Pratica di Shadowing: Who Destroyed The Library of Alexandria? | The Rest is History - Impara a parlare inglese con i video

All this tremendous learning of the classical world was destroyed by the Christians, that Christianity was responsible.

I don't think the Christians did it, and I definitely don't think the Muslims did it, but they also have been fingered as culprits.

Yeah, there's lots of stuff on the internet saying that they're the bad guys in the story.

Right, so this is even more improbable.

I love Alexandria.

We're often asked on the rest of this history, where would you most like to go back to?

and I love that Alexandra is this syncretic place.

It's partly Greek.

It's partly Egyptian.

So let's talk a little bit.

It's founded by Alexander himself, isn't it?

I mean, that's the legend at least.

Yeah.

This is in 331 BC.

He's conquered most of the Near East.

He's conquered Egypt.

He's been crowned in Memphis, which is the ancient capital of Egypt, as Pharaoh.

But he wants a city that can control Egypt from the coast and obviously have shipping links to the Mediterranean world beyond.

And he chooses this site.

It's a kind of narrow bar of land between the Mediterranean Sea and a lake called Mariotis.

And it provides a great complex of deep water harbours.

And that's the key reason that he chooses it.

It is a landscape of absolutely dazzling artificiality.

So it's a kind of grid system of the kind that you get in New York, all laid out personally by Alexander.

and after Alexander's death it gets appropriated by his childhood friend and lieutenant Ptolemy

who grabs Alexander's body brings it to Alexandria buries it there

so the tomb of Alexander is a kind of marker of

Ptolemy's claim to be the true successor of the great conqueror it's the first city to have numbered addresses

which I think is a kind of wonderful detail it it had slot machines it had automatic doors, it had international banks.

So it's an incredible place.

It's a place of wonders.

And the wonders, in a sense, have to be built partly

because Ptolemy is trying to establish his very parvenu regime as the inheritor both of the pharaonic greatness of Egypt

and of the um the great empire conquered by alexander

but also because as an upstart city it needs to attract people

and it needs to have things that people want to come

and see and so it's a little bit i think like kind of dubai

or somewhere like

that i was i was about to say it's a bit it's like uh a dubai

or it's like um it's got a little bit of las vegas about it so it's all quite as that

but because it lasts for centuries.

So at that point, it's not really a zatz.

I mean, it's its own thing.

But it's also got the slight air of one of those planned capitals like Brasilia or somewhere, hasn't it?

Yes.

There's a sense that by investing in culture, you are boosting the prestige of your city.

Oh, yes, definitely.

And he wants the greatest conglomeration of texts and philosophers that money can buy him.

It's worth saying about Ptolemy, by the way.

He's a clever man.

He writes a memoir, doesn't he, of his time with Alexander?

I mean, he is a literate, shrewd, intelligent man.

So there is part, maybe it's not just, you don't have to be cynical about it.

I mean, maybe he probably really does like the idea of scholarship and learning and all these things, don't you think?

I don't think that he would see any tension between it.

I mean, he doesn't see that promoting his own brand and his own city is anything to apologise for.

I mean, he's all in favour of that.

But I think he genuinely does believe in this kind of radical concept of learning for its own sake.

The Library of Alexandria, I mean, people have this fantasy of it, don't they, is the repository of all the world's wisdom.

All kinds of scientific discoveries are happening, thanks to the books in the library.

The scholars who are working in the museum are pushing the boundaries of knowledge.

And that actually there's this very common view, which you see repeated in kind of popular histories and things, which is that with the loss of the Library of Alexandria,

which was destroyed for reasons that we will go on to discuss, the world was was plunged into a darkness the cause of

science was set back how much truth is there in this

and i can kind of guess what your answer is going to be this idea

that uh the library of alexandria is a kind of scientific research center

that it's kind of mit or you know silicon valley

or something like that yeah university williamton not getting

that far the The truth about the Library of Alexandria is that its focus is overwhelmingly literary and Greek.

And they're anxious, I think, that amid all the wars that have plagued Greece for the past 200 years,

the previous 200 years, there's every possibility that these texts will be lost.

And so that's an absolutely kind of key part of it.

And this combines with the obsession of the Ptolemies for collecting.

because once you have the kind of ideal that you're going to get as many books as possible, you know, that's tremendously fun if you're a king with very, very deep pockets.

And so the Ptolemies are sending agents out across the Greek world, particularly to Athens, particularly to Rhodes, where they have the largest book markets.

There are kind of almost certainly apocryphal stories

that Ptolemy III wants the original copies of the plays of the three greatest Athenian tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

And he asks the Athenians and the Athenians say no, and he keeps pestering them.

And finally, the Athenians say, okay, but you'll have to pay an absolutely kind of crippling deposit because we don't trust you.

So Ptolemy hands over the deposit and then just pockets the tragedies and the Athenians are left with the deposit.

So, I mean, this story develops clearly out of the sense that there is something faintly maniacal about the determination of Ptolemies,

the Ptolemies and his librarians to get all these texts.

And what they do then, having got all these texts, it seems is basically to establish the definitive editions of pretty much all the classical texts that we have today.

So your homers and Herodotuses and things.

So that is a very, very great achievement.

I mean, it's an absolutely astonishing achievement, But it's not perhaps on a level with curing cancer or building space rockets,

which is really what I think people want to believe that was going on in the library.

And the truth is that there are kind of amazing discoveries and breakthroughs at the library that are not to do with,

you know, with literature.

So the classic example of this is the calculation, I mean, to an astonishing degree of accuracy of the circumference of the Earth,

which is done by a scholar called Eratosthenes.

It's really important to emphasize that for the Greeks, theory always triumphs over experiment.

And there's a line in Plato's Republic that I always think of in this context where Plato says, when we're looking at astronomy,

we must approach it as we approach geometry by way of kind of working out problems and ignore what's in the sky.

So in other words, the maths of astronomy is what really matters.

You know, the pinpricks of light in the sky, that's kind of completely irrelevant.

But all of that said, Tom, they do have coin-operated slot machines.

They do have automatic doors.

They do have...

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Have steam engines.

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Yeah, steam engines.

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Exactly.

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Practical inventions.

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But what they don't do is apply any of those to what we would recognise, say, as an industrial policy.

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Yeah.

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You know, the steam engines are being used to power various gizmos and temples.

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They're not being used to power railway trains that can be laid out over the desert.

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to go and attack enemies or anything like that.

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No. So there is...

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Those Ptolemaic armoured trains would have been brilliant, though.

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But the Library of Alexandria is not a great centre of technology.

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That is not what it's about.

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And I think the other myth is

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that it is universal in the sense of aspiring to contain all the wisdom of the world.

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Really, its focus is Greek.

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The other great question is what happens to it? where does it go

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and that is usually framed as who destroys it

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so a favorite candidate as you'll know dominic

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because you write about it in your your book on cleopatra is julius caesar exactly are you convinced by

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that no uh i think it's clearly a i think most

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scholars who've written about this think it's um caesar causes a fire there's no doubt about that when he's trapped in Alexandria,

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having visited, you know, he's visited Egypt as part of his war against Pompey.

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He's installed himself.

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He's taken possession of the palace quarter.

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He ends up being shacked up with Cleopatra.

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He's fighting against her brother, isn't he?

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Ptolemy.

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Of course, they're all called Ptolemy.

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And in the course of this, there is a big fight down at the harbour.

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And Caesar, it seems, if you're to believe the accounts, sets fire to his own ships to stop the enemy getting hold of them

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and in the course of

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that the fire spreads through the warehouses from the ships to the warehouses

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and the books there are damaged

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but i mean as as you will know tom the the library is not at the docks

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so yeah so the library's the fire spread

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but it would have to spread a hell of a long

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way catherine nixey basically argued all this tremendous learning of the classical world was destroyed by the Christians,

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that Christianity was responsible for plunging the world into a new dark, I mean, a darkening age, as she calls it.

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Yeah.

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So just, I mean, on that, we have five accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum.

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So it is one of the best authenticated episodes in the whole history of Alexandria, but none of them mention the destruction of a library.

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to the degree

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that we classical texts have survived it's down to the efforts

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of christian copyists christian scribes without them we we would have nothing

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so i don't think the christians did it

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and i definitely don't think the muslims did it

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but they also have been fingered as culprits yeah

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so the story goes stuff on the internet saying

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that they're the bad guys in the story right

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so this is even more improbable but the story is that the the the arabs sweep into egypt

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they conquer it they lay siege to Alexandria they capture it the commander of the Arabs Amar

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writes to Omar the caliph

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and says well you've got all this you know this great

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city there's this enormous library it's full of books what should we do with them

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and he waits and then Omar's reply comes back

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if the content of the books you mention is in accordance

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with the book of Allah we may do without them for in

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that case the book of Allah more than suffices

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if on the other hand they contain matter not in accordance

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with the book of Allah there can be no need to preserve them proceed then

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and destroy them we have no need of other books yeah

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and I think the reason why this I mean it's

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so clearly not true this is not again the Muslims had

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huge respect for the the the legacy of Greek philosophy um the reason

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that this is survives is

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that it it's kind of in accordance with what people who

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are very hostile to institutional religion like to imagine about it of course you know

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that it's all bigots who have no time for anything other than their own holy books um

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so i think it's it's a kind of enlightenment myth really

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and actually the person who comments most wonderfully on this is gibbon

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so gibbon says i sincerely regret the more valuable libraries

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which have been involved in the ruin of the roman empire but when i seriously compute the lapse of ages, the waste of ignorance and the calamities of war.

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Our treasures, rather than our losses, are the object of my surprise.

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So don't mourn what we've lost, but celebrate what we've retained.

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I mean, that's actually quite a nice message, isn't it?

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Yeah.

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Very un-Gibbonian, given that he's normally so sceptical and so sort of...

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Well, no, I think...

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You know, the decline and fall is a great monument to the amount of texts that are there.

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And I guess that Gibbon is, you know, that's what he is expressing.

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Thank God I don't have to do any more reading.

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That's what he's thinking.

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Sources are necessarily limited.

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Thank goodness.

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But to repeat, you know, again, what we said at the beginning, I think the fact

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that the Library of Alexander is no longer there is precisely

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what gives it its potency as a kind of mythic symbol of libraries.

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Thank you so much for that, Tom.

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Hurrah for libraries, basically, because without them, we wouldn't be able to do this podcast.

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no no especially the Bodleian Library uh right we'll see you all next time everybody bye bye

Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?

Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.

Pratica di Shadowing: Who Destroyed The Library of Alexandria? | The Rest is History - Impara a parlare inglese con i video

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Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?