Talk:Library of Alexandria/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: A. Parrot (talk · contribs) 18:31, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

So I'm starting work on the review today, but I'll probably take a few days to work through it and get familiar with the sources. A. Parrot (talk) 18:31, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose, spelling, and grammar): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (reference section): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR): d (copyvio and plagiarism):

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images and other media, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free content have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

• Just to start with: the images are all appropriate, and most look properly licensed. (I'm not sure if GA copyright-status reviews are supposed to be as stringent as those at FAC, but there might be hitches with the copyright status of a few—yes, I can hear you groaning already.) But I'm not entirely comfortable with the lead image. Partly, I can't find anything about its origins and thus can't peg it or its author to a date, which might complicate its copyright status even though it looks like a public-domain 19th-century engraving. Perhaps more significantly, it looks implausible to my eyes. I can't imagine that an institution as Greek as the Library, built in Alexandria the early years of Ptolemaic rule, would be built with Hathoric columns; for that matter, I don't know if Hathoric columns were ever used outside temples or chapels dedicated to Hathor or Hathor-like goddesses. I'd rather see a different illustration of what the Library might have looked like, but having looked around myself, I don't see anything else on Commons and not much on Google Images, and probably nothing that's public domain. A. Parrot (talk) 23:14, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

Well, all the sources I have identify it as a nineteenth-century engraving. The classicist Robert Garland uses the image on page 61 of his book Ancient Greece: Everyday Life in the Cradle of Western Civilization with the caption "The Great Library of Alexandria O. van Corven (German), nineteenth century. This artistic rendering of the Library of Alexandria, or Mouseion, is partly based on archaeological evidence." I am not currently aware of any sources that identify the image as anything other than a nineteenth-century engraving, so, in my view, there is no reason to doubt that it is what all the sources say it is unless we have solid evidence to doubt that identification. It seems to me that the artist is simply obscure, which is hardly evidence that the image is some kind of hoax.

As for the image's accuracy, there is not really anything I can see that we can do. No one knows what the Library actually looked like and no one has ever turned up its archaeological remains, although, on page 150, Watts does mention a stone statue base inscribed with the name of the orator Aelius Demetrios that probably originally came from the Mouseion being reused during the reign of Diocletian. That is probably closest thing anyone has ever found to the actual, physical remains of the Library. Furthermore, as far as I am aware, there are no other illustrations of what the Library might have looked like that are in the public domain or freely licensed. There are other illustrations, but they are all recent and copyrighted. Unless someone turns up an image that I do not currently know about, we are stuck with either this image or no image at all. --Katolophyromai (talk) 17:22, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

I figured as much. I'll register my unhappiness with the image, but whether to remove it, thus leaving us with no image of what the Library would have looked like, is up to you. As for the others I had copyright doubts about, I was worried about the reconstructed elements of the Ti. Claudius Balbillus inscription and the Alexandrian World Chronicle papyrus. The former is from a book published in 1923, which might not be public domain in the US, but the odds are very good that it is. (It's about copyright renewal, which many copyright holders didn't bother with, and would an Austrian publisher go through the rigamarole?) The website to which the World Chronicle page is sourced is a book-scan widget, which glitches when I try to page through it. But the book is from 1905, it must surely be public domain, and if the reconstructed portions of the text are in the book, they're public domain too. So I'm checking off the image criteria. A. Parrot (talk) 21:51, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

• I have one point about content so far, which is based on the sources I have on hand rather than examination of the ones cited here. The claim that the pagans barricaded themselves within the Serapeum during the struggle that led to its destruction comes from the account of Rufinus. A study of the destruction of the Serapeum by Johannes Hahn ("The Conversion of the Cult Statues: The Destruction of the Serapeum 392 A.D. and the Transformation of Alexandria into the 'Christ-Loving' City", in From Temple to Church, Brill, 2008) argues that Rufinus's account is much too hagiographical to be trustworthy and points out that Socrates of Constantinople, who knew two eyewitnesses to the events, gives a different sequence of events. A single paper is of limited significance in changing the scholarly consensus, but the introduction to the most authoritative recent book on the destruction of temples during the Christianization of the empire (The Archaeology of Late Antique 'Paganism', Brill, 2011) treats Hahn's as a solid though not definitive argument. Moreover, Hahn's argument is part of a pattern in recent scholarship: skepticism toward accounts of temple destruction that describe a grand struggle between pagans and Christians in which the Christians emerge triumphant. All that is tangential to the article on the Library, so I suggest eliding the contentious details about the Serapeum struggle. Thoughts? A. Parrot (talk) 23:13, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Interesting. I have not read that paper. I myself was concerned about the "Successors to the Mouseion" section, but for a different reason, which is that none of the entries in this section are technically about the actual Great Library of Alexandria and, indeed, not all of them are even about libraries in Alexandria, since some of them, such as the school of Theon and Hypatia and the fifth-century "Mouseion", are schools, not libraries. Nonetheless, I felt that I needed to include this section since all these later institutions have gotten so bundled up with the original Library in popular culture and even in popular books and writings on the subject that I felt it was necessary to at least say something about them, or else people would feel something important was being left out.

I particularly felt it was necessary to talk about the destruction of the Serapeum and the death of Hypatia. Carl Sagan conflated the Serapeum with the Library of Alexandria in his Cosmos: A Personal Voyage series back in 1980 and claimed that Hypatia was a scholar there and ever since then the whole story about Hypatia being murdered and the Library being deliberately destroyed by obscurantist Christians has somehow become the one thing that most people "know" it for, even though that whole story has almost no basis in historical fact. It is all over the internet and they even made a movie about it (which actually, in fairness, did do better on the historical accuracy than Sagan did, although it is still massively inaccurate). Indeed, it is truly tragic that more people have heard this fictional story than have heard about Eratosthenes's almost-accurate calculation of the circumference of the earth in the third century BC!

I was kind of hoping you might have something to say about whether or not I should keep so much information. My view was that it was probably better to give too much information and have no one complain than give too little information and have everyone complain about how the article is so inadequate because it does not talk about Hypatia's murder or the destruction of the Library by Christians. I also wanted to include the information about the fifth-century "Mouseion" to counter the widespread misconception that the end of the Library of Alexandria meant the end of Alexandrian intellectual life, which it certainly did not. --Katolophyromai (talk) 05:29, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I think most of what you have about the destruction of the Library's successors should stay, for all the reasons you state. I only meant to elide the parts of the Serapeum story that Hahn disagrees with, so as to remain neutral while avoiding getting into details like "X author says this/Hahn says that", which belong in the Serapeum of Alexandria article and not here. I know you don't have access to Hahn's study, but from what I'm reading it looks safe enough to limit the text to the points on which Rufinus and Socrates agree. (The other authors who write about the event don't seem to be at issue here; I'm assuming that's because Eunapius's account is vague about the sequence of events and Sozomen and Theodoret were basing their work on the earlier accounts.) A. Parrot (talk) 06:22, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

• I've begun checking the text against the sources, though I won't be able to finish over the weekend as I hoped—sorry about that. I've found and thought I'd point out a few hitches in the citations, although fixing them isn't necessary for GA status. Canfora and Empereur aren't cited, so my citation-checking script gives me error messages for them. If you don't intend to cite them, I suggest moving them to the further-reading section or simply deleting them. The citation of Gibbon in citation 121 doesn't have an SFN template and thus doesn't connect with the entry for Gibbon in the bibliography. And citation 125 doesn't connect to the entry for McLeod because it uses a different date, seemingly because there are different editions or printings of the book from 2000 and 2004.

More tomorrow... A. Parrot (talk) 04:59, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

I fixed citation 125. --Katolophyromai (talk) 05:29, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Okay. Sorry I took so long to finish up, but I've now looked at the sources enough to be confident that the last few criteria are met. I have no reservations about passing the article as long as the hitch with the details about the Serapeum is addressed, which I expect it will be whether I pass the article or not. (Feel free to ask me if you want any more details about Hahn's argument).

A very good job, once again. A. Parrot (talk) 02:15, 15 November 2018 (UTC)