney added.
Canadian Zinc's 100% owned Prairie Creek Mine is an important Canadian resource, located in the Mackenzie Mountains in the Dehcho region of the Northwest Territories, within the watershed of the South Nahanni River and in proximity to but outside the current boundaries of Nahanni National Park Reserve.
The Project includes a partially developed underground mine with an existing 1,000 ton per day mill and related infrastructure and equipment. The mineral deposit contains very substantial quantities of zinc, lead and silver. When in production the Mine will add significantly to Canada's production of lead and zinc concentrates and will create employment for about 225 people and business opportunities for the local communities in the Dehcho region of the Northwest Territories which currently have a very high unemployment rate and a growing population.
Development of the Prairie Creek Mine has the support of the great majority of the peoples of the Dehcho, who are badly in need of the jobs, training and business opportunities that the mine will provide, and who at the same time are committed to the protection of their traditional lands.
Canadian Zinc has entered into Memoranda of Understanding with the Nahanni Butte Dene Band and with the Liidlii Kue First Nation (Fort Simpson) to establish mutually beneficial, cooperative and productive relationships. Canadian Zinc has agreed to use its best efforts to employ community members on a first preference basis and to assist the communities to benefit from the business opportunities associated with the Prairie Creek Project.
A major underground tunneling and diamond drilling program completed in 2006 /2007 led to the completion of a Technical Report to National Instrument 43-101 standards in October 2007, filed on SEDAR, which estimates that the Prairie Creek Property hosts total Measured and Indicated Resources of 5,840,329 tonnes grading 10.71% zinc, 9.90% lead, 0.326% copper, and 161.12 grams silver per tonne. In addition, the Report confirms a large Inferred Resource of 5,541,576 tonnes grading 13.53% zinc, 11.43% lead, 0.514% copper and 215 grams silver per tonne and additional exploration potential.
The Measured and Indicated Resource is capable of supporting a mine life in excess of fourteen years at the planned initial rate of 600 tonnes per day, which will increase to 1,200 tonnes per day, and the future inclusion of Inferred Resources is expected to extend the mine life to at least 20 years.
The proposed new operation at Prairie Creek utilizes the existing infrastructure and facilities that were built in the 1980s and which will be upgraded and enhanced to meet current-day environmental standards.
The proposed development and operation of the Prairie Creek Project is currently undergoing environmental assessment by the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Review Board, which is expected to be completed by October 2010. The exclusion of the Prairie Creek Mine from the proposed Nahanni National Park Reserve expansion area has brought clarity to the land use and policy objectives for the region and will facilitate various aspects of the environmental assessment.
The future operation of the Prairie Creek Mine will provide tremendous economic stimulus to this region of the Northwest Territories, and presents a unique opportunity to strengthen and enhance the social and economic well being of the surrounding Dehcho communities.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") permits U.S. mining companies, in their filings with the SEC, to disclose only those mineral deposits that a company can economically and legally extract or produce. Certain terms are used in this press release, such as "measured," "indicated," and "inferred" "resources," which the SEC guidelines prohibit U.S. companies from including in their filings with the SEC.


In this month's diary, the author finds himself feeling sorry for murder defendant Robert Blake, being grilled by Gary Condit's lawyers, and playing the role of the corpse in a new roman à clef.
Unfortunately, the two weeks I spent at the Robert Blake murder trial in Los Angeles were sort of boring. I can never get very excited listening to the testimony of expert witnesses. I missed the two men Blake had allegedly tried to hire to kill his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley. I also missed Blake's first wife, Sondra Blake Kerr, the mother of his two adult children, Delinah and Noah, telling of an encounter she had had with her former husband in a public place, where she congratulated him on his marriage. "He pushed me against the wall and said, 'The marriage is all smoke and mirrors,'" she testified. "He grabbed my wrist and said, 'The baby's real, but the marriage isn't.'" And I missed Bonny Lee Bakley's daughter Holly Gawron, who said Blake used to call and threaten her, mistaking her for her mother. If all of these things are true, the outlook is grim. No matter how miserable your marriage is, you can't hope to solve the problem by killing your spouse. On the other hand, I can understand Blake's rage at being first used by a celebrity chaser and then trapped in a loveless marriage. Bonny Lee, the con woman–grifter with a police record and 10 husbands, is that curiosity in criminal cases—the unpopular victim. It's very hard to find anything nice to say about her. I suspect that I would have disliked her as much as Blake apparently did. I am almost always pro-prosecution in murder cases, but I cannot help feeling sad about the untenable position Robert Blake is in. I grew very fond of the guy in the two weeks I was in California. We never talked about Bonny Lee or the murder.
One day I saw him embrace an exotic, red-haired woman of a certain age who had gone up to wish him luck. "Who was she?," I asked him later. "She's an opera singer I know," he replied. "Sometimes we used to sing together in the back room of Vitello's." Vitello's was his favorite restaurant, where he dined with Bonny Lee minutes before her murder. "She had a sister who used to accompany her, but she died," he continued. "I wrote the eulogy for the funeral. She just came by to say hello. That was very nice of her." We also talked about our mutual friend Tita Cahn, the widow of the great lyricist Sammy Cahn, who Blake thinks is one of the funniest women in the world. "Say hi to Tita," he said. When I complimented him on his beautiful pin-striped suits, he said he had gotten the fabric from the Warner Bros. costume department, which had bought bolts of it years ago to make suits for Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield. Mostly we talked about Rosie, his daughter by Bonny Lee, who is now four years old. He is absolutely dotty about the child, and his troubled face softens into an expression of love whenever he speaks about her. She is being raised by Delinah—"Deli" for short—his daughter from his first marriage, who is 35 and pregnant with her first child. "It's perfect," said Blake with a big smile. "Little Rosie will be the new baby's aunt. They'll grow up together." He has at least accomplished one very important thing by smoothing out Rosie's life, even while going through this terrible ordeal. I had the urge to give him a hug and say, "Everything's going to be all right," but I didn't, because I don't really think everything is going to be all right.
I had totally forgotten that Blake and I once had the same agent, Arnold Stiefel, a great Hollywood character who has long been the manager of Rod Stewart. Stiefel is the drive behind Stewart's series of albums of standards called The Great American Songbook; this year Stewart won his first Grammy, for the third volume, and Volume Four is currently in the works. I wanted to hear Arnold's take on Robert Blake, so we met for dinner at Il Sole, the very in and popular Sunset Strip restaurant, of which Arnold is a co-owner. We sat at the best table, and Arnold greeted all the celebrities. He introduced me to Jodie Foster, one of my favorite actresses, whom I had just seen in the French film A Very Long Engagement, in which she speaks fluent French.
"Was it hard to speak French with all those real French actors?," I asked.
"Yes, very," she replied, "but actually my character was a Polish woman speaking French."
Stiefel's professional relationship with Blake went through many stormy times, but he retains an affection for the actor. Blake was a star in rapid decline when his wife was murdered. Stiefel reminded me that Blake had made a number of great films with great directors—not just In Cold Blood, with Richard Brooks, but also The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, with John Huston, and The Greatest Story Ever Told, with George Stevens. Before each of those pictures opened, Stiefel said, people would tell Blake that he was going to be the hottest actor in Hollywood, but it never happened. Only when he fizzled out in movies and played Baretta in the television series of that name did he become, for a brief period, the star he had always wanted to be. There are endless stories about his behavior on the set of Baretta, and not many of them are complimentary. People speak about his rage. Joan Collins told me, when I was in Los Angeles, that she had been terrified of him when she starred in an episode of the series.
I had to leave Los Angeles and miss all the good stuff in the Blake trial because I had to be in New York with my lawyers to prepare for my second deposition in the $11 million slander suit filed against me by former congressman Gary Condit, regarding the Chandra Levy case. Being involved in a lawsuit is a lousy way to spend your old age. I wrote last month that my first deposition had been aired two days running on the Today show, with Katie Couric presiding. Subsequently, the CBS Early Show interviewed Condit's lawyer Lin Wood in California with Condit's son, Chad, who said I called his father a murderer, which I never did.
Lin Wood is a natural-born publicist, who understands totally the power of television. A week or so after the CBS show, Chad Condit and his sister, Cadee, were guests on Larry King Live for an hour to talk about the lawsuit. I felt under media siege, sitting alone in my house in Connecticut, hearing myself spoken of in such disparaging terms. I found it agonizing. According to Condit's children, I am the one who caused their father to lose his bid for re-election for something I said on Laura Ingraham's radio show, which was broadcast only on a minor station in Los Angeles and not at all in New York City. Between Chad and Cadee and Condit himself on the videotape from his deposition, it was said eight times that I had called Condit a murderer. My lawyer, Paul LiCalsi, provided a statement saying that I had never said such a thing, which Larry read twice during the program. However, Larry was having one of his softball evenings and never quizzed the Condit siblings as to where and when I had called their father a murderer. I guess all that will come out at the trial. Just for the record, I never thought Gary Condit was the murderer of Chandra Levy. What I thought back then and still think today is that he knows more about what happened to Chandra than he has ever said. In an article about Wood in the second issue of Radar magazine, he was quoted as saying, "I do enjoy seeing Dominick Dunne squirm." I didn't think that was a very classy thing for a lawyer to say, but it was certainly accurate. He did make me squirm during my deposition. He has a prodigious talent for intimidation. Once, back in the 1960s, Frank Sinatra, who didn't like me, paid a waiter 50 bucks—a lot of money to someone making a waiter's salary at that time—to hit me in a Beverly Hills members-only nightclub called the Daisy. For a second, after the punch, Sinatra and I locked gazes. He had the same look of pleasure in his eyes that I recently saw in Wood's. To this day I can't stand the sound of Sinatra's voice.
Publishers often send me bound galleys of new books to read in hopes that I will supply a jacket blurb saying how enchanting, witty, gripping, tragic—whatever—I think the book is. This can be a pain in the neck, but it goes with the territory of being a writer and having a lot of writer friends. This month I was sent the bound galleys of Jane Stanton Hitchcock's new novel, One Dangerous Lady, which is coming out in June from Miramax Books. It's set in the highest echelons of New York's billionaire society set—the kind of people who give wings in their name to the Metropolitan Museum. Many of the characters seem to be based on real people who will be recognizable to the social cognoscenti. I was having a wonderful time reading the galleys and figuring out who was who on a Sunday afternoon at my house in Connecticut when suddenly I came upon a character called Larry Locket, a writer who covers murder cases involving famous people for a magazine called Vanitas. It didn't take me long to figure out who that was, and I was riveted, because it is an eerie and exciting feeling to find yourself as a character in a novel. Locket is described in this manner: "Larry was known for taking on the rich and powerful, many of whom had publicly vowed to get even with him one day. He'd had many threats against his life." I'm not going to give away the plot of Hitchcock's book, but I was taken aback when Larry—me—is bludgeoned to death, on the orders of an enormously rich widow with the largest apartment in New York, about whom my character is writing a story for Vanitas. My memorial service takes place at St. Patrick's Cathedral, which I'm pleased to report is packed for the occasion. Even Mayor Bloomberg attends. Better yet, my editor and friend for 22 years at Vanity Fair, Wayne Lawson, is my editor at Vanitas, under the fictitious name of Dawson Lane. Standing beside my casket in the cathedral, Dawson delivers a eulogy for me. I was really quite moved by the scene. I hope I do as well in real life when my time comes.
I was in Los Angeles during Golden Globes week, which is not quite up to Oscar week, but it has its charms. The talk at every party was the breakup of the Brad Pitt–Jennifer Aniston marriage—nothing but Brad and Jen, Jen and Brad. I heard countless theories. People were generally saddened by the split, because the couple had seemed so wonderfully glamorous, beautiful, and madly in love, like real old-time movie stars. Besides, they lived so well. I knew their Beverly Hills house before they moved into it. One of the truly wonderful houses around, it was built in the 30s by the film star Fredric March. For years it was the home of the Vanderbilt heir Shirley Burden and his wife, Flobelle. Their son, the late New York social figure Carter Burden, grew up in the house. Then Wallis Annenberg, the daughter of Walter Annenberg, the billionaire publisher and former ambassador to the Court of St. James's, occupied the house for about a decade. I don't know who lived in it between the time Wallis decamped and Pitt and Aniston took up residence. Pitt, who sees himself as a bit of an architect, made changes in the interior that displeased some people who were familiar with the original paneling. Within days of the breakup, the house was under discussion at a Golden Globes party at the home of Bob Shaye, the co-chairman of New Line Films. According to the conversation, Jennifer, not Brad, owns the house, and she's going to put it up for sale.
About the same time, Mrs. Barbara Davis, the widow of the billionaire oilman Marvin Davis, who died last year, gathered a few friends for one of the last dinner parties at the Knoll, her magnificent Beverly Hills mansion, before she put it up for sale. Originally built by the widow of a member of the prominent Doheny family, the mansion was too big for Barbara Davis alone. It sold almost immediately for what was whispered to be $66 million, but Barbara Davis wasn't talking. She wouldn't say who had bought the place, either, because it was still in escrow. After Barbara and Marvin moved to Beverly Hills, in 1982, and bought the Knoll, they brought back to the movie crowd a sense of glamour that had long been missing. They never stopped entertaining. I remember nights there when violinists in red jackets stood playing on every step of the curved stairway in the marble front hall. The goody bags you got on the back of your chair to take home with you at the Davises' semi-annual Carousel of Hope benefit were like no others I have ever seen. Barbara Davis is a generous, good-hearted soul much loved in the movie community for the vast sums she has raised for charity.
"Where are you going to move, Barbara?" someone asked her.
"Into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel until I find a new house," she replied.
"You should look at Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston's house. It would be perfect for you."
"How should I go about it?"
"Perfect. I'll have my guard deliver it to her guard."
Sherry Lansing, for 20 years one of the most powerful women in Hollywood, is stepping down as head of Paramount Pictures. I remember her back when she was a beautiful young actress having a major romance with one of the early television titans, Jim Aubrey, then head of CBS. Once, when they were on their way to the movies in the rain, they were hit by a guy who went through a red light, and Sherry was in a hip-to-toe cast for months. It didn't mar her great looks. She became someone whom people talked about. "There's Sherry Lansing," they would say when she walked into a restaurant or showed up at a screening. Danny Melnick, an old friend of mine, was head of MGM at the time, and like Jim Aubrey he knew how intelligent Lansing was. "Sherry has the smarts," he said to me, and he hired her to head his story department. A year and a half later she became vice president of production at MGM. When Danny left MGM to become the head of Columbia Pictures, he took Sherry with him as vice president of production. Then—wonder of wonders at the time—she became the first female head of a studio in the history of Hollywood when she took over Twentieth Century Fox. When she moved to Paramount, where she reigned supreme for 12 years, she became an international celebrity. Along the way, she married the director William Friedkin, another old friend of mine, who years ago, at the start of his career, directed the film The Boys in the Band, written by Mart Crowley, on which I was an executive producer. Despite Sherry's power and her immense success, she has stayed as nice as she used to be, and she's still beautiful. They say she's going into philanthropy and good works, which is wonderful, and she'll be great at it. But I hope that someday she'll read a book and say to herself, "I just have to produce this as a movie—just this one last time." Paramount has named its major screening room the Sherry Lansing Theater. Both Billy and Sherry have stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in February, in one of her last public acts, she put her handprints and footprints in cement in front of Grauman's Chinese. That's the real big time, and it seemed only fitting.


Kenya: Today could be an important landmark for Raila Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement in the journey to the 2017 elections given that its highest decision-making organ is to ratify or reject the proposed new leadership drawn from the party's two camps.
The new team Raila will be seeking to have installed is to champion the task of repositioning the party, recently rocked by internal wrangles on the road to 2017.
Plagued by persistent wrangling since February when party elections ended in chaos, ODM resorted to a boardroom deal to accommodate key figures from rival camps in an expanded leadership structure that will be considered by the National Governing Council (NGC) today.
The National Executive Committee (NEC) and the Transitional Independent Executive Committee (TIEC), an interim organ formed after the bungled polls that drew representatives from the warring camps, last month proposed 27 party national officials. However, the national office bearers angered some party members, including Raila's close allies, who claimed the camp perceived to be packed with ' Jubilee moles' had secured powerful positions.
Today, the NGC is to either endorse or reject the proposed list of party officials, and interviews by The Standard yesterday indicated members still held divergent views.
The list proposes Raila remains party leader with governors Hassan Ali Joho (Mombasa) and Wycliffe Oparanya (Kakamega) as his two deputies.
Suba MP John Mbadi is designated as national chairman and Budalang'i MP Ababu Namwamba was named as secretary general.
Namwamba fiercely fought for the position with nominated Senator Agnes Zani who was associated with a rival camp said to be favoured by Raila. In the proposed new lineup, Zani and nominated Senator Elizabeth Ongoro have been named deputies to the secretary general.
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In the lead-up to the bungled polls, Namwamba's camp had Joho and Turkana Governor Josphat Nanok, who is designated as one of the two deputy national chairmen.
The other deputy national chairman is Funyula MP Paul Otuoma, who is among those who have rejected the list and demanded competitive elections.
The NGC is made up of 47 county chairpersons, Council of ODM Governors, senators and members of the National Assembly. It is also made up of NEC (national officials), 20 national representatives of the Youth League and 20 national officials representing the Women League. Members of County Assemblies are not part of this team unless they are officials in the two leagues.
On Thursday, Otuoma called on the National Delegates Conference (NDC) to exercise its duty wisely and save the party from collapse. "The delegates should not be used to rubber-stamp a preconceived list of leaders. What happened in Naivasha is wrong because we can't solve our party problems by having a few people lock themselves up in a hotel room and draw a list of leaders," Otuoma said.


Employers covered by San Francisco's Health Care Security Ordinance (HCSO) and/or the Fair Chance Ordinance (FCO) are required to submit the 2017 Employer Annual Reporting Form to the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement by April 30, 2018.
Employers may determine whether they are required to submit the form by filling out this survey. Employers who were not covered by the HCSO or the FCO in 2017 will be directed to a page indicating that they do not need to submit the form. Covered employers will be directed to the appropriate online form.
Covered employers should review the instructions before beginning the online form. A PDF preview of the form is also available.
Click here for additional resources on the reporting requirement.
For more information on the HCSO and FCO, employers may visit the city's website.


Pure Funquest, no doubt about it. There is something that stands out about a Funquest bred horse and this is no exception. Oh Dolly has the typical Funquest head with a kind eye, chisled face, and presence. She makes another pure Funquest here at Grunden Ranch Morgans. She has been DNA tested and is homozygous for black.