The Greatest Library

My wife and I took very different courses at the University of Oklahoma. We did have one instructor in common, although we did not know it until after we were married! His name was Duane Roller, Ph.D., and the class was History of Science.

Now, that may sound like a rather boring class to you. Most students who signed up for it thought the same thing. Just another elective. The class met at 7:30 am on Tuesday and Thursday's. A brutal hour for your typical college student.

Ten minutes into that first class, I knew that this class would be different. Dr. Roller started talking and the whole class listened. We were enraptured by the stories he told. He embellished the stories with fascinating images from his own collection. Pictures of places I would dearly love to visit some day. Greece and Rome.

Now, with a class that early, lots of students would get a friend in the class to share notes and they would split with one going on Tuesday and one on Thursday. You also always had a number of students dropping a class so that by half way through the semester, a class was about 80% the size it started.

Not Dr. Roller's class.

It got larger!

I think people who were not even enrolled came to hear him. Students looked forward to his class... You came even if you were sick! It was not to be missed.

Did I learn something? Yes!, I still remember vividly the topics he talked about and that was almost 30 years ago.

His greatest story was about the great ancient library at Alexandria.
This library was founded around 300 BC. There was no problem in adding to the collection. If you were on a ship that docked in Alexandria, all scrolls on your ship were confiscated and copied exactly by library scribes.

The copies were returned to you. The library kept the original books!
Over 3 centuries, the library built up a collection of over 700,000 scrolls. It was the center of learning for the entire world. It had beautiful lecture rooms and a vast population of students and scholars used it.

This library held the written history of the world and writings of the greatest thinkers of history. Then came Caesar. Yea, that Caesar.
He sacked Alexandria in 48-47BC and in the process, The worlds greatest library was burned.

What we know of ancient history is from scraps of history that were in other places. Imagine, writing the history of the last 200 years with the restriction that you can only pick 15 books at random from the local library. The great ancient writers we know today are just the lucky scraps that survived in smaller libraries. Just think about the stories that did not survive. Tales and facts that would likely far surpass the ones we know.

Dr. Roller put it this way. When the great library at Alexandria burned, the great curtain of history fell. The Ancient history of man is behind that curtain. We can only glimpse the past through a few scattered holes in it.

The History of Science collection at the Univesity of Oklahoma is one of the finest anywhere. That also is thanks to Duane Roller.

When he died on 1994, the University heard from students all over the world who had taken his class.

Here is to one incredible teacher.

Later,
Dan