Author: Joel Levy
Publisher: Vision Paperbacks
Price: £10.99
Isbn: 1904132936

This work covers much ground familiar to forteans and some less so: Atlantis, Solomon’s Temple, Camelot, El Dorado, the Ark of the Covenant, Aristotle’s lost Dialogues, the Grail, Shakespeare’s lost plays, any number of lost treasures, the lost army of Cambyses, Boudicca’s grave, the tomb of Genghis Khan, the Lost Colony of Roanoke, Amelia Earhart’s last flight, the Persian invasion fleets, the White Ship, and the Franklin expedition. Levy summarises conflicting hypotheses found in works of varying reliability, which serves as an inoculation against over-eager belief. It’s history lite, granted, but even-handed.

I was particularly interested in the chapter on the Library of Alexandria, the destruction of which has been described as “the day that history lost its memory”. Founded by Ptolemy II Philadelphus (282–246 BC), at its height it was said to comprise 500,000–700,000 scrolls. Besides the Royal (or Great) Library, there were several smaller ones. Accounts of their fate are vague and contradictory. One book-burning allegedly took place in 48 or 47 BC when Cæsar set fire to the area around the docks while he was under siege; another when a Christian mob under Patriarch Theophilus razed the Serapeum in AD 391; and a third when Caliph Omar conquered Egypt in AD 640. The tale that Omar ordered the books burnt in the fires of the city’s bathhouses – on the grounds that any scrolls that contradicted the Q’uran were heretical and any that agreed with it were superfluous – is almost certainly Christian black propaganda.

Levy’s most telling point concerns the library’s size. Half a million scrolls would require 25 miles (40km) of shelving, but none of the sources mention a gargantuan edifice. The finest library in Ancient Rome, Trajan’s, probably contained only around 20,000 scrolls, while the Library of Pergamon, arch-rival of Alexandria’s, probably had around 30,000. Callimachus, a librarian at Alexandria, catalogued the Royal Library’s contents. The Pinakes, which included summaries and biographical notes on the authors, consisted of about 120 scrolls (roughly a million words), too few to cover half a million or more scrolls. If the Royal Library was smaller than legend supposes, it is easier to understand why it disappeared without leaving more traces.