Wasn't Constantinople the capitol of the Roman empire at one time?
Posted on 05/02/2010 3:17:15 PM PDT by neverdem
Wasn't Constantinople the capitol of the Roman empire at one time?
Actually, no. It was destroyed by fire during fighting in the city between the Roman Emperor Aurelian (the man for whom Orleans and New Orleans are named) and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra in the 270's AD. If there was anything left of the three libraries in 391 AD, then the Coptic bishop will have destroyed them when he obtained permission from the court of Theodosius I to destroy the pagan temples of Alexandria. There were three libraries in Alexandria: the royal library and two others attached to temples of Serapis and Caesarion, the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. Historical accounts of the destruction in 391 AD make no mention of libraries or what happened to them.
Best bet is that the royal library was destroyed in the 3rd century, and the surviving temple libraries mined out for the establishment of the library at Constantinople some 40 or 50 years later, so that there was no longer a "library of Alexandria" in the time of Theodosius.
Umar's destruction of Alexandrian libraries was, according to Bernard Lewis and other historians, propaganda generated by Saladin to cover his destruction of "heretical" Islamic texts, i.e. to make his own action seem less extreme, and precedented.
Thank you for posting this article. It seems to be better than the ‘Thinker’s usual material. I shall have to look for more from this O’Neill.
Well put.
Disagree. The cities of the West were much decayed, their nobility fled into the countryside with their wealth, to hide it from the imperial tax collectors and the trading class taxed into near-nonexistence. The high-cultural appurtenances of civilization will have suffered disproportionately, surviving mostly as private libraries and Kunstzimmer kept by rusticating sub-Roman nobles like Sidonius Apollinaris and other remnants of the plutocratic Late Roman senatorial class.
Viticulture and olive orchards continued in the early Dark Ages, but so to say, is not to say that they flourished, or that they enjoyed anything like the prosperity and security of 300 years before, much less the 200 years before that; and tellingly, land-use patterns in sub-Roman Spain show a marked shift toward locations near water, indicating possibly a need to escape up or down rivers at a moment's notice. Similar land-use changes are seen in Britain, where some villas continued to be "occupied" -- but by task-oriented activities, while actual occupation (as in, I live and sleep here) moved to hilltop settlements.
Wiki says that scholars incline to the view that the books destroyed during the "Alexandrian War" were actually commercial account-books and such, and that the great collection in the Ptolemaic palace wasn't threatened, being in another area from the fire.
Uh, no. The Amoritic Subiru (the original name for the Assyrians) appeared in the second Semitic migration out of Arabia during the middle third millennium BC. Their cousins the Habiru we call Hebrews; as the Bible informs us, the Hebrews settled in Abraham's birthplace, Ur "of the Chaldees" (actually of the Sumerians), and thereabouts.
The Amorites were called by their Semitic bretheren, the Akkadian-speaking Babylonians who arrived a few hundred years earlier in the first wave, "the hateful Amurru". (Thus the Cambridge Ancient History.)
Thus a recent lecturer I heard on the archaeological excavation projects of Cyprus and their ties to historical records.
http://www.aina.org/aol/peter/brief.htm
Brief History of the Assyrians
by Peter BetBasoo, (author of the letter to Carly Fiorina.)
Racial Type
Assyrians are a Semitic peoples indigenous to Mesopotamia. They are Mediterranean Caucasoids, and are ethnically distinct from Arabs and Jews.
I’m not sure why you disagree with me. I was disagreeing with the author and therefore agreeing with you.
As with the deaths of most civilizations, classical civilization was nor murdered, it committed suicide. The major cause was several centuries of civil wars, caused basically by the Roman failure to ever develop a basis for legitimate rule and especially for succession.
Anyway, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire has been a source of after-dinner discussion for at least 400 years..... it certainly exhausted Edward Gibbon, who died only two weeks after he finally saw it in print.
Michael Grant pushed taxation as a cause. Others like trade imbalances with India better (depletion of cash in circulation) .... and of course some people blame Christianity, or the reorganization of the Roman army, or what do you like.
I'll let your source fight it out with the Cambridge dons, who say different.
IF they are Semitic, and allow that they are, they can't be all that "distinct" from their Hebrew cousins.
Maybe, might be, however once the Romans took over the library went into decline and without the Ptolemy’s there to nuture it, there wasn’t much there by the 600’s.
“The state had apparently already lost its people’s allegiance.”
I was reading a history of Cairo. Apparently there was so much internal fighting, that they were glad to have the Muslims come in and settle things down.
tyvm!
Yeah, I’m sure we’ll say the same thing here after the Moslems take over America. :’)
Personally I think it was Rex Harrison but then the facts are suspicious.
“As Petraca (Petrarch) said in the 14th century, “I will not be persuaded that any good can come from Arabia...” “
There are many in India that would agree with Petrarch. I rather think we should thank Islam for the rise of Sikhism. It is not for nothing that India still remembers the Mughal Empire’s rule as a nightmare.
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