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Genghis Khan's Pen As Mighty As His Sword
IOL ^ | 8-23-2004

Posted on 08/23/2004 6:46:57 AM PDT by blam

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To: SunkenCiv
Actually, the library was burned during the fighting between the Eqyptians and Romans. perhaps some remnant survived that was burned in later times. In late 48 B.C., Caesar commanded an expeditionary force to settle the civil war between Cleopatra and her brother, Ptolemy. A large fleet of war galleys was in the harbor at Alexandria, and Caesar ordered the ships burned, lest they fall into the hands of the Ptolemy's Egyptians. As the great American military biographer, Col. Theodore Ayraut Dodge noted, "It was in the conflaguration thus begun that Alexandrian library perished, togerther with many other public buildings and treasures." (Dodge, "Julius Caesar", pg. 582)

According to the link you provide, Canfora's rather lowly-rated book is merely expressing an opinion on when the library was destroyed - one that flies in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Again, perhaps some small remnant of the library survived, only to be destroyed at a later date.

21 posted on 08/24/2004 7:39:31 AM PDT by Seydlitz
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To: Seydlitz
Actually, no it wasn't. The library was not burned by Caesar or in Caesar's time. In Caesar's own account, the fire set among the Egyptian ships spread to the dock area, and burned "some books which chanced to be there". The Great Library was in the citadel, which is where Caesar was at the time of the fire. Since the library is referred to and continued to be used for six more centuries, claiming that Caesar burned it is difficult to reconcile.

So much for your "mountain of evidence".

As Canfora noted, after the Moslem conquest, the caliph was consulted. He sent back word that anything in the library that conflicts with the Koran should be burned, and that anything that agreed with the Koran wasn't needed either, because they had the Koran. The burning of the library's 400,000+ books (which by that time had been copied onto parchment, rather than the original papyrus, and as Canfora said, was "crawling with errors") took place in the heating systems for public baths, and took six months.

22 posted on 08/24/2004 7:56:57 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Unlike some people, I have a profile. Okay, maybe it's a little large...)
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To: combat_boots
And it was Genghis Khan, the Chinese King, who burned the library at Alexandria, Egypt, detroying all those ancient documents.

Wrong.
The suspects for the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria are Caesar, Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria and Caliph Omar of Damascus - A Roman, a Christian, and a Moslem.

23 posted on 08/24/2004 7:59:13 AM PDT by paleocon patriarch (Rule One: -"The cover-up is worse than the event." Rule Two: "No one ever remembers the first rule.)
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To: Seydlitz
library at Alexandria

The new library at Alexandria hasn't been burned, yet.

24 posted on 08/24/2004 9:07:24 AM PDT by RightWhale (Withdraw from the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty and establish property rights)
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To: blam

Sigh. Most historians seem to misspell the name, Ghengis. ;-)


25 posted on 08/24/2004 10:26:34 AM PDT by Ghengis
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26 posted on 05/06/2009 5:18:40 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/____________________ Profile updated Monday, January 12, 2009)
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The erroneous "godgravesglyphs" keyword, sorted:

27 posted on 10/18/2022 9:34:37 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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