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The achievements of Alexandrian science, lost to the West for over a millennium before their partial recovery via Constantinople and classical Arabic and Islamic cultures, were to be instrumental in launching the European Renaissance on its quest for new worlds. ’92 More exotic are the countless books, articles, and now websites devoted to spinning further myths or offering outlandish interpretations of the lost library of Alexandria. Alexandria, a journal ‘devoted to exploring the philosophical, spiritual and cosmological traditions of the Western World’, is among the more respectable of these but few are free of esoteric offerings, especially given the democracy of the web.

Savage pillage accompanied the genocide in Cambodia, under the Khmer Rouge (1975–79),119 and the establishment of the Mujahideen government in April 1992 began a series of attacks on the libraries of Afghanistan, beginning with the Kabul Public Library. 120 As such histories demonstrate, deliberate attempts to extinguish knowledge and cultural identity usually do little to discourage further indiscriminate looting and mutilation. In this respect also, violence against libraries extends efforts (whether by the ban of books or by pre-publication controls) to censor knowledge and reading.

75. Eunapius of Antioch, Life of Antonius. Similar silence marks Socrates’ History of the Church in his chapter about the destruction of the Serapeion. 76. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 1: 82, 812. 77. It had been savaged by Augustus, Caracalla had killed much of its citizenry, the city and the palace quarter were sacked by Aurelian, and the city was captured and looted by Diocletian at the start of the fourth century – all before the great earthquakes and inundations that obscured this history.