Who Burned the Library of Alexandria?

No single person or event is securely identified as destroying the Library of Alexandria; it declined over centuries, and its precise end cannot be dated from the surviving evidence. Julius Caesar's fire, Aurelian's warfare and the destruction of the Serapeum belong to different episodes, with different evidence. The story blaming the Arab conquest appears much later than the events it describes. Historians generally explain the Library's disappearance through several causes rather than one decisive act of destruction.

This guide establishes what the Library was, then examines Caesar's fire, the disruption of scholarly life, Aurelian's campaign and the Serapeum's destruction. It then assesses the account blaming the Arab conquest, before turning to the survival of texts and a related work about Alexandrian collecting.

The short answer: an institution, not a single disaster

The Library belonged to the Mouseion, a centre of learning founded under the Ptolemies in Alexandria, Egypt, usually dated to the early third century BC. Its scholars collected, compared and edited Greek literary texts. Callimachus compiled the Pinakes, a major bibliographical work associated with this scholarly tradition. The institution's history concerns both collections of writing and the people whose work depended on them.

Its books were chiefly handwritten scrolls, not bound volumes resembling modern books. Ancient estimates of the holdings disagree, so no reliable total can be given; a scroll count would not equal a count of separate literary works anyway. There is also a distinction between the Mouseion and its original collection: later references to the institution do not necessarily establish that the same library still existed.

Julius Caesar and the fire of 48 BC

During the Alexandrian War in 48 BC, Caesar set ships alight while fighting forces supporting Ptolemy XIII. The fire burned part of Alexandria's harbour area. Caesar's own account does not report the Library's destruction. Other ancient writers connect the fighting with lost books, but their descriptions differ over where the books were and how the loss related to the royal collection.

Seneca reports burned books, citing the historian Livy. Plutarch explicitly links the spreading fire to the destruction of the great library, while Cassius Dio describes books burning in storehouses. These accounts do not securely establish that the entire royal collection disappeared. Strabo, visiting around 25 BC, describes the Mouseion without mentioning a destroyed library, although continued scholarship does not prove that every earlier collection survived intact.

Scholars departed, and royal support declined

Disruption had begun before Caesar's campaign. Around 145 BC, many scholars were expelled from Alexandria under Ptolemy VIII. Athenaeus preserves an ancient account of this expulsion of intellectuals. The grammarian Aristarchus of Samothrace left Alexandria for Cyprus during these upheavals. This is evidence of damage to Alexandrian scholarly life, not evidence that Ptolemy VIII burned the Library or ordered its books destroyed.

Historians generally describe a gradual decline involving the loss of royal funding, political turmoil and the departure of scholars. These causes concern the conditions that sustained scholarly work, rather than a single destructive episode. The expulsion therefore matters to the Library's history even without evidence of a fire. It helps explain why the question of who burned the building is narrower than the question of what happened to the institution.

Aurelian's war and the destruction of the Serapeum

In the 270s AD, Aurelian's campaign devastated the Brucheion, the palace quarter where the Mouseion had stood. The fighting formed part of Rome's recovery of territories controlled by the Palmyrene regime. The fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus associates the district's devastation with Aurelian's reign. This places warfare at the Library's former location, but no surviving account securely documents an order from Aurelian to burn the Library.

The Serapeum, dedicated to Serapis, was destroyed in 391 AD during Christian action against pagan worship. Its associated collection was distinct from the main royal library and occupied a different location. Surviving narratives do not securely establish that a substantial collection remained there then. Socrates Scholasticus describes the temple's destruction without describing a library fire. The evidence therefore does not establish that this event destroyed the original royal library.

The story of 642 AD and why historians doubt it

The Arab-conquest legend attributes an order to destroy the books to Caliph Umar and claims they became fuel for Alexandria's bathhouses. An account linking the conquest with the Library's destruction appears in Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi's writings around the beginning of the thirteenth century. The surviving early accounts of the conquest do not corroborate a caliphal order to burn the Library, leaving the later allegation without that support.

Ibn al-Qifti's thirteenth-century account brings John the Grammarian into the story. Identifying that figure with John Philoponus creates a chronological problem, since Philoponus lived before the Arab conquest. The late appearance of the accounts, the absence of corroboration in early conquest narratives and this problem of identification are reasons for doubting the story. It is not secure evidence for assigning the Library's destruction to Umar or the conquerors.

What survived and where to go next

Works once collected at Alexandria could survive through copies held elsewhere. Conversely, the disappearance of an ancient work cannot ordinarily be traced to a particular Alexandrian fire. The history of the collection and the survival of individual writings are therefore separate questions. The broader guide to the Library of Alexandria, its holdings and surviving legacy develops that distinction between the institution's losses and the transmission of texts.

The Letter of Aristeas connects the origin of the Septuagint with the collecting ambitions of Ptolemy II. It is a later Jewish literary account, not an eyewitness record of the Library's foundation, and it gives no account of its destruction. The edition on this site is titled The Letter of Aristeas; the guide to the Septuagint provides a further route into the translation's history.

Keep exploring

• The Library of Alexandria: what it held, what was lost, what survives
• Hypatia of Alexandria
• The Septuagint, explained
• The Lost Books of the Bible: the complete list