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If the Library of Alexandria never burned, would we have landed on the moon by 1500?
I was reading about the Library of Alexandria last month and got stuck on one detail: a lot of people say we lost hundreds of thousands of scrolls when it went up, and some historians claim we lost entire fields of study like early steam power and advanced math. My buddy says that's way overblown, that the library was already declining for a hundred years and most of the important stuff got copied and moved to other cities anyway. So which is it? Did one fire set us back a thousand years or are we giving it too much credit?
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the_jake29d ago
You ever notice how the "one fire set us back 1000 years" story mostly comes from people who never read the actual history? I used to buy into that too until I looked into it more and realized the place declined for like a century before it even burned, plus tons of stuff got copied and shipped off to other cities. So yeah, your buddy is closer to right, it's way overblown but damn if it doesn't make a good story.
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