Lost Wisdom: The Secrets of Ancient Libraries

In September 2018, the 200-year-old National Museum of Brazil went up in flames, taking with it at least 20 million artifacts spanning 11,000 years of not only Brazilian history, but also Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Paleontological, Geological, and Biological; everything. The reasons for this tragic loss of human history and culture remains unclear. If we cannot easily, and with certainty, answer these questions about an event which only recently occurred, then how could we ever begin to believe we could know the totality of the events contributing to the loss of cultural institutions of our ancient past? 

In Lost Wisdom: The Secrets of Ancient Libraries, Dr. Heather Lynn will go in search of answers in this modern historiography. What happened to the Library of Alexandria? Did it really burn to the ground? If so, then who burned the Library? This is a question that has been debated by historians since as far back as one hundred years after the library’s destruction. The answer appears to be determined to a certain extent, by the historians’ religious or cultural sympathies. Some say the Christians burned down the library, some say Muslims, others say Julius Caesar is to blame. The list of guilty parties is extensive.

Next, Heather examines the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, Alexander's inspiration for his great library. Alexander made it his life’s goal to build a library just as grand, if not grander, than this ancient Mesopotamian library. Then, Heather explores the Library of Celsus, which was the third-largest library in the ancient world, third only to Alexandria and Pergamum.

Finally, Lost Wisdom: The Secrets of Ancient Libraries looks at the latest amazing discovery of a massive Roman library discovered in Germany. Archaeologists say that it may have housed up to 20,000 scrolls, making it larger than the Library of Celsus in Turkey and yet again, changing the history books. Why were these libraries so awe-inspiring? How have their legacies lived on today? Could there be others still waiting to be found?


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