The destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria

Ancient Origins

Alexandria, one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, was founded by Alexander the Great after his conquest of Egypt in 332 BC. After the death of Alexander in Babylon in 323 BC, Egypt fell to the lot of one of his lieutenants, Ptolemy. It was under Ptolemy that the newly-founded Alexandria came to replace the ancient city of Memphis as the capital of Egypt. This marked the beginning of the rise of Alexandria. Yet, no dynasty can survive for long without the support of their subjects, and the Ptolemies were keenly aware of this. Thus, the early Ptolemaic kings sought to legitimize their rule through a variety of ways, including assuming the role of pharaoh, founding the Graeco-Roman cult of Serapis, and becoming the patrons of scholarship and learning (a good way to show off one’s wealth, by the way). It was this patronage that resulted in the creation of the great Library of Alexandria by Ptolemy. Over the centuries, the Library of Alexandria was one of the largest and most significant libraries in the ancient world. The great thinkers of the age, scientists, mathematicians, poets from all civilizations came to study and exchange ideas. As many as 700,000 scrolls filled the shelves. However, in one of the greatest tragedies of the academic world, the Library became lost to history and scholars are still not able to agree on how it was destroyed.

An artist’s depiction of the Library of Alexandria. Image source.

Perhaps one of the most interesting accounts of its destruction comes from the accounts of the Roman writers. According to several authors, the Library of Alexandria was accidentally destroyed by Julius Caesar during the siege of Alexandria in 48 BC. Plutarch, for instance, provides this account:

when the enemy tried to cut off his (Julius Caesar’s) fleet, he was forced to repel the danger by using fire, and this spread from the dockyards and destroyed the great library. (Plutarch, The Life of Julius Caesar, 49.6)

This account is dubious, however, as the Musaeum (or Mouseion) at Alexandria, which was right next to the library was unharmed, as it was mentioned by the geographer Strabo about 30 years after Caesar’s siege of Alexandria. Nevertheless, Strabo does not mention the Library of Alexandria itself, thereby supporting the claim that Caesar was responsible for burning it down. However, as the Library was attached to the Musaeum, and Strabo did mention the latter, it is possible that the library was still in existence during Strabo’s time. The omission of the library can perhaps be attributed either to the possibility that Strabo felt no need to mention the library, as he had already mentioned the Musaeum, or that the library was no longer the centre of scholarship that it once was (the idea of ‘budget cuts’ seems increasingly probable). In addition, it has been suggested that it was not the library, but the warehouses near the port, which stored manuscripts, that was destroyed by Caesar’s fire.

The second possible culprit would be the Christians of the 4th century AD. In 391 AD, the Emperor Theodosius issued a decree that officially outlawed pagan practices. Thus, the Serapeum or Temple of Serapis in Alexandria was destroyed. However, this was not the Library of Alexandria, or for that matter, a library of any sort. Furthermore, no ancient sources mention the destruction of any library at this time at all. Hence, there is no evidence that the Christians of the 4th century destroyed the Library of Alexandria.

The last possible perpetrator of this crime would be the Muslim Caliph, Omar. According to this story, a certain “John Grammaticus” (490–570) asks Amr, the victorious Muslim general, for the “books in the royal library." Amr writes to the Omar for instructions and Omar replies: "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.” There are at least two problems with this story. Firstly, there is no mention of any library, only books. Secondly, this was written by a Syrian Christian writer, and may have been invented to tarnish the image of Omar.

Unfortunately, archaeology has not been able to contribute much to this mystery. For a start, papyri have rarely been found in Alexandria, possibly due to the climatic condition, which is unfavourable for the preservation of organic material. Secondly, the remains of the Library of Alexandria itself have not been discovered. This is due to the fact that Alexandria is still inhabited by people today and only salvage excavations are allowed to be carried out by archaeologists.

While it may be convenient to blame one man or group of people for the destruction of what many consider to be the greatest library in the ancient world, it may be over-simplifying the matter. The library may not have gone up in flames at all, but rather could have been gradually abandoned over time. If the Library was created for the display of Ptolemaic wealth, then its decline could also have been linked to an economic decline. As Ptolemaic Egypt gradually declined over the centuries, this may have also had an effect on the state of the Library of Alexandria. If the Library did survive into the first few centuries AD, its golden days would have been in the past, as Rome became the new centre of the world.

Featured image: One of the theories suggests that Library of Alexandria was burned down. ‘The Burning of the Library of Alexandria’, by Hermann Goll (1876).

 By Ḏḥwty

Ancient partial skull from Israeli cave linked to migration of humans from Africa to Europe

This undated photo provided by the Israel Antiquities Authority on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2015 shows a partial human skull excavated from a cave in Israel's western Galilee region. (AP Photo/Israel Antiquities Authority, Clara Amit)
NEW YORK –  Long ago, humans left their evolutionary cradle in Africa and passed through the Middle East on their way to Europe. Now scientists have found the first fossil remains that appear to document that journey, a partial skull from an Israeli cave.
The skull dates from around 55,000 years ago, fitting into the period when scientists had thought the migrants inhabited the area. And details of its anatomy resemble ancient skulls from Europe, Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University in Israel wrote in an email.

He and others present the finding in a paper released Wednesday by the journal Nature. The skull, which lacks facial features and its base, was found in Manot Cave in the Galilee region of northern Israel.

The migrants are called modern humans because of their anatomy. The earliest remains of modern humans in Europe date to about 45,000 years ago.
Experts not connected with the work were impressed. "This is the first evidence we have of the humans who made this journey," apart from some ancient tools, said Eric Delson of Lehman College and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Although finding a fossil that fits so well with what was believed about the ancient migration might be expected, "we didn't have it before," he said.
"We could predict theoretically what we would find. They've found it. ... Up until now, that was a ghost."
Katerina Harvati of the University of Tuebingin in Germany said the skull gives clues about the anatomy of the migrants. Since Neanderthals were already known to inhabit the area, the skull also documents that they and modern humans co-existed there, as suspected, Harvati said.
That supports the idea that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred there, experts said. Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London wrote in an email that the skull is the first fossil of a modern human from western Asia that is well-dated to the estimated time of the interbreeding, some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.
 Fox News

Ancient Stone Toolmaking Didn't Just Spread Out of Africa with Humans

By Charles Q. Choi

The artifacts were discovered in 2008, after the Armenian military bulldozed a road and uncovered the ancient stone tools. Credit: Daniel S. Adler

An advanced way of crafting stone tools, once thought to have only originated in Africa, may have been invented elsewhere independently, according to a new study. The finding provides evidence that this ancient technology did not spread across the world solely as a result of humanity's exodus from Africa, researchers say.
Between 200,000 to 300,000 years ago in Eurasia and in Africa, ancient humans developed a sophisticated kind of stone tool production method known as Levallois technology, named after the site where it was first discovered in France. Levallois technology involves knocking stone flakes of specific sizes and shapes off a lump of stone, called a core.
The resulting flakes, with all of their edges sharpened by the earlier trimming work, are refined into knives or other tools, relatively small items that would have been easy to carry — an important consideration for the highly mobile hunter-gatherers of the time. [See photos of the ancient stone artifacts]

Before Levallois technology, early humans used a different approach called bifacial technology, where a mass of stone is shaped through the removal of flakes from a rock in order to produce a tool such as a hand axe, and most of the flakes are discarded. Archaeologists suggest that Levallois technology was more economical because fewer raw materials were wasted in the process.
Researchers have argued that Levallois technology was invented in Africa, and that this innovation eventually spread to Eurasia with the exodus of humans from Africa. As a result, this new way of building stone tools would have replaced local bifacial technologies. However, investigators have now found the earliest known use of Levallois technology in Eurasia. The discovery serves as the first clear evidence that Levallois technology arose independently outside of Africa.
Scientists investigated nearly 3,000 stone artifacts excavated from an archaeological site in Armenia known as Nor Geghi 1, or NG1. In the 1990s, the Armenian military had bulldozed a road from the group's base, exposing the artifacts, which the archaeologists discovered in 2008.

The artifacts in the top row (A) were created with an approach known as bifacial technology, in which two surfaces are used to remove flakes and shape the stone. The artifacts in the bottom row (B) were crafted using a method known as Levallois technology, which involves using a hammer to knock stone flakes of specific sizes and shapes off a lump of stone.
Credit: Daniel S. Adler

View full size image

The site was preserved between two lava flows that date back 200,000 and 400,000 years ago. Analysis of the sediments and volcanic ash found between the lava flows suggests that the artifacts were between 325,000 and 335,00 years old. Back then, the area was "a floodplain, a beautiful, open vegetated landscape," with a continental climate similar to today's, said lead study author Daniel Adler, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.
The stone artifacts, which were made from the volcanic rock obsidian, revealed that people there used both bifacial and Levallois technology at the same time, the earliest evidence of the coexistence of these technologies. The populations there apparently gradually developed Levallois technology out of bifacial technology, the researchers said.
This finding reveals that this technological innovation occurred intermittently throughout the Old World, rather than spreading from a single point of origin, as was previously thought. This highlights the antiquity of the human capacity for innovation, the researchers said.
"Technological innovation was something that our ancestors were very good at," Adler told Live Science.
In addition, chemical analysis of more than 300 obsidian artifacts revealed that humans at the site gathered materials from rocky outcrops as far away as 75 miles (120 kilometers). This suggests that they must have been capable of exploiting large, environmentally diverse territories, according to the researchers.
It remains uncertain who produced these artifacts, but they predate the emergence of modern humans about 200,000 years ago in Africa. Modern humanswere not the only human lineages to walk the Earth — other, so-called archaic humans once lived in Africa and Eurasia.
The scientists detailed their findings in the Sept. 26 issue of the journal Science.

Live Sciencel

Humans May Have Dispersed Out of Africa Earlier Than Thought

By Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor

 

Modern humans may have dispersed in more than one wave of migration out of Africa, and they may have done so earlier than scientists had long thought, researchers now say.

Modern humans first arose between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago in Africa. But when and how the modern human lineage then dispersed out of Africa has long been controversial.

Scientists have suggested the exodus from Africa started between 40,000 and 70,000 years ago. However, stone artifacts dating to at least 100,000 years ago that were recently uncovered in the Arabian Desert suggested that modern humans might have begun their march across the globe earlier than once suspected.

 

 Out of Africa models

To help solve this mystery, Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and her colleagues tested four competing out-of-Africa models. Two models involved a single dispersal — one involved a route northward, up the Nile River valley and then eastward across the northern end of the Arabian Peninsula into Asia; the other involved a "beachcomber" route along the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula into Asia. Two other models involved multiple dispersals, with both models involving routes along the northern and southern ends of the Arabian Peninsula — one involved connections and gene flow between these routes, and the other did not. [See Photos of Our Closest Human Ancestor]
The investigators used these models to predict how much the genes and skull measurements of different groups in Africa, Asia and Australia might have diverged from one another given how separated they were by space and time. Then, the researchers compared these predictions with actual gene and skull data from 10 African, Asian and Australian human populations.
The researchers found that both the genetic and skull data supported a multiple-dispersal model involving several migrations.
"It is really exciting that our results point to the possibility of a multiple-dispersals model of modern humans out of Africa," Harvati said. "A multiple-dispersals scenario, with earlier modern humans leaving Africa as early as 130,000 before present, can perhaps account for part of the morphological and genetic patterns that we see among modern human populations."
 The first wave of migrations probably followed the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula as early as 130,000 years ago to Australia and the west Pacific region, while the second wave traveled along the northern route about 50,000 years ago, the researchers said. These waves of migration appear relatively isolated from each other.
"Australian Aborigines, Papuans and Melanesians were relatively isolated after the early dispersal along the southern route," study lead author Hugo Reyes-Centeno, of the University of Tübingen, said in a statement. Other Asian populations apparently descended from members of the later northern wave of migration, the researchers said.
The delay between these waves of migration could be due to ancient environmental factors, "specifically climatic conditions that might have impeded the crossing of the Arabian Peninsula, such as desert conditions," Harvati said.
Ancient environmental factors might not only have prevented migrations, but also spurred them, Havarti said.
"For example, the documentation of severe droughts throughout eastern Africa between about 75,000 to 135,000 years ago could have encouraged a dispersal into other parts of Africa as well as outside of the continent," Harvati said. "More favorable conditions within Africa could have limited migrations out of the continent between 75,000 to 50,000 years ago."

Effects of interbreeding
The researchers cautioned that interbreeding between modern humans and other lineages of humans might influence the results of this new study. For example, instances of interbreeding with the now-extinct Denisovan lineage might have introduced ancient genes into certain modern human groups, perhaps making them look as if they left Africa earlier than they actually did. [Denisovan Gallery: Tracing the Genetics of Human Ancestors]
"Our study did not specifically test for hybridization with archaic humans, and, of course, it is possible that such admixture could contribute to our results," Harvati said. "We feel, however, that the very low levels of admixture that have been proposed are not sufficient to drive our findings."
The researchers said continued fieldwork and genetic advancements might help confirm this model of multiple, relatively isolated waves of migration.
"The story of human evolution tends to be simplified," Harvati said. "However, more complex models, such as multiple dispersals versus a single dispersal out of Africa, gain strength as more data and new methods become available."
"Further fieldwork in the region of the southern route — for example, the Arabian Peninsula, southeast Asia, Melanesia — is essential in order to further understand the timing and route of early modern human dispersals," Harvati said. "Of course, this is a vast geographical space that has been largely understudied, but it is crucial in developing our knowledge of the first Eurasians."
http://www.livescience.com/44988-humans-dispersed-earlier-than-thought.html

Lessons from a Zambian Road - reading by author Bill Jones, Jr.

http://thisblogblank.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/lessons-from-a-zambian-road-2/

Author Bill Jones, Jr. reads his poetry - have a listen