The Library of Alexandria

The Library of Alexandria is a miraculous building, one with a most intriguing history. Built by the Greeks of Ptolemy as part of their Mouseion, their temple to the Muses, it was said to have housed all of the world's knowledge, though subsequent estimates have revised the number down a few notches. They say that it housed over a million papyrus scrolls, containing everything from mundane and banal daydreams that could scarcely be thought of as real knowledge, all the way to accounts from the farthest reaches of the Earth.

Every time a ship entered the harbour of Alexandria, the scholars of the Library would send their servants down to the quay. They would confiscate all the papyri held on board and bring them up to the Library, where the scribes would create copies of them. The copies would be handed back to the owners of the ship and the original stored in the hallowed halls of the Mouseion. This way, they collected stories of famines and rich harvests, of wars of conquest and wars of survival, stories of cities in the far east, where a myriad myriad people lived, and stories from further east still, where people walked on clouds and ate whole trees and tried each morning to catch the sun when it crawled nimbly over the edge of the world to start the day.

Over time, the papyrus scrolls would deteriorate: the starchy sheets would begin to rot, the ink would start to fade. And so, there was a whole other set of scribes, working in the hall right beside those copying newly arrived texts, that would recreate those fading scripts on fresh papyrus and save the words held on them. As time went on, fewer ships came to Alexandria – their captains were unwilling to put up with the delays caused by the book-thieves intruding on their vessels – and those that did come were wise enough to leave their books at home or hide them well under the floorboards. So, the stream of words dried up and more and more scribes came to be employed in the hall over to restore what they had written down years earlier.

But they never fully stopped receiving new tomes for their endless shelves. As the boats coming down the river became fewer and less frequent, the scribes would still sit by the banks of the mighty Nile and ask the water of any news coming from the direction of its headwater. They sat and listened and sometimes wrote down a few words of what they heard the water tell them of the far-off South. The king, much too worried about tax rates and land reforms as he was, tried to forbid them from wasting public funds on water scrying. His protests were soon silenced, when the scribes tried to warn him of an invasion from the southern tribes that was foretold in the waves of the holy stream – he ignored them and was killed when his unprepared army met the barbarians in the field.

As the other scribes, the ones in the copying hall, transcribed these stories again and again, they slipped up, as all people must do from time to time. They worked long shifts in the stuffy cellars of the Library, their candle giving off only the barest hint of light, for if they burned any brighter, they might in accident or frustration burn down the fragile papyri. As these scribes sat there, using all their bodily might to stay awake and force their eyes open, their minds slipped and the stories on the pages before them sprung awake. More than one scribe ran screaming from the quiet vaults, believing that the river pirates of two-hundred years ago were in reality coming for him, their armed boats swimming on the black ink streams right into the heart of the city's sanctum. Others struggled to read the words in front of them and did not notice all the mistakes they made while copying them half-asleep from one sheet to the next. Thus, whole armies were decimated by one fell swoop of a scribe's quill and kings of ages past suddenly found their reigns lasting for centuries longer than they had previously thought, all because a stray zero or two slipped past the attention of history's guardsmen.

The great tragedy – or miracle, as some might say – of the Library of Alexandria, though, lies in its demise. The Romans, who were not strict disbelievers in the value of knowledge, but rather took a more practical approach to it, did not much consider the flammability of the Library's treasures, when Caesar ordered the city to be burned. He won the city, but lost the world, one burnt line at a time. The scholars and scribes were running back and forth through the fire-lit night, fetching water to put out the burning Mouseion. They put water in everything they could find: buckets, helmets, bowls and inkwells. The most desperate drank seawater right out of the harbour where the Roman ships were docked and spit it on the burning codices. They fought a whole month to put the fire out, but their battle was in vain: the few scrolls that were not burned were soaked in water and just as unreadable.

The Library was destroyed, but the scribes carried on. With their scholarly masters gone, scattered all over the empire after the loss of their holy place, they set to work and replicated what was left of the ancient world's knowledge. For every burnt scroll, a scribe would take a sheet of papyrus and hold it over a candle flame to burn it until it looked just like the original. Every water-damaged codex would be replicated, dozens of scribes poring over the washed-out text to copy it as faithfully as possible, before the whole book was dragged through the harbour and the wet slab put back in the decomposing shelves.

Through the centuries, the scribes kept on working until the Christian take-over of the city. The followers of Christ saw the scribes sitting in the rubble of their ancient Library, burning bits of paper and denounced it as pagan practice. Charged with heathenry, the scribes were forbidden from continuing their work, their scrolls were burned one last time, the ashes scattered to the sea and the rubble pushed into the harbour. Thus, the Library was ended for the second time.

Three hundred years later, the Christians lost the city and the armies of the Caliph marched triumphantly through the streets of Alexandria. When the Muslim ruler came to the empty square in the heart of the city, he was awed by the size and beauty of the palm-ringed plaza and decided to have his residence built there. Confused why no previous ruler took advantage of this empty space, he asked his Vizier, why such a grand place would stand empty in a city so rich and full of life as this. The Vizier called upon his ministers to find the oldest and most knowledgeable man in the city and to bring him before the Caliph to tell him the story of the city's empty main square. Eventually, an old Egyptian was brought before the Caliph and asked about the place. With the help of several of the Caliph's interpreters – for the old man only spoke Egyptian and the Caliph only Arabic and no one interpreter spoke both – he was able to tell the great ruler the story of the city's Library, how the ancients used to collect all the world's knowledge from all the world's cultures and religions there, how the brutish Romans burned it down out of carelessness, how the Christians burned it down out of zealotry and how ever since the place has remained empty.

The Caliph listened to the story and was awed and humbled by the city's ancient history, though it dismayed him that he was only the third man to conquer such a marvellous building that was already burnt down twice. Beaten to the punch by the heathens that came before him and with no way left to impress his image on to the city, he ordered that the Library be burned regardless. His vizier and his army's generals were confused but ordered the soldiers to do as the Caliph said. Soon, thousands of the great conqueror's soldiers were advancing on the empty square, carrying torches in one hand and swords in the other. They set fire to the air, burst through invisible doors, tore non-existent books out of long destroyed shelves and killed the absent scholars.

The Caliph was delighted at the spectacle and soon a great crowd gathered at the edge of the main square. In the audience were the descendants of all those scribes who once wrote down the knowledge of the ancient world and who were taught the importance of this place from their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Upon seeing their sacred hub destroyed for the third time, all those scribes sprang into action: they grabbed buckets and bottles and whatever containers they could find and rushed to the harbour to fill them with water. The Caliph's surprise was great, when he saw hordes of lowly Egyptians rush into the plaza and start quenching the invisible flames of the erstwhile Library. Soldiers and scribes soon chased each other around the empty square: several scribes holding shut enormous doors that were not there, so their colleagues could gather more intangible scrolls into their pockets while the soldiers struggled to get into the wall-less room; other soldiers not seeing scribes hiding behind see-through curtains; and people being crushed by immaterial debris falling from the ethereal ceiling. The Caliph was so amused by the spectacle unfolding in front of him that he ordered the square to be left empty for ever, saying that one cannot just build a palace on top of a building as magnificent as this.