ANCIENT
EGYPT
The History, People and Culture of the Nile Valley
The History, People and Culture of the Nile Valley |
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Volume Three Issue Two - September/October 2002 Review Panel Miriam Bibby THE
LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA: Attention
has focused for several years now on the foundation of a new centre of
learning, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, at the ancient throne of knowledge in
Egypt, Alexandria. This book of essays, inspired by the work of the Australian
Friends of Alexandria Library and produced by a group of Australian historians,
archaeologists, classicists and medievalists, is ‘in homage to the Library’s
legacy…and an opportunity to share recent work on the Library’s
significance.’ The pale ghost of pharaonic Egypt is tantalisingly here, but
scarcely able to make itself seen or heard. There are no essays on the nature,
function, discovery or interpretation of ancient Egyptian texts. The ground in
this book is firmly held by classicists and medievalists and it would be a brave
reviewer who would venture forth, unreferenced and alone, to argue any case for
pharaonic contributions or to enter into a discussion of the nature of Ptolemaic
Egypt. True, the function of ancient Egyptian ‘libraries’,
stored in religious foundations, is clearly different from that of a concerted
and systematic attempt to draw together and to classify texts from all over the
world, ancient or modern. (One footnote to Roy McLeod’s opening essay, a
reference to a 1972 New York Graphic Society publication by M.A. Hussein, Origins of the Book: Egypt’s contribution
to the Development of the Book from Papyrus to Codex suggests
a possible starting point for those wanting to extend the argument back into
history.) Roy McLeod focuses on the origins, factual and mythological, of the
original Alexandrian foundation. He suggests after references to the collections
and translations of Hittite and Assyrian kings that ‘the special character of
the Library was informed by Macedonian rulers who had a vested interest in
accumulating oriental knowledge, with the intention of installing a syncretist
Hellenism throughout the imperial world’. The Library was closely connected to
the museion
‘but we have clues suggesting that it was built upon the plan of a
rameseseum – as such, a combination of palace, museum and shrine.’ (From Roy
McLeod we also first gain the information that Ptolemy III ran up the first ever
library fine, still ongoing as far as I can tell, although the king’s ransom
that he put up to borrow books which he apparently never intended to return
possibly still covers the debt.) D T Potts investigates the nature of ancient
libraries with a detailed exposition of the ‘systematically collected library
in the ancient Near East’, arguing the case for that of Sennacherib predating
that of the better known Assurbanipal. Wendy Brazil creates a vision of Alexandria which crosses
space, interspersing (inevitably) quotations from Durrell with views of
imaginary and real dwellers in and visitors to Alexandria. It is Robert Barnes
who grasps the nettle with the quote from Timon of Phlius (who enters stage
periodically throughout the book like a snarling Greek chorus) on the nature and
functions of the library and its living inhabitants: ‘In populous Egypt many
cloistered bookworms are fed, arguing endlessly in the chicken-coop of the
Muses’. R.G. Tanner continues the ‘nature and value’
theme of this essay with a piece on the possible origins of the collection, but
it was John Vallance’s essay ‘Doctors in the Library: the strange case of
Apollonius the Bookworm and other Stories’ that provided the link for me
between the academic Alexandria and the actual application of knowledge. A
two-way process; the ‘bookish doctors’ move between academic or empirical
spheres and into the real world, giving a sense of patients left waiting in
wards while the doctors discuss, dispute and dally. Samuel Lieu’s ‘Scholars
and Students in the Roman East’ evokes the pharaonic ghost again with its
description of Libanius’ ‘teacher’ (pedagogue): ‘…he is worse than a
slavedriver; always on to you, almost stuck to you, continually goading,
rebuking all the time, chastising laziness…punishing trivia excessively,
following you fully armed as it were, brandishing a stick or martinet in his
right hand.’ Patricia Cannon Johnson’s wellexpressed essay on the
Neoplatonists leads on to J.O. Ward’s provocative final firework. In this, the
possible backwash into Europe of an Alexandrian tide of acquisition and storing
knowledge is viewed through the medium of Umberto Eco’s Name
of the Rose. The essay begins, innocently enough, with an overview of
how realistic a representation of a medieval library Eco gives in his book
because Ward is ‘a literal sort of academic’. Gleefully, although not in the
following example, Ward presents estimated facts and figures including the real costs of producing a
library: ‘Even a missal…might require up to 156 skins of best calves…a
large bible might require up to 500 skins. Even at a conservative estimate,
Eco’s 85,000 books might have required the skins of between two and eight
million calves.’ There is much real information in this essay, but that is not
the point. The library in Eco’s allegory is labyrinth; the library is our vain
and misunderstood attempt to define a creation
for which we are not responsible, in both senses of the word. ‘By establishing a constructed, artificial and
ultimately erroneous notion of truth, and vainly surrounding it with a myriad of
treatises carefully guarded from profane use, the library and the librarians are
contradicting the nature of things. In their insatiable pride, their urge to
monopolise and deify knowledge, they go against the “desires of their loins or
the ardour that makes another man a warrior of the faith or heresy”.’
‘Perhaps the final spiritual meaning of the aedificium of Eco’s novel is the contingency of all
meaning, the uselessness of all systematic knowledge. What a paradoxical
conclusion for a novel about a library!’ And thus, this book of essays on the
Library of Alexandria concludes. MAB Title: The Library of Alexandria: Centre of
Learning in the Ancient World Editor: Roy McLeod Publisher: I B Tauris ISBN: 1-86064-428-7 Price: £39.50
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