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https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/pluginfile.php/437863/mod_resource/content/1/Bagnall%20article.pdf https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/pluginfile.php/437863/m

• throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  That's not great. A quick skim says that the number of books were probably (edit typo: overestimated) by a fair bit: "The actual numbers were probably lower, perhaps by as much as one order of magnitude" Reference to this says "a library that was a tenth of this size [sc. the 500,000 in Ps.-Aristeas] would still have been very large in antiquity") so it was a large library. I have to say, claims of hundreds of thousand weren't really plausible anyway. Second it doesn't say it was dwarfed elsewhere at the time. It does say "The Library of Alexandria, however comprehensive for its time, was not on a scale comparable with the great research libraries of the twentieth century[0]". Which is fair, but doesn't support what you say. finally it doesn't say (that I can see) that it was empty when destroyed. The guy does say there's now way it would have survived a long time due to the humidity and climate it was in, but doesn't suggest (AFAIKS) that it was nearly empty when it was destroyed. [0] well duh So I'm going to go with the more common view for now. Thanks anyway.