Learning Commons Episode 2: Ancient Lessons in Alexandria

SUMMARY
Lessons about the nature of the library as learning commons continues with an examination of Alexandria. Its collection, access, scholarship, and romance is explored, with emphasis on the great library as meeting place and its intellectual capital. A working summary of the features of the modern learning commons is extrapolated from the ancient source. Google+ is related to the analysis.


The Story So Far

Last week's post suggested that Ashurbanipal's Royal Library at Nineveh was instructive to the notion of a library as a learning commons. Despite it's elitism and political purpose, the library was a civilizing force that recognized the importance of gathering known and soon to be forgotten knowledge in a systematic way. Above all, King Ashurbanipal knew that for both a country and its people knowledge is power.

As Fernando Báez has shown in his breathtaking work A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq, there were many other ancient libraries. These include libraries in Sumer, Isin, Ur, Nippur, Kabnak, Anshan, Ebla, Hattusa, and Persopolis. All of these libraries shared the same incendiary fate as Ashurbanipal's.

Rameses II (1304-1237 B.C.) ordered a library to be built in the Rameseum, the temple to house his remains. Later called the House of Life, this library was the precursor of the most famous library in the ancient world: the Library at Alexandria.

The Library at Alexandria

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedi

The Library was begun by Ptolemy I Soter about 306 B.C. on the advice and direction of the famous Athenian scholar, politician, and general, Demetrius Phalereus. It was actually part of the Mouseion (museum), a larger research centre that was dedicated to the Muses. Ptolemy expressed the urge to collect universal knowledge from all quarters of the known world. This included the Greek poets and philosophers, Jewish scholarship and sacred texts, and multi-lingual records from other civilizations. The collection was largely of papyri and estimated at between 500,000-700,000 scrolls. From all ships that landed in Egyptian ports and and from conquered lands, scrolls were commandeered to be copied, though the originals copied were often not returned. The Ptolemys even tried to control the supply of papyrus, leading to rival Pergamum creating parchment from sheep skin, (charta pergamena)  as the foundation of their library of 200,000 works.

According to The International Friends of the Library at Alexandria, this library "wasn’t merely a repository for books, although its collection was unrivaled. It was the world’s cultural and intellectual capital, teeming with influential scholars for more than seven centuries." It was a place not merely to collect scrolls but to create, discuss, debate, and build knowledge. Scholars arrived from all over the Mediterranean to be housed, fed, and honoured in a house of learning that fostered collaboration. At best, the Library aspired to become a learned symposium, yet our modern notion of open, democratic exchange was not fully realized. Demetrius "had transplanted to the soil of Alexandria, the master's (Aristotle's) conception of a community of learned men isolated from the outside world and a retreat where they could cultivate the muses" (Luciano Canafora, The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World, p. 39). Furthermore, the Ptolemys controlled certain intellectual activities and censored access to certain collections.

The Romance of Alexandria's Library

Anthony Hopkins as Ptolemy 1
in the Alexander

Two recent cinematic depictions of the Library have increased our romantic wonder. In Alexander, Anthony Hopkins plays Ptolemy Soter, actively composing and dictating Alexander's storied biography, while walking the magnificent halls of the Library. Hopkins captures nicely the construction of the myth of both Alexandria and Alexander. The film's reconstruction of the interiors of the Library are breathtaking. Watch for the subtle view from the Library's terrace of the Pharos, Alexandria's lighthouse and one of the ancient wonders of the world.


In Agora, Rachel Weisz plays Hypatia, the most celebrated female scholar of the ancient world. She is depicted as the astronomer and mathematician we know her to be, but also as a teacher of youth. There is little evidence that the librarians had a teaching role at all.

Moreover, while the destruction of the library is depicted with a profound sense of loss, the given cause of Christian fervour against the pagans and atheistic learning is suspect. The historical inaccuracies of the film are well documented and a more rounded documentary can be found here. In the film,

Rachel Weisz as Hypatia in Agora

Matthew Battles in his Library: An Unquiet History warns against too romantic a notion of the Library at Alexandria:

If the Ptolemys had not pursued their aggressive acquisitions policy in Alexandria, confiscating books from private readers and failing to return scrolls borrowed from other repositories for copying, many of the lost works might well have survived. But the Ptolemys didn't see their library as a universal repository devoted to the preservation of liberal learning, however much our cherished origin myths may have us believe it was so. Libraries are as much about losing the truth -- satisfying the inner barbarians of princes, presidents, and and pretenders -- as about discovering it. (31).

Is The Library of Alexandria a Model of the Modern Learning Commons?

For all its shortcomings as a public space, the Library at Alexandria had a public dynamic. As Alberto Manguel eloquently states in The Library at Night, Alexandria's librarians and scholars "trained themselves to become attentive to the world beyond their borders, gathering and interpreting information, ordering and cataloguing all manner of books, seeking to associate different texts and to transform thought by association" (p. 32).

Modern Depiction of the Ulpian Library

Trajan's Ulpian Library is a less well-known but important contribution to our story. It was the greatest "public" library of the ancient world and accorded all visitors opportunities to view resources, discuss information, and engage in learning in free debate.

So what does the ancient world teach us about what a modern learning commons? What could it look like? It would be a place dedicated to the

• storage of universal knowledge for public access
• classification of information for knowledge
• use of knowledge for power and wisdom
• building of knowledge for civilizing purposes
• fostering of human imagination and inspiration
• marriage of learning and aesthetics
• social network for sharing ideas

You can see where I'm going. This is now the Internet, the virtual learning commons in theory and practice. In fact, the new library is an ancient idea online, in all its glory and cautions. Consider that the new librarians may be Google and all who build it (special thanks to my friend Scott McPhee for this last section).

Google+: Circles, Sparks, Hangouts and Huddles

We are all familiar with Google and its incredible success. Google's origins are simple – a search engine built to help catalogue the growing number of websites and documents available on the Internet.  That early concept exploded to encompass not just web pages but all information – which has lead to a vast array of apps and products that span from publicly available knowledge like books and videos to personal information - such as email and docs.

Last week, Google officially launched Google+, a social platform for Google's users.  This expands that cataloguing territory even one step further: to understanding not only of formal published material, but to weave that information into the informal social dialogue that happens between people.

Here are the ten corporate principles that guided the creation of Google+. I think that principle #8 – The Need For Information to Cross All Borders – is particularly relevant to our story of the Learning Commons:

Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in more than 60 countries, maintain more than 180 Internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States. We offer Google‘s search interface in more than 130 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages and accessible formats as possible. Using our translation tools, people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages they don‘t speak. With these tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can offer in even the most far–flung corners of the globe.

Check out here what the folks at Google are doing to meet Facebook -- face-to-face! Google's concepts of Circles, Sparks, Hangouts and Huddles recall the deeper promise of ancient libraries -  to encourage society's dialogue and help us understand what is around us.

The Modern Library at Alexandria

Final Word and Next Time

This has been my longest blog. I could like to explore the history of libraries and contemporary implications ad infinitum. And perhaps later I'll discuss the modern library at Alexandria, or the exciting archaeology taking place at Hadrian's Villa.

However, my next blog starts a new chapter that will invite you to a learning commons for lovers of school libraries. Stay tuned.