Talk:Library of Alexandria

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Library of Alexandria has been listed as one of the History good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

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Date	Process	Result
November 15, 2018	Good article nominee	Listed

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on December 16, 2018.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that Eratosthenes, the head librarian of the Library of Alexandria, calculated the circumference of the earth with remarkable accuracy in the third century BC?

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This article was selected as the article for improvement on 1 July 2013 for a period of one week.

A member of the Guild of Copy Editors reviewed a version of this article for copy editing. However, a major copy edit was inappropriate at that time because of the issues specified below, or the other tags now found on this article. Once these issues have been addressed, and any related tags have been cleared, please tag the article once again for {{copyedit}}. The Guild welcomes all editors with a good grasp of English. Visit our project page if you are interested in joining!

World's oldest and biggest library

Dear authors, Thank you for this great information about the world's biggest library in ancient world, but it seems The library of Alexandria was not world's biggest library. It was Takshila (that time in Bharat(India)) followed by two more libraries which had at least 9 times the collections as that possessed by Alexandria. I just wanted to share this information. Please feel free to share the feedbacks.

Best

Arab Invasion Section

Hello @A. Parrot, I don't think that in my revision, we were patently stating that Theodosius was the one who destroyed the library. Instead, we presented a historian's perspective on what he considered probable. Additionally, the sources seemed appropriate to me.

Regarding the section title "Arabic sources on Muslim invasion," I find it somewhat inaccurate since many of the sources did not seem to be exclusively Arabic. The term "Arab invasion" would be more relevant and accurate. Therefore, I am considering updating the section name and the associated wikilink accordingly, if that’s alright. StarkReport (talk) 22:45, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding sourcing, I was mostly concerned about the Arab News source; its statement about Theodosius relied on D. P. Singhal, whose qualifications I'm uncertain of. In any case, a mention of Theodosius seems to be misplaced here. The existing article text treats it as the consensus that the library no longer existed in its original location in Theodosius' time, so the case for blaming him rests on the idea that 1. some of the library's collection was relocated to the Serapeum and 2. Theodosius was to blame for the Serapeum's destruction. Those topics are already extensively discussed in the section that follows the one where you were adding your text.

If we were to add anything more about why scholars disbelieve the story about the Arab conquest, I would favor elaborating on the reasons for their skepticism—e.g., that John Philoponus was almost certainly dead by the time of the conquest. A. Parrot (talk) 23:43, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, so would this work: "Additionally, Roy MacLeod notes that the story first appears 500 years after the conquest, and John Philoponus was likely deceased by then, indicating that the tale lacks historical credibility."^[1] right after the quote of Diana Delia. @A. Parrot? StarkReport (talk) 04:28, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've edited in a tweaked version of your suggestion. A. Parrot (talk) 07:28, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

^ 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."

When and Who it was build by.

Is there no information about who built the library and when? In the article there seems to be a lot of question about who came up with the plans and when it was built. Is there a way to get more solid knowledge on this kind of information? If not maybe reword the text on that part because there seems to be a lot of "maybe" and "probably" that take away from the article. Cturpen21 (talk) 00:42, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No, there isn't. Ancient history always has "a lot of "maybe" and "probably". Johnbod (talk) 02:21, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

[FOOTNOTEMacLeod200071-1] 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."

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