The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (48 page)

(570-632) (The prophet Muhammad) 632-634 First caliph Abu Bakr 634-644 Second caliph Omar 644-656 Third caliph Uthman

 
LIBRARIANS OF ALEXANDRIA

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is a synthesis of many people’s work, so our first debt is to all those scholars who, for so many generations, have striven to recover ancient Alexandria from the ashes. Though only fragmentary today, the great corpus of knowledge gathered and nurtured in the libraries of Alexandria, and the scholarly titans who both studied and contributed to it, are the source of our inspiration in this book. We still find it hard to conceive of the breathtaking scope and originality of minds like those of Callimachus and Claudius Ptolemy.

It is now more than six centuries since scholars began to rediscover Alexandria’s unique heritage, and successive generations have labored to translate the originals and to take up the torch themselves in pushing forward the frontiers of learning. Our bibliography names those whose works we have relied upon, and we wish to thank all of them for providing us with the bread and butter of this work. On a rather narrower stage, several living scholars’ works have been especially helpful in orienting us with regards specifically to Alexandria. The writings of Alan Bowman on Egypt after the pharaohs are seminal, as is the work of Gunther Holbl on the Ptolemaic Empire. Theodore Vettros’s work on Alexandria itself, and in particular on Neoplatonism and early Christianity, opened our eyes to the crucial role Alexandria played in the formulation of theology in general, and Christianity in particular. We therefore acknowledge our debt to these scholars. We would also like to thank Dr. Christopher Kelly of Cambridge University for reading the manuscript and suggesting many changes that have not only greatly improved it but saved us from many an error. Away from the ivory tower, out there in the big wide world, the author Bill Bryson has recently shown the reading public that you don’t have to be an academic to write about the history of knowledge and ideas. His work has encouraged us to think as widely and deeply as possible in this book, pursuing the notion that we too could write
A Short Classical History of Nearly Everything.

At the conception of this book we received generous enthusiasm and support from John Lloyd of Quite Interesting Limited, for which we are extremely grateful. Our agents Mark Lucas and Julian Alexander of the LAW agency in London and George Lucas at Inkwell Management in New York have provided unstinting support and keen editorial insights throughout, and we’d like also to thank Hilary Redmon and Wendy Wolf at Viking Penguin in New York for excellent editorial input throughout the project.

Finally, we want to thank our wives and families—for Howard, Val, Amie, Leila, and Maya; for Justin, Stephanie and Constance—for their patient support and tolerance as we waded our way through the huge amount of reading and writing this book has required. Last of all, we’d like to acknowledge each other, for getting through this considerable undertaking with ne’er a crossed word, all undertaken in a spirit of scholarly adventure which has been a great pleasure for us both!

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