The Fierce, Forgotten Library Wars of the Ancient World | Hacker News Reader

The Fierce, Forgotten Library Wars of the Ancient World

atlasobscura.com

105 pointsdiodorus24 comments

The rivalry between these great libraries sounds a bit like the competition between today's Silicon Valley giants -- they even were outbidding each other for talent already back then.

The storage capability of the Library of Alexandria seems so quaint today, when all of its books would fit multiple times over in the Flash memory of a smartwatch... And that makes me wonder how soon the computing capability of today's Google or Facebook will look similarly quaint. I'm sure it won't take 2000 years.

Maybe (hopefully?) these centralized information behemoths are just this era's Greek libraries.

Taking that digression for a moment: realise that in technology, with Moore's Law affecting at least costs if not capacity, we're in a situation where roughly every ten years, the cost of provisioning some level of service falls by a factor of roughly tenfold.

Facebook was about 10x easier to implement than Google was. Google was about 10x easier to implement than Microsoft during its 1980s peak. And whatever eats Facebook starting today will be roughly 10x easier than it was.

This also has something to say about maintaining incumbency, when faced with the duality of a 10x cheaper upstart and accumulating technical debt, though there may be compensation in institutional expertise and market positioning, especially as regards customer and business partnerships.

I find your comment insightful... And I'm not really sure why both your comment and mine have been downvoted to negative values. Is this discussion considered off-topic?

Well, at least back then they didnt manage to put the sorting option for relevance and the validation of the data behind a paywall.

I have to imagine that access to the libraries was restricted to a lucky few.

On the context of these ancient libraries: - everything was hand written / copied - there was no punctuation, no real word spacing - information was primarily transferred via oration and this written form was a new fangled technology :) - there were multiple differing character sets in use, sometimes even for the same language. Also some texts were written right left, or left to right, or even alternating back and forth (boustrophedon)

The history of the english alphabet (with miniscules and majiscules) is a rather interesting story, and if this sort of history interests you I recommend The 26 Letters by Ogg.

and don't forget it was also argued passionately that it would ruin scholarship and the intellectual mind by some pretty smart and influential figures, one being Socrates.

> this written form was a new fangled technology

Ehm, sorry, but by the time of the library of Alexandria people had been writing for several thousands of years. The Middle East actually has an incredibly long history of writing (both in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent).

Awesome! I'm a history fan of this particular period in human civilization, and this has served as a trailhead to many wonderful stories I didn't know about before. As much as I believe that we're currently living in the most exciting time in human history, there is so much to be said about exciting times of the past.

Absolutely! Plus: Learning more about the past saves us from what CS Lewis called "chronological snobbery" - the belief that modern opinions (and, may I add, achievements) are better simply because they are newer. In an age without digital networking or even the printing press, a library of half a million volumes is a phenomenal achievement!

Pretty sure Lewis was upset because he couldn't prove his Christian faith as rational, so had to invent a lot of ways to discredit modern thinkers.

I'd go as far as saying that "chronological snobbery" is pretty much non-existent. Look at all the ways people idealize the past, especially when they talk about the 'good old days' or how things are much worse today.

Of course, the other extreme of idealizing the past exists as well, and is just as bad an approach. However, one does frequently hear people talking about people in the past in a very derogatory way ("I can't believe people used to believe xyz..."). While we do know a lot more nowadays than we used to, many things that we claim an "enlightened" perspective on are not actually facts, but mere interpretations of the world based on our cultural context. In effect, chronological snobbery is nothing but cultural snobbery projected back in time. (If you've ever lived in another culture for any significant period of time, as I have, you will realize just how differently two completely rational people can view the same event through different cultural lenses.)

As to Lewis: as far as I am aware, he actually coined the term "chronological snobbery" (or at least the concept) before he became a Christian. He did, after all, teach old/medieval English Literature at Oxford and Cambridge, so the past is something he dealt with and thought about a lot. And if you think he couldn't talk about his faith rationally, try reading some of his books (especially something like "Miracles")...

> If you've ever lived in another culture for any significant period of time, as I have, you will realize just how differently two completely rational people can view the same event through different cultural lenses.

The best course on American History that I ever took was taught by an man who had grown up in South America (he was teaching in the US). I first learned a number of interesting ways of thinking about the Americas through because of cultural emphasis that he brought from another part of the world.

I'm interested to know if this prof.'s lectures are online somewhere. Do you by any chance know?

"The Library of Alexandria, ultimately consisted of approximately 500,000 scrolls."

And about as many opinion pieces discussing whether that counted as Big Data.

Now I want a game based on this.

That would be extremely cool. Perhaps a variation of this game?

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/27042/veritas

I thought about that, but I was thinking about the direct human conflict: acquisition of rare texts, counterfeiting, arson, etc. The theme hasn't been done to death.

Are you thinking of a board game or more like Pergamon Go? My first thought would be a tabletop RPG setting, as a quest for arcane tomes is fun in any era.

>Pergamon Go

Visions of young millennials crowding ruins trying to catch harpies, sphinxes, and minotaurs only to awaken the dormant odious spirits lying in wait beneath those ancient stones

Hail Helix!

I was thinking either a board game or a video game inspired by board games.

Do you have any examples of the kind of board game inspired video game you have in mind? When I think about a video game for this, I imagine a RTS game which would be somewhat similar to Age of Empires II and Empire Earth II in the graphical look and in the mechanics.

Pretty light on the actual warfare (besides poaching the other side's scientists and librarians, and the export stop for papyrus).

IIRC, they did also confiscate scrolls from merchants who set foot in their ports. I was looking forward to more stuff like that and even more sinister stuff.

As described here it was less a "war", and more "competition".

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