Anonymous #372F
Allegedly the jury was filmed. If true, I strongly suspect Kyle will be convicted through intimidation of the jury. That’s in addition to the alleged threats to burn down the city.
Thankfully though, the real world doesn’t take social media complaints as hard enough evidence to remove a judge. His job is safe.
No ancient sources mention the destruction of any library at this time, though 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon mistakenly attributes it to bishop Theophilus.
The last suggested perpetrator of the crime is the Caliph Omar. In 640 CE the Arabs under General Amrou ibn el-Ass, captured Alexandria after a long siege. According to the story, the conquering Arabs heard about a magnificent library containing all the knowledge of the world and were anxious to see it. But the Caliph, unmoved by this vast collection of learning, apparently stated ‘they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.’The manuscripts were then gathered together and used as fuel for the 4,000 bathhouses in the city. In fact there were so many scrolls that they kept the bathhouses of Alexandria heated for six months. These incredible facts were written down 300 years after the supposed event by Christian polymath Gregory Bar Hebraeus1 (1226-1286 CE). However, while the Arabs may have destroyed a Christian library at Alexandria, it is almost certain that by the mid 7th century CE the Royal Library no longer existed. This is made clear by the fact that no mention is made of such a catastrophic event by contemporary writers such as Christian chronicler John of Nikiou, Byzantine monk and writer John Moschus and Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem.
The myth of the Arab destruction of the Library of Alexandria is not supported by even a fabricated document. One may wonder what purpose it served. One answer, often given and certainly in accord with a currently popular school of epistemology would see the story as anti-Islamic propaganda, designed by hostile elements to blacken the good name of Islam by showing the revered Caliph {Umar as a destroyer of libraries. But this explanation is as absurd as the myth itself. The original sources of the story are Muslim, the only exception being the Syrian-Christian Barhebraeus1, who copied it from a Muslim author. Not the creation, but the demolition of the myth was the achievement of European orientalist scholarship, which from the eighteenth century to the present day has rejected the story as false and absurd, and thus exonerated the Caliph {Umar and the early Muslims from this libel.
Passions still run high on this matter. When Glen Bowersock first invited me to present this paper, I hesitated because of a traumaticearly experience. I wrote an article on the Alexandrian Library oncommission for a short-lived magazine called The Dial, published for Channel 13. The editor did not like my caution about the accounts of the destruction of the Library and, without telling me, rewrote the arti-cle to blame everything squarely on the Christians.38 Whether he hated Christianity or just liked a simple story line, I do not know. The matter is, truth to tell, not so clear.39 The subject has been end-lessly debated by modern scholars, but with little result. There was certainly still some substantial library in Roman Alexandria. This is evidentfrom Suetonius’s life of Domitian (20), where we learn that he replacedbooks lost to fire in Roman libraries in part by sending scribes to Alex-andria to copy manuscripts there.40 And some of the scholarly workthat went on in the Roman period in Alexandria is difficult to imaginewithout a substantial library. As the Museum was certainly still operative in the Roman period, belief in a Caesarian destruction of the Library requires the uneconomical assumption that the Library was destroyed in the fire but the Museum was not.
there is no historical evidence for his existence