I learnt this the other day, and I just thought it was really cool! Basically, if you don’t know, the library of Alexandria housed all the knowledge of the ancient world! They would seek out books, and copy them for the library! Think about how many words that is! How much knowledge you could consume!
Most people think it burned down in a fire, but that isn’t entirely true. Part of the library might have burned, but the more likely scenario is that the scrolls, which were papyrus, began to rot away! These would need to be copied out, and if they weren’t copied, they would lose the knowledge. At first it would have been one book, then another, and another, until they were all gone!
We let all that knowledge fade away! Can you imagine? There were things in that library like an early design for the steam train, reinvented over a thousand years later! The loss of these books were estimated to have set us back technologically by a millenium! Wowzers! Just thinking about it all is driving me up the wall!