Alexandria in the Googleplex
The Pre-History of the Universal Library
“Alexa, what is a universal library?”
“A universal library is a library with universal collections.”
“Alexa, what are universal collections?”
“Sorry, I don’t know that.”
In 1996, an MIT graduate and Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Brewster Kahle founded two organizations: the Internet Archive and Alexa Internet. Both employ the same technology, Alexa’s user-installed web-trawler: Alexa sells a ranked index of websites to digital marketers, and the Internet Archive saves snapshots of those sites made accessible to the public through the Wayback Machine. (For example, here is the earliest version of American Philological Association website, captured in January 1999.) But they do so for different ends: where the Internet Archive’s stated mission is to give anyone with a WiFi connection “universal access to all knowledge,” Alexa’s work is more profit-driven and calculated, providing subscribers with what its website calls “valuable information about […] what’s important and what isn’t.” If the Internet Archive strives to serve as an open repository of all human knowledge, in Alexa’s world, one day you’re in and the next day, you’re out.
The more I read about this, the more I wonder: how can these two platforms, with such radically different aspirations, sit on the same foundation?
It may or may not come as a surprise that both the Internet Archive and Alexa Internet have the Library of Alexandria as part of their conceptual DNA. Kahle has frequently called the Internet Archive “Library of Alexandria, 2.0,” and when the New Bibliotheca Alexandrina opened in Egypt in 2002, the Internet Archive donated a complete copy of itself — 100 terabytes of data on 200 computer cores — to the new library, calling the gift “The New Papyrus.” Alexa Internet, on the other hand, borrowed the ancient library’s name. After the company was acquired in 1999 by Amazon, where developers worked on a promising AI interface that launched in 2014, it gave its name to the voice of Amazon’s personal assistant. Ask Alexa, “What are you named for?” and she will dryly tell you, “My name Alexa comes from the Library of Alexandria, which stored the knowledge of the ancient world.”
The myth of the Library of Alexandria’s “universal” collections is so familiar as to be doctrinal. But the idea of the universal library as such is barely a classical one, and certainly not Alexandrian. Within a generation or two of its founding, the Library was firmly established as a stage for recherché learning in the face of expanding koine; famously the home of “cloistered bookworms in the chicken-coop of the Muses” (in Robert Barnes’ now lapidary rendering of Timon of Phlius, Diels Frag. 12), the library was, as Peter Bing writes, an “instrument that facilitated the emergence of a privileged circle of learned readers — a tiny elite, to be sure.”
In ancient texts we may read about collections that contained “all the books of the philosophers” or “great multitudes of Greek books,” but these notices remind us that library collections in antiquity were more often than not heterogeneous and idiosyncratic. The library of Epicurean philosophy at Herculaneum is a very good example (even if there are texts yet to be found), mirrored in method, if not in orientation, by booklists from Egypt that show concatenations of poetic works or philosophical ones or what have you.
These lists reflect private collections, surely, while the library at Alexandria and other famous centers of learning like those at Pergamum and the Palatine were civic affairs, funded by ruling powers. When Strabo visited the Egyptian capital in 25 BCE, he found the community of the Museion still active and maintained as an imperial privilege, overseen by a priest “once appointed by the kings, but now appointed by Caesar” (Geographia 17.1.8).
Of course, regal collections might have always had a more omnibus character than private ones. Efforts to build collections that mapped the scale and scope of an empire go back to at least Assyria, and probably further. It is in this light that we should read the brief notice of Josephus that describes the project of the Ptolemies as one of “collecting all the books in the inhabited world” (πάντα τὰ κατὰ τὴν οἰκουμένην συναγαγεῖν βιβλία, Antiquitates 12.2.1) — the earliest testimony there is to Alexandria’s universal character but one motivated just as much by Josephus’s own desire to make Jewish history, and the translation of the Septuagint, a privileged part of the Hellenistic tradition. According to Michael Handis, as antiquity wore on, the Ptolemies’ library took on greater proportions in the literary imagination. Like the inflated counts of library books itself, handily debunked by Roger Bagnall in his study of the “Library of Dreams,” one suspects these later notices often fall into the category of indefinite hyperbolics, rather than real figures.
The idea of a universal library, and certainly the phrase “bibliotheca universalis,” is more of a Renaissance invention. In the mid-1500s the Zurich physician Conrad Gesner set out to record and publish a catalogue of all of the works ever written in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, “extant and not extant; old ones and those more recent, up to today; wise ones and ignorant ones; ones that have been published and ones are held in [manuscript] collections” (1r). Conceived as a reference work in the style of Pliny’s Natural History, the Bibliotheca Universalis was designed as a tool to allow readers to find information quickly: “so instantly whatever anyone looks for, it will be ready at hand; whatever they do not want to read, they can pass over” (1v). Rather than knowledge about the world, this was an encyclopedia of books.
Now, scholars of the Alexandria library will pipe up to say: “Wait! Didn’t Alexandria have a catalogue? Isn’t that what Callimachus’ Pinakes are?” In the recent Ancient Libraries collection, Anne Harder and Christian Jacob say just that. But, at least according to the Suda, Callimachus’s project differed from Gesner’s by employing judgement in a process of selection: his were “Τables of Those Most Distinguished in All Branches of Learning, and What They Wrote” (πίνακες τῶν ἐν πάσῃ παιδείᾳ διαλαμψάντων). While all areas of knowledge were represented, only the works of the best authors are described. (Gesner would later take on a more Callimachean project in the form of his Pandects, which function as a user’s guide to the Bibliotheca.) In spite of his Reformation Protestantism, Gesner’s approach was decidedly catholic.
Perhaps what draws the Pinakes and the Bibliotheca Universalis together most closely as intellectual projects is that they are not, in fact, library catalogues. Rather, each lists works irrespective of whether they were or were not in a particular library, whether the Ptolemies’ at Alexandria or Gesner’s in Zurich. Where Callimachus’ represents an ideal library, Gesner’s shows us a total one.
In antiquity, medical knowledge was jealously guarded. Galen, for example, visited Alexandria with the express wish to see the works of the anatomist Numisianus, but was prevented from doing so because the notebooks were in the possession of Numisianus’s son Heraclianus, also a physician. When Heraclianus died, Galen says he had his father’s notes burned so that no one else would ever read them. Compare this with the earlier case of Pacchius Antiochus at Rome, whom the Augustan doctor Scribonius Largus similarly describes as having withheld his medical recipes during his lifetime but, by leaving his books to the emperor upon his death, allowed them to pass into the imperial libraries — which had been inspired by Alexandria’s — and so into the knowledge of those who had access to them, like Largus himself (“thus they came into our hands”).
For Gesner, then, the project of the Bibliotheca Universalis may have been in part a response to the cloistering of knowledge that had been a norm since the first foundation of libraries. That is, it tried to make knowledge of books as widely accessible as possible: “I prepared this work not for myself, but for the common endeavor: Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes” (1v). As a physician, and a careful reader of ancient medical authorities like Galen and Largus, that interest was particularly charged.
And, truly, that modern notion of the “universal library” relies on similar visions of access at a distance. So, Brewster Kahle in 2002, on the Internet Archive: “Imagine walking into a library, anywhere in the world, and having the full range of human knowledge at your fingertips — in all its forms. Such universal access is now within reach because of digital technology.” So too, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, in 2005, defending in the pages of the Wall Street Journal what is perhaps the most widely used online library project of all, Google Books: “Imagine sitting at your computer and, in less than a second, searching the full text of every book ever written.” Access, in the bibliographic sense, relies on indexing: the catalogue and the finding aide. And this is where we come full circle, back the hand-shake between Alexa Internet, an indexing company, and the Internet Archive, a web repository.
Yet the misaligned imperatives of openness and capitalization have lead to failures and fissures: the seemingly positive outcome of cases brought against Google and its partners by the Authors’ Guild in 2005 and 2011 (i.e., that full digitation did not violate copyright per se) had the knock-on effect of making those scans unsalable. Without a clear path to the capitalization of digitized works, Google has quietly lost interest in its scanning efforts — once touted as encompassing “all books in all languages” — leaving partners and third parties to pick up the pieces. Hathi Trust, based in the University of Michigan, has grown out of Google Books to provide long-term support of books digitized at academic libraries. The Internet Archive specializes in non-print and ephemeral media. The Digital Public Library of America aggregates distributed digitized corpora from local and national institutions. The digital universal library is in pieces.
Its myths hide what lessons the Library of Alexandria can really teach us about the nature of knowledge and its preservation. Libraries are sites where the past comes out to reach the present, but they are also sites at which the present comes to deposit its visions of itself for its own imagined future. It is ironic, of course, that the library has left very little of itself to us. The best evidence for its workings and the surest signs of its lasting impact lie not in the stories that are told of it, but in the scholarship that was done there, unimaginable outside of the context of a sizable collection: the standard recension of Homer, the cultural encyclopedias of Callimachus’s poetry, the very foundations of philology. This work attests not to a universal library but to one very focused in the areas of interest of its users and overseers: that is, they were books made to be read. Furthermore, evidence points to the fact that the decline and fall of the library happened gradually, over time, and not in a single blaze. Perhaps the greatest lesson that the Library of Alexandria has to teach us about the future of libraries is this: to survive, collections must be used, accessed, animated.
When the modern museum was in its infancy, in Conrad Gesner’s lifetime, it was conceived as an echo of the Museion of Alexandria and described through a false etymology with ‘mosaic’: to build a collection was to gather diverse fragments of understanding into a pattern that was recognizable. As Paula Findlen writes, “The museum, as mosaic, brought together pieces of a cosmology that had all but fallen apart in the course of several centuries. Organizing all known ideas and artifacts under the rubric of musaeum, collectors imagined that they had indeed come to terms with the crisis of knowledge that the fabrication of the museum was designed to solve.” The mythical destruction of Alexandria, like that of the Tower of Babel, is framed as the original sin from which humanists and intellectuals must recover.
As students and scholars of the past, we can see our job as recollecting the pieces of the past that have been fragmented and obscured, like the history of the Alexandria library itself, but we must also learn from the narratives we’ve repeated about it, questioning the myths of completeness that lie at the heart of the dual fantasies of its universality and destruction. The classical library should teach us that it is only through access and animation, in all its forms — perhaps even the ones least expected — that we will ensure the continued energy of our intellectual heritage: past, present, and future.
Stephanie Frampton is a classicist, comparatist, and historian of the book in antiquity. She is President of the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School and Associate Professor of Literature at MIT.
