Ptolemaic Alexandria

"Hellenistic Alexandria — the Greek-speaking new capital of Egypt that was founded by Alexander the Great and then came under the control of one of his leading generals, Ptolemy — became the first center of scholarship of what we now call philology. Many of the fundamental methods and innovations that established philology occurred in and around two particular institutions that the Ptolemaic kings (all named Ptolemy, from 323 BC down to the Roman conquest of the 1st century) created. One was what came to be called the Museum, from which we get our word museum. It wasn’t actually a museum, it was more a college of scholars on a royal salary. The other was a huge library, the largest library in the ancient world. Those are the two institutions within which philology took shape. Fraser’s study is exemplary, not only because it is the fullest study of what went on in Hellenistic Alexandria, but also because it shows how difficult it is to recover those early days of philology. Almost everything we know about the scholars of Alexandria comes from texts that were written many centuries later. They pass along stories, some probably legendary, some probably true, all of them more or less embellished, about what went on in Alexandria. Fraser sorts through that and comes up with a very solid, if necessarily somewhat uncertain, picture of the first days of philology. Nothing is left. There are legends that it was burned to the ground by religious fanatics who were opposed to secular learning. If you were a Christian, the version of that story is that the library was burned down by Muslims. If you were a Muslim it was burned down by Christians. Both those legends are almost certainly false. The books seem to have gradually disappeared. The one moment we know of in which a bunch of books disappeared from the library is when Cleopatra (Cleopatra VII of Egypt — in the royal family all the boys were called Ptolemy and all the girls Cleopatra) gave a whole bunch of them to Julius Caesar. That’s one case where we actually have historical records of how some books disappeared. His conclusions are very complex, but basically the lesson is that almost all of the techniques that scholars later applied to the study of texts were pioneered in Alexandria. Almost all the methods that scholars later applied to the study of languages were first broached in the invention of grammar by ancient Hellenistic scholars. So it really is the origin story of philology."