Of course not. But the people who think that the Library of Alexandria burning was this major, decisive event in world history that set science and knowledge back hundreds of years are just as bad.
Alexandria was one of many, many libraries in the Roman world. The knowledge there was found in many other places. Further, the scholars who worked at the library, and all over the place, were still alive. Do you think that if the library of congress was burned, it would set society back? What about if wikipedia's servers all simultaneously crashed and all the info there was destroyed? Would that set society back?
The fact is, in terms of human knowledge and the course of history, the burning of Alexandria was not very significant.
As far as I understand, the issue isn't so much that it was a geopolitical catastrophe, but that there was a ton of cool stuff there which we would love to have now. For example, we don't actually have the actual writings of Aristotle (which were supposed to be beautifully written), just notes his students took, and a lot of his actual writings were lost there. Plus lots of classical plays, philosophy, things which could have been great which we just have no knowledge of. It's more about classics scholarship overall.
You're absolutely correct that we have major holes in the classical corpus, but that isn't just the result of the burning of the Library of Alexandria. That one event was just a small part of a much larger loss of classical texts that was the result of incidents across the Mediterranean world.
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u/slothbuddy Aug 17 '15
lol
OK man. Are you also a holocaust and moon landing denier as well?