Jesus fucking Christ, no, the burning of the library of Alexandria did not in any way slow down human progress. It wasnāt the only library to have existed in the world at the time.
āAlexandria was hardly the only library in the world, and the libraries at Pergamum and later Rome herself rivaled Alexandria in scale. Antony replaced the losses of the fire during the Alexandrine War with copies made from the library at Pergamum, and libraries in gymnasia or simply founded for citizens abound during that period in the Greek world, theyāre in like literally every city of any size.
If anything at all was lost it was almost certainly mainly critical commentaries on various authors, as well as catalogs of their worksāboth the Alexandrian library and the Pergamene one were famous for producing such commentaries.
Pretty much everything else of value would have existed elsewhere. Itās possible that a few (at that time probably little-known) philosophical texts might have been lost, but even such texts are likely to have had other copies elsewhere.ā
Hereās an extensive and well sourced post debunking the utter bullshit myth that the burning of the Library somehow shot human progress back thousands of years until the 16th century dragged Europe out of theĀ āDark Agesā.Ā
Which is also a term very few historians use or take seriously anymore because it is, again, based off of inaccurate misconceptions about Medieval history, AS WELL as being an EXTREMELY Eurocentric viewpoint that ignores scientific and scholarly work done in other areas of the world like China and the Middle East.
During the so called āEuropean Dark Agesā, architecture achieved complexities the Romans could only dream of, the first universities were opened, scholarship was kept alive, metalurgy advanced rapidly.Ā
There wasnāt ONE renaissance, there were THREE. The one we think of had itās roots as far back as the 14th century. They didnāt come out of nowhere, the advancements were built off of work of hundreds of years of work by educated folk from across Euroasia and they fed into one another.
In fact, hereās a handy list of Medieval European scientists, from the 5th to 14th century.
That fucking graph up there is one of the most offensivley bad pseudo-historical memes. Itās so infamous, /r/BadHistory simply calls it Ā āThe Chartā.
Let this fucking bullshit die already.
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