Suppose we have some technology indistinguishable from magic that allows us to do this.
We might go back disguised as scholars with cameras to take pictures of all the scrolls.
Or more directly perhaps we can digitally image them by some sort of time-viewer.
What is thought to be have been lost?
Probably a lot of literature: plays by Sophocles etc.
Some earlier scientific and mathematical material… by Archimedes etc.
But is there anything crucial that is forgotten today? Any ‘secret knowledge’ that has been lost?
I suspect not, but it’s interesting to speculate…
as you suggest, lost plays by famous (and forgotten) playwrights (In his novel The Glory that Was, L. Sprague de Camp’s researchers really wanted to get their hands on the Lost Plays) and scientific and mathematical treatises by famous and obscure writers.
Finally learning where a lot of things by “the Scholiast” came from.
Certainly a lot of historical knowledge was lost: for example, Ptolemy I, who probably founded the library (although it likely did not exist as a physical institution until the reign of his son), was one of the chief companions of Alexander the Great and wrote a history of Alexander’s campaigns, a history which does not survive except in extract but was definitely present in the library.
In its later years, what remained of the library came under the control of neoplatonist groups, which were finally suppressed by the rising tide of Christianity. As late as the last quarter of the fourth century, the Serapeum or “daughter library” in Alexandria had a functioning pagan temple and a school teaching the “proper” rules of divine worship of the gods and cultic rituals.
One point worth mentioning: the Library of Alexandria had a long slow decline. By the time the Bishop of Alexandria destroyed the Serapeum in AD 391, the glory days of the library were centuries in the past. There was no one single fire that destroyed everything. Part of the collection was likely accidentally burned by Julius Caesar’s troops in 48 BC, but the bulk either survived or was soon rebuilt. However, not much is known about the library Roman Alexandria; the head librarians in early Ptolemaic Egypt were themselves notable scholars, but we don’t even have the names of most of the Roman-era librarians. The part of Alexandria where the library was located was destroyed during the Palmyrene invasion in the 270s, but whether the main library even still existed by that point is uncertain.
They were built 2500 years or so before the Library .
The Exodus is a myth- perhaps based on a legend. Mind you sure, some ex-slaves and others likely did leave Egypt and went back to The Holy, but it didnt take 40 years and not in those numbers. Not to mention it was around 1000 years before the Library was built.
The Library was burned first by Julius Caesars troops in 48BC- they didnt mean to, the fire spread from some ships burned in the harbor. Also the Romans liberally looted the Library- having old scrolls was a big thing among the Roman elite. Perhaps only some of the Library burned. In 272 AD the Romans destroyed most of the rest of the Library, then the rest in 297AD. So a lot of the Library was looted, not burned.
The Christians did not destroy the Library.
But by then is was a temple to Mitra, and there is no record of any books or scrolls being destroyed.
In 542 AD, any books remaining in Alexandria were burned by the Muslims. "“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.”. Mind you, by then there was no great Library as such.
They used herbs, which were neither safe nor effective.
We could likely find full early versions of the Iliad. Also - Sappho’s Poetry, Aristotle’s Lost Works and a few others.
Here is a great cite-
. The idea that the temple of Serapis still housed a library in 391 is doubtful;
and * Over 1000 lost authors in the fields of history and geography alone – the monumental Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, compiled initially by Felix Jacoby
216 lost tragic playwrights, about 170 of them earlier than the fire in 47 BCE – Snell’s 1971 edition of Tragicorum graecorum fragmenta (for the well-known playwrights, their hundreds of lost plays have large editions of their own)
Around 80 lost philosophers prior to 400 BCE – Diels and Kranz’ Fragmente der Vorsokratiker
About 200 lost epic poems prior to 400 BCE – spread across several editions
Around 90 lost lyric and elegiac poets prior to 300 BCE – Page’s Poetae melici graeci, Gentili and Prato’s Poetarum elegiacorum testimonia et fragmenta
It is a myth that the burning of the Library at Alexandria destroyed books and info that were irreplacable. Much of it existed in other places, some was looted before the fire or moved, the place was looted for a long time, it remains questionable if the library was even actually burned.
Nice story though, and that is all it. The winners record their story and that becomes history. Like salting the earth at Carthage, it did not happen.
One thing we might find would be original-language copies of Euclid’s Elements. All of the copies now in existence descend from Arabic translations. Not that we’d learn much new from such originals, but they’d be interesting.
I’ve heard the ancient civilizations had advanced knowledge of math. The ideas would be similar to today. That certainly would have been in the library for scholars to learn.
Supposedly advanced knowledge of math and science was lost and had to be acquired again in The Renaissance.
It’s difficult to prove without historical documents.
The Mithraem and the Serapeum were two separate structures. The monk Tyrannius Rufinus wrote that the bishop supervised the destruction of a hidden Mithraic temple and publicly mocked the pagan artifacts therefrom, causing pagans to attack Christians. When the Christians counterattacked, the pagans retreated to the Serapeum, so-named because it was consecrated to Serapis, the syncretic Graeco-Egyptian god-protector of Alexandria. Emperor Theodosius, after heavy lobbying by Bishop Theophilus, then authorized Theophilus to destroy the Serapeum and all of the other statues and temples and monuments to Serapis in the city.
The quote beginning “If those books are in agreement with the Quran …” is first recorded by the Syriac Orthodox bishop Gregory Bar Hebraeus, who lived six hundred years after the Muslims invaded Egypt in AD 642, and Gregory never gave any clue as to where he heard the story, so its historicity is, um, questionable. The only earlier mention of the Muslims burning a library there is in the Account of Egypt by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, written very late in the 12th century, and al-Latif says in the same passage that Aristotle taught philosophy at the Serapeum (an obvious fantasy or falsehood). Meanwhile, the Egyptian Coptic bishop John of Nikiou, a near-contemporary of the Muslim invasion (he was bishop in the 680s/90s) wrote in his Chronicle of assorted Muslim atrocities and misdeeds, and never mentions the burning of a library.
One small example of what was lost is the non-Homeric parts of The Epic Cycle concerning the Trojan War.
Given how much study has been devoted to the 2 Homeric books, imagine what they’d do with 6 more.
Since the library waxed and waned over the centuries, later there could have been copies of very early Christian writings that are now lost.
Josephus had access to some writings that we no longer have, most of which would have also been copied in Alexandria. Instead of a summing up of other material, the originals would be amazing.
A ~2nd century Hebrew-Aramaic Torah would be interesting. (The greek Septuagint is actually closer to the Samaritan text than to the more canonical Masoretic text.)
Again, my cite says-The idea that the temple of Serapis still housed a library in 391 is doubtful;
wiki- In 642 AD, Alexandria was captured by an Arab army under the command of Amr ibn al-As. Several later Arabic sources describe the library’s destruction by the order of Caliph Umar.[98] The earliest was al-Qifti who described the story in a biographical dictionary History of Learned Men , written before 1248.[99]Bar-Hebraeus, writing in the thirteenth century, quotes Umar as saying to Yaḥyā al-Naḥwī (John Philoponus): “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.” So, Ibn al Qifti recounts, the general ordered that the books be burned to fuel the fires that heated Alexandria’s city baths. It is said that they were enough to provide heating for six months.[100]
Note that the article mentions Ibn al Qifti. But by that time it is doubtful if there was a great library, the books burned were likely private collections.
The secret is that there is no secrets. Keep it to yourself. Think of all the conspiracy theorists whose lives would be destroyed if they learned the truth.
We’ve got historical documents, mostly in Arabic, containing translations of the same Hellenistic scientific and mathematical works that were kept in the Alexandria Mouseion. That knowledge was never “lost”, per se, although a few specific classical works no longer survive in a Greek original.
Yes, Latin-literate scholars in the Western European Middle Ages mostly lost touch with the Greek technical sciences heritage and had to later reabsorb it into their textual corpus and curriculum: beginning with the 12th century or thereabouts, with the first major wave of translations from Arabic, and continuing into the Renaissance’s large-scale encounters with Byzantine versions of original Greek forms of the texts.
But that’s a very different phenomenon from being truly “lost” to human knowledge. Absolutely nothing in our whole intellectual history of the ancient and medieval worlds supports the hypothesis that there was some kind of esoterically advanced Hellenistic Greek scientific corpus that became lost, literally without trace, in the decline of Hellenistic Greek society.
Sure, there are lots of specific details and texts that are no longer available (just owing to general patterns of documentary extinction, not to any isolated catastrophe like the supposed destruction of the Mouseion). But we have a general sense of what they were about: and they were about what you’d expect from the context of that very well-studied ancient culture. There aren’t any lost ancient proofs of the Riemann hypothesis, or empirical measurements of the speed of light, or anything like that kicking around in the immemorial dust of Alexandria.
When literacy was not common, the written word perhaps had an almost magical significance.
They wouldn’t have taken the trouble to write it down if it wasn’t important, surely?
Just like “if it’s on the Internet it must be true”…
Speaking of libraries, I was very disappointed to discover that the famous and much-photographed facade of the library of Ephesus is in fact a 19th century fake by a German ‘archaeologist’.
Though Ephesus is a very interesting site to visit, and apparently did have a real and important library at one time.
