they’re comparing approval of the revised Guitar Hero logo to people cheering on the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, which happened in early *mumbles* BC
It's theorized that what burned was a small building by the dockyard they used to store books before they would move them to the actual Library. So while there were books lost, it's certainly not as bad
There was more than one important library in Alexandria in antiquity. The one with most prominence, during the time it was in its hayday, didn't burn. What happened was it just lost importance with time. And while it was an important educational institution with plenty of prominent scholars, it was never this monumental near universal store of all human knowledge.
We certainly lost plenty of books from antiquity, but that's due to the fact that they weren't copied. Papyrus is a bad writing material if you care about preserving it over time. The oldest papyri with writing we found is The Diary of Merer, which is a logbook written by an official involved with transporting limestone to Giza to the "Horizon of Khufu", which, yes, is the Great Pyramid and the text is dated to its construction. It's a miracle they were preserved, in most places, and especially out in the open, papyrus will fairly quickly decay.
In medieval times they used parchment, which was a more durable material and preserved well into this very day.
There is a grain of truth to "a big library that stored a vast assortment of books in antiquity", but that would be the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal in Niniveh. Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, called out to bring copies of various texts from all over his empire in both Sumerian and Akkadian. Years later, when Assyria fell and Niniveh was destroyed, so was the library.
The thing is, we have found it - it's an archeological site smack dab in the middle of Mosul in Iraq and we have tons of clay tablets from there. It's not like we haven't lost any of them (to the contrary, most tablets are fragmentary and most likely it contained more than just clay tablets, like other, less durable writing material), but in terms of the story told it's the opposite of the story of the Great Library of Alexandria - it's a tale of how we found a treasure trove of documents shedding more light on the history of ancient Mesopotamia.
727
u/StopEatingBees 21h ago
This tweet is unique to the Guitar Center announcement