by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
July 26, 2026

You know about the Library of Alexandria, right? You know, the famed repository of all the wisdom and learning of the ancient world. And you know how the library was destroyed, right? It was set on fire and all of those scrolls went up in smoke…

…or did they? Like most famous stories from ancient history, this one, too, is most likely false. So how was the library lost? And, more importantly, what does that have to say to us, here in the 21st century, as we careen off the cliff into the abyss of the “post-literate” society?

Find out all the fascinating details in this week’s edition of The Corbett Report Subscriber editorial.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria—built during the reign of Ptolemy II in the third century B.C.—may have been immortalized as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but students of the esoteric know that the real wonder of Ptolemy II’s reign was the library.

Conceived by Demetrius of Phalerum, designed by Ptolemy I, constructed by Ptolemy II, the Library of Alexandria was the most remarkable, the most impressive, the most tragic library in history.

Did Zenodotus of Ephesus wile away the hours perusing the original manuscripts of Homer in some nook or cranny of that marvellous monument?

Did Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculate the circumference of the earth from the shade of those hallowed halls?

Did Aristarchus of Samothrace sharpen the sword of his immense intellect by cutting the first poetic lines while Hero of Alexandria distracted him with the infernal rattle of the world’s first steam engine—thereby, no doubt, igniting the first round in the never-ending fight between the library shushers and the library loudmouths?

Maybe!

And what scrolls, precisely, were to be found on those shelves? What obscure gems of esoterica, what wondrous tales of the ancient world, methodically captured and dutifully copied from every passing ship to alight in Alexandria’s harbour, were stored in its archives?

The true history of the antediluvian world?

The account of the Nephilim and other rare tales long since forgotten by (or methodically expunged from) the historical record?

We know of the lost plays of Sophacles, Aeschylus, Euripides, but what of those works of literature, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, that we don’t know we lost?

Did the hidden parts of the library contain works of magic, spells, ancient and arcane knowledge of gods and divine powers and zero point energy?

Did those scrolls tell us about the building of the pyramids? Of Göbekli Tepe? Of the Sea Peoples? Of the flood?

Maybe!

And how many scrolls were lost, anyway? 40,000? 400,000? 700,000?

Maybe?

Of course, we don’t know the details of the library and the secrets of its shelves. That’s why it haunts us! Upon the blank slate of that mythical repository we can project anything we want. The library is not that thing out there in Alexandria at a given point in time; it’s in here, in our imagination, populated by our dreams and our nightmares, carrying our hopes, reflecting our fears.

But what of its fate? What do we make of the great conflagration that sent this hard-won knowledge up in columns of smoke, back to the heavens from which all such knowledge derives?

Here again we find more of projection and phantasy than of proof and facticity. Indeed, as it turns out, the various rumours of the library’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Julius Caesar lighting the library ablaze during his siege of Alexandria in 48 B.C.? Yes, his soldiers seem to have set some ships on fire in the city’s port. And yes, the fire seems to have spread to part of the city. It may have destroyed one of the library’s storehouses, but not the library itself.

Otherwise, how could we explain Strabo’s account of his visit to the library some three decades after it was supposedly destroyed? Or how could we explain the mind-boggling output of Didymus Chalcenterus—the most prolific writer in antiquity, responsible for some 4,000 books and known as Biblioláthēs (or “the book-forgetter”) because even he couldn’t remember all the books he had written—if this first-century Alexandrian did not have access to the resources of the library?

Perhaps the culprit was Theodosius I, then. Maybe this Christian Roman Emperor, having ordered the closing of all Pagan temples, indirectly caused the destruction of the Serapeum, an adjunct of the library that had been dedicated to the god Serapis.

But this story was largely put forward by Edward Gibbons, whose historical project seems to have been to blame the Christians for everything. Few historians these days take this account of the library’s downfall seriously.

Ah! I know! It was Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second Rashidun caliph, who, after conquering Alexandria with his Arab army, gave the fateful order to his conquering general: “If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them.” And it is said that the general gave the order to fuel the fires that heated the city’s public baths with the books from the library, and that those books kept the fires burning for six months.

But here, too, the fantastic pathos of this terrible tragedy is undermined by reality. The first account of Umar’s outrageous command did not appear until 300 years after the event itself, and even then they were only recorded by Bishop Gregory Bar Hebraeus, whose stock in trade was blaming historical atrocities on Muslims without supporting documentation.

No, the truth about the great library’s fate is so incongruent with our phantasmagoric fantasies of fearsome flames and singed scrolls that our imagination refuses to accept it.

You see, the Library of Alexandria did not burn. It was not consumed in one glorious conflagration. The wisdom of the ages was not set ablaze, and the ashes of that wisdom were not scattered by the Egyptian winds.

No. The library was lost to neglect. It didn’t need to burn. The icy tendrils of disrepair and the frosty touch of disinterest accomplished what no inferno could ever achieve.

It’s comforting to believe that the library was engulfed in flames. We can imagine the scribes and scholars and students of the ancient world rending their garments and weeping and gnashing their teeth as they watched the collected knowledge of the world go up in smoke. At least they cared! At least they knew the value of what they lost.

But the alternative…the alternative is too ghastly to contemplate. Not a collective cry of despair at the loss of this wisdom, but a cool shrug of disinterest as the library collects dust, sprouts cobwebs, gradually disintegrates.

As you might have guessed by now, history is never about history. It’s about us. And the story of the Library of Alexandria is about us, too.

After all, we are being told that we have reached the end of the Age of Reading. We have entered the post-literate society. We no longer read books, wrestle with ideas, or contemplate the great works of the ages. Instead, we engage in the infinite scroll. We read tweets and browse reels and view TikToks. We chase the ever-diminishing high of the evanescent dopamine rush as we get further and further away from what it means to be human.

The modern Library of Alexandria is disappearing before our eyes. But it is not being consumed by flames. It is crumbling into disrepair as we scroll on to the next post.

This is the way the library ends
This is the way the library ends
This is the way the library ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

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