The Greatest Library of Alexandria Didn't Burn! Scientists Found the Scrolls and Read Them

Imagine you're Julius Caesar. It's 48 BC, you're in the port of Alexandria, and you urgently need to destroy an enemy fleet. You set the ships on fire. Perfectly logical. War is war. The fire spreads to the port warehouses. Several buildings burn down. You're not particularly worried about it at that moment because you still have half the world left to conquer. Then, 2,000 years later, historians, school textbooks, and documentary films declare that on that very night you destroyed the greatest library of the ancient world. 700,000 scrolls. The entire accumulated wisdom of ancient civilization supposedly turned to ash. Supposedly in a single night. And here's where things get interesting because that's not true. Well, not entirely true. 20 years after the fire, the Greek geographer Strabo came to Alexandria and described the library as a living, functioning institution. No tragedy. Which means some scrolls survived, were removed and hidden, and some of them were found in our own time, and what was inside turned several fields of science upside down. Today, we'll look at what actually burned in 48 BC, where the scrolls that were saved ended up, and what happened in 2023 with a charred papyrus that's almost 2,000 years old. Stay to the end. The final story is absolutely impossible. What Actually Burned? The first thing to understand about the library of Alexandria is that it wasn't a single building. Many people picture something like an enormous hall with columns, scrolls lining the walls from floor to ceiling, and the whole thing going up in flames at once. Nothing of the sort. It was an entire system, spread across several points in the city. The main storage facility was inside the royal quarter, a restricted zone where outsiders weren't allowed at all. Scholars were brought there from all across the Mediterranean, paid a salary and fed at government expense, and in return were asked to do one thing, read, translate, and write. Essentially, it was the world's first state-funded research institution. Imagine a government today telling you, here's an apartment, here's a salary, here's access to every book on the planet. Just study whatever you want and write what you think. That's roughly how it worked. And there was this entertaining detail. Every ship that entered the port of Alexandria was searched. If manuscripts were found on board, they were confiscated, copied, the original kept in the library, and the copy returned to the owner. So it was an official state pirate library. Want to dock? Be so kind as to share your literature. Basically a customs office, except instead of money they took books. And they kept the original and gave you the copy. Fair? Well, that depends. Besides the main storage, there was a second facility, a library attached to the Temple of Serapis. It was smaller but still enormous, housing tens of thousands of manuscripts. So when Caesar set fire to the fleet in the port, the fire spread to the port warehouses. Not to the library itself, but to warehouses where scrolls were temporarily stored waiting to be shipped. Around 40,000 documents. That's a lot. And it's genuinely a shame. But it's not the entire library, and the main collection in the royal quarter remained untouched. Write in the comments. Did you know the library didn't burn down under Caesar? I'm certain most people believe it did, because that's how the story is usually told. So when did it finally perish? This is where the real story begins. It wasn't destroyed in a single moment. It was killed slowly. Four times over the course of nearly seven centuries. In the 270s AD, the Roman Emperor Aurelian was suppressing a revolt in Alexandria, and in the fighting destroyed the entire royal quarter, the very district where the main building stood. In 391, the Christian patriarch Theophilus organized the destruction of the second facility, the Serapium, a pagan temple with pagan books, in his view a place of impurity that needed to be eliminated. And in 642, the Arab commander captured the city, and according to one version, finished off whatever remained, though most historians believe there was almost nothing left by that point. Four blows over 700 years, each time different people with different motives. But between each of these blows, there was time. And during that time, scholars managed to save, copy, and remove some of the texts. Where exactly? Keep watching. Where the scrolls went. When people say that the destruction of the library of Alexandria set humanity back a thousand years, it sounds beautiful but somehow abstract. Hard to really grasp. So let's be specific rather than abstract. The three main Greek dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, wrote around 700 plays combined, and of all those 700 plays, roughly 33 have survived. Four and a half percent. Imagine if all that remained of Russian literature were three short stories by Chekhov, the first volume of War and Peace, and a few poems by Pushkin, and everything else was known only by title, and the occasional quote that someone mentioned in passing in some other text. That's roughly the situation we're in with Greek theater. Aristotle wrote around 200 works, and about 30 have survived. Among the lost ones is his treatise on comedy, The Second Part of the Poetics. That's the very book around which Umberto Eco wrote his detective novel, The Name of the Rose, where a monk kills people just to prevent the manuscript from coming to light. So Eco built an entire novel around a book we still haven't found, and possibly never will. Eratosthenes, who worked in Alexandria in the 3rd century B.C., managed to calculate the circumference of the Earth to within 2% accuracy, without satellites or modern instruments, using only two wells, the angle of the sun's shadow, and geometry. His complete method was described in a separate treatise that is lost, and we know about this calculation only because other authors mentioned it in passing. Now, the most incredible story of all. In 1906, the Danish scholar Johann Heiberg was in Constantinople examining an old prayer book, a standard medieval religious text. Nothing special. But when he looked closely at the parchment, he noticed that there was something beneath the religious text. The thing is, monks in the Middle Ages often scraped old texts off parchment and wrote over them because the material was expensive and discarding it seemed wasteful. Heiberg deciphered these scraped letters beneath the prayer book's text, and couldn't believe his eyes because it was Archimedes. The treatise on the method of mechanical theorems, which had been considered completely and permanently lost. And here's what was found inside. Archimedes, in the 3rd century B.C., had been using mathematical concepts that famous European scholars only rediscovered in the 17th century A.D. We're talking about the foundations of calculus. And without this science, there is no physics, no bridge building, nothing in the modern technical world at all. Newton and Leibniz received eternal worldwide fame for this discovery, while Archimedes did the same thing 2,000 years before them, and it had been sitting under a prayer book waiting for a Danish scholar in 1906 to decide to look closely at someone else's parchment. Two things about this story amaze me. First, that Archimedes knew all of this 2,000 years ago, and it was just sitting there all along. Second, that it was found completely by accident, because one Danish scholar in 1906 decided to take a closer look at an old piece of parchment. And there are many such pieces of parchment still out there in the world. What we lost, and how serious it is. When people say that the destruction of the Library of Alexandria set humanity back 1,000 years, it sounds beautiful but somehow abstract, hard to really grasp. So let's be specific rather than abstract. The three main Greek dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, wrote around 700 plays combined, and of all those 700 plays, roughly 33 have survived. Four and a half percent. Imagine if all that remained of English literature were three short stories by Hemingway, the first volume of War and Peace, and a few Shakespeare sonnets, and everything else was known only by title and the occasional quote that someone mentioned in passing in some other text. That's roughly the situation we're in with Greek theater. Aristotle wrote around 200 works, and about 30 have survived. Among the lost ones is his treatise on comedy, The Second Part of the Poetics. That's the very book around which Umberto Eco wrote his detective novel The Name of the Rose, where a monk kills people just to prevent the manuscript from coming to light. So Eco built an entire novel around a book we still haven't found, and possibly never will. Eratosthenes, who worked in Alexandria in the 3rd century BC, managed to calculate the circumference of the Earth to within 2% accuracy, without satellites or modern instruments, using only two wells, the angle of the sun's shadow, and geometry. His complete method was described in a separate treatise that is lost, and we know about this calculation only because other authors mentioned it in passing. Now, the most incredible story of all. In 1906, the Danish scholar Johann Heiberg was in Constantinople examining an old prayer book, a standard medieval religious text, nothing special. But when he looked closely at parchment, he noticed that there was something beneath the religious text. The thing is, monks in the Middle Ages often scraped old texts off parchment and wrote over them, because the material was expensive and discarding it seemed wasteful. Heiberg deciphered these scraped letters beneath the prayer book's text, and couldn't believe his eyes because it was Archimedes. The treatise on the method of mechanical theorems, which had been considered completely and permanently lost. And here's what was found inside. Archimedes, in the 3rd century BC, had been using mathematical concepts that famous European scholars only rediscovered in the 17th century AD. We're talking about the foundations of calculus. And without this science, there is no physics, no bridge building, nothing in the modern technical world at all. Newton and Leibniz received eternal worldwide fame for this discovery, while Archimedes did the same thing 2,000 years before them, and it had been sitting under a prayer book waiting for a Danish scholar in 1906 to decide to look closely at someone else's parchment. Two things about this story amaze me. First, that Archimedes knew all of this 2,000 years ago, and it was just sitting there all along. Second, that it was found completely by accident, because one Danish scholar in 1906 decided to take a closer look at an old piece of parchment. And there are many such pieces of parchment still out there in the world. Who helped read the ancient text? Now let's go back to those 1,800 charred scrolls from Herculaneum. For two and a half centuries, scholars tried to read them, and it was genuine torture, because unrolling such a scroll by hand meant destroying it completely. It crumbles to dust at the slightest touch, since it's hard and brittle like charcoal on the outside, while the layers of papyrus inside had fused solid over 17 centuries. Several dozen scrolls perished exactly this way, destroyed in attempts to read them, which is, of course, very unfortunate. The rest simply sat in a museum in Naples, closed and unopened, impossible to touch. In 2019, American computer scientist and entrepreneur Brent Seales proposed scanning the scrolls with high-powered x-rays, roughly like a hospital CT scanner but in a special particle accelerator, to get a three-dimensional model of the internal layers without unrolling the scroll. Good three-dimensional models were produced, but nothing could be read in them, because the ink was carbon-based and on an x-ray carbon on carbon simply isn't visible. Everything looks uniformly black. Four years of work, tens of millions of dollars, and not a single word read. I honestly can't imagine what it's like to spend four years shining x-rays at a charred roll and seeing just a black screen. Most people would have given up much sooner. Then, in 2023, Seales announced a competition with a $700,000 prize for whoever could write a program capable of recognizing letters in three-dimensional scans. Three students won. Two American, one Swiss. Their algorithm detected barely perceptible textural imprints of letters on the papyrus surface. It turns out the ink, as it dried, slightly altered the texture of the material by a few micrometers, literally one-tenth the thickness of a human hair. The human eye can't see this. The neural network could. The first decoded words turned out to be part of a philosophical text about pleasure. A treatise by Philodemus of Gadara, an Epicurean philosopher of the first century B.C., which no living person had read for nearly 2,000 years. By the end of 2024, the team had decoded several hundred lines from various scrolls, reflections on the nature of music, on how human perception works, on the structure of pleasure and pain. Small fragments of the thinking of people who lived before the Christ and perished under a layer of volcanic lava. Incidentally, one of the decoded fragments contained an unexpected detail. The author described the smell of food as an important part of the pleasure of eating, exactly the way modern neuroscientists would put it. Two thousand years apart, the same conclusion. And here's what's important to understand about the scale of this competition. Seals made it open, meaning anyone in the world with a computer and the desire to try could participate. In the end, more than a thousand teams from different countries worked on the problem. The student from Nebraska who was first to recognize letters had never studied antiquity or archaeology. He simply knew how to work with neural networks. For 2,000 years, no one could read these scrolls, and then a 22-year-old guy with a laptop showed up. Seals says publicly that of 1,800 scrolls, about 1% has been decoded and 99% remains unread. And among them, there may well be texts we consider permanently lost. Because Herculaneum was a wealthy city, and its residents collected the finest Greek manuscripts. What exactly lies in those cylinders that haven't been touched yet, nobody knows. What they found under Alexandria In the 1990s, Egyptian authorities began building a metro in Alexandria. Workers started digging, and almost immediately everything stopped, because under the ground there was another city. This is, by the way, a typical story for Alexandria. The modern metropolis sits directly on layers of ancient construction, and any serious building project inevitably turns into an involuntary archaeological expedition. A Polish-Egyptian expedition found remains of buildings from the 3rd through 1st centuries BC there, foundations, columns, mosaic floors, right in the district where the library complex was supposed to have been. The library building itself has still not been found, and we don't have its precise location, which is in itself remarkable. The most famous building in the ancient world, and we don't know exactly where it stood. But in 2004, scholars announced the discovery of what they called possible remains of lecture halls. 13 rooms along a central corridor, stone benches along the perimeter, and a raised platform for a lecturer in the center. Precisely how places for scholarly discussions at the library are described in ancient texts. This isn't 100% proof, there could have been other educational institutions there, but the dating and geometry match very precisely. At the same time, Egyptian and French divers began surveying the floor of Alexandria's harbor because earthquakes and changes in sea level over 2,000 years have submerged a significant part of the ancient city to a depth of 6 to 8 meters. And there lie fragments of statues, sections of columns, pieces of paved roads, and entire quarters of the palace complex. The French underwater archaeologist Frank Goddio, the very one who had previously found several of Napoleon's ships in Abiquir Bay, went through these submerged quarters section by section, and found structures right in the zone where the royal quarter with the library was supposed to stand. All of this lies underwater a few hundred meters from the modern shore, and to this day no one has touched it, because excavations at that depth require enormous funding and a pile of permits that nobody has yet. What do you think, if there really are sealed stone boxes with scrolls down there, should they be raised or is it better to leave them and study them right underwater? Write in the comments. One more curious detail about Alexandria. In 2001, Egypt officially opened a new library of Alexandria, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a modern building right on the shore approximately where the original complex might have stood. It now houses 8 million books, several museums, and research centers. Journalists wrote about it as a revival, but the most curious thing is that during construction of this new building, several ancient artifacts were also found, and some of them are still being studied. Literally, they were building a new library, digging a foundation pit, and found traces of the old one. In 1998, Egyptian divers raised from the harbor floor a statue of a priest and a sphinx with the name of Pharaoh Samtik II. That's the 7th century BC, meaning 300 years older than the library itself. The statue had lain underwater for 2,000 years in near-perfect condition. This means that the marine environment in this particular location preserves objects, doesn't destroy them, but preserves them, and that changes everything we thought about the submerged quarters. What's down there may not be a pile of rubble, but perfectly legible artifacts. Monasteries. Accidental repositories. There's one more story that's almost never mentioned in this context, and it really should be. Medieval Christian monasteries. One might ask, what do monks have to do with ancient Greek philosophy? But a huge portion of ancient texts survived precisely there, and it happened more or less by accident. Monks copied texts as part of monastic labor, they copied everything indiscriminately. The Bible, saints' lives, church statutes, and along with these, they copied ancient authors simply because those were teaching materials. Rhetoric was taught using Cicero, logic using Aristotle, medicine using Hippocrates, and banning these texts would have been like banning textbooks. So in monasteries from Ireland to Syria, thousands of manuscripts with ancient texts accumulated, whose value most monks themselves had no real idea about. Just old books in Latin sitting in chests, not particularly needed by anyone. It's rather like if your grandmother had Archimedes' works sitting in a cardboard box of old magazines in her attic, and nobody knew, because nobody had opened the box. In 1417, the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini was traveling through German monasteries in search of old manuscripts. It was his passion, he traveled around, dug through chests, begged monks for forgotten books. In the monastery of St. Gallen in Switzerland, he found in a dusty chest the poem On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, a Latin text from the first century BC that hadn't been read for around a thousand years. The poem described the world as consisting of invisible, indivisible particles moving through void, ancient atomism, which Europe had by that point completely forgotten. Bracciolini sent a copy to friends in Florence, they read it, began discussing it, then a century and a half later Galileo started experimental physics, then came Newton, then Dalton in 1803 discovered atomic theory with actual proof. This is of course a simplified chain, history is always more complicated, but Lucretius definitely belongs in it. And here's what's interesting, Bracciolini didn't just find a manuscript, he understood what he was holding, because he was educated enough to recognize Lucretius and connected enough to know who to show it to. In someone else's hands, the same manuscript could have sat in that chest for another hundred years. And how many such manuscripts monks copied over, not understanding the value of what they were scraping off, this we will never know. And one more case I can't fail to mention. In 1905 in the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, British archaeologists Grenfell and Hunt found hundreds of thousands of papyrus fragments on the site of an ancient city dump. The city's residents 2,000 years ago had been throwing away unwanted documents, bills, letters, official papers, and these had been preserved by the dry Egyptian climate. And among this everyday rubbish were unknown poems by Sappho, fragments of Pindar, and parts of Gospels that hadn't made it into the canon. These papyri are still kept in Oxford, and scholars have been studying them for 120 years now. And there's no end to this work in sight. All of this was found on a city dump and had lain in the ground for 2,000 years. What is happening right now? In 2017, an international group of scholars began systematically scanning monastic libraries throughout the Middle East, and one of the objects was the Monastery of St. Catherine on the Sinai Peninsula. It is one of the oldest active Christian monasteries in the world, about 1,500 years old, and its library has survived Arab conquests, the Crusades, and the Napoleonic Wars. It holds thousands of manuscripts that have never been carefully studied. When scholars began scanning the manuscripts, hidden layers were discovered beneath the visible texts, the same kind of palimpsests as that prayer book with Archimedes. Except here, there turned out to be more than a hundred of them. A hundred manuscripts beneath which other, older texts are hidden. Monks didn't destroy them, they simply wrote on top. Among those already deciphered are fragments in languages considered almost completely lost, part of a previously unknown Bible translation, and fragments of a medical treatise connected to the Alexandrian tradition. The work there will take decades. And here's what's important to understand about the scale. The Monastery of St. Catherine is one object. There are hundreds of such monasteries with unexplored libraries throughout the Middle East, in Europe, in Ethiopia, and in Armenia. In Ethiopia, there are manuscripts in the ancient Ethiopic language dating to the 5th and 6th centuries, and some of them are translations from Greek made when the Alexandrian tradition was still alive. What exactly was translated there, we don't yet know. And here, this is what really turns everything upside down. An engineer named worked in Alexandria. In the 1st century AD, he built a steam engine. A real, working one, powered by steam. He called it a toy because he simply didn't understand what to do with it. After all, there were slaves nearby who did all the same things for free. Why would you need a machine? Most of his works are lost. And the Industrial Revolution, which turned the entire world upside down, happened 1,700 years after him. That entire journey, from steam engine to railways, factories, and modern cities, could have begun back in antiquity. A few of Heron's scrolls just weren't copied in time. Or here's another example that personally stays with me. Aristarchus of Samos, he also worked in Alexandria, calculated that the earth revolves around the sun. In the 3rd century BC, 1,700 years before Copernicus. His main work on this subject has not survived. We know about it only because Archimedes happened to mention this idea in Without that mention, we would never have known that Aristarchus had figured this out. Europe spent more than a thousand years arguing about what revolves around what, burned several people at the stake for giving the right answer. And all that time, the right answer had already been written on a papyrus somewhere in Alexandria. It just didn't survive. This is not a story about what we lost. This is a story about what we are only beginning to find. You know what amazes me most about all of this? Not that the library burned. But that it didn't burn. And we still lost almost everything. Simply because nobody made copies in time. Someone wrote a prayer over Archimedes. Someone considered a steam engine a toy. The history of humanity is not the tragedy of one fire. It's a thousand small decisions, each of which cost us several centuries. Write in the comments what from today's video struck you most. Subscribe to the channel. Turn on notifications. The next episode is coming soon.