It occurred to me while Alexander’s body went everywhere, these books on Alexander likely hold a lot of evidence on Aristotle and Plato, Socrates… Alexander certainly was in Aristotle and Theophrastus’ educated circle. Books may still be there even after the body of Alexander the great was moved for the umpteenth time later on.
Where is ‘there’, because if sites have been uncovered and no books found, then this points to the idea that they have yet to uncover the real grave.
I’m looking at that, I don’t know much about this emperor’s activities… I know two locations said to be at one time Alexander’s Tomb are under current archaeological investigation, and one is a off limits mosque in Egypt. I gotta spend some time narrowing this down.
My problem is, the Turks and Arabs had their own treasure digging frenzy for gold and “arcane alchemy & magic pagan, Jewish and Christian texts” during our dark and middle ages, they left some pretty insightful texts on their searches, but at least one has been translated but quite rare. I gotta go back to the Library of Congress to read it. Learned about it a few months ago… my luck the Arabs probably broke in during the Mamluk era and raided these books.
wouldn’t they have made copies, and when they did that records?
I think it far more likely that the books, the real grave and probably treasure, are out there somewhere. Archaeologists will find disturbed earth via satellite, eventually all locations on earth will be known.
I doubt his body is in one piece, Christians consider the bodies of saints sanctified and holy, blessed by God, likely got chopped up and mistaken as a saint for relics, under a few dozen altars.
As to the copies, yeah… it’s scattered across several works. We are talking about a empire that didn’t take preservation of libraries seriously though, it was something the Alexandrians under the Ptolemies did, but Julius Caesar obviously held in low regard, as well as Mark Anthony. Antioch did have a library system, but it appears they mostly maintained library master copies… by the time of Malalas, you see a lot of confusion there. Perganum did a lot to compete with Alexandria, I’m sire a lot ended up in Constantinople’s library, just as a lot of the Alexandrian works did.
Just… Romans didn’t care about copying and making backup works. Like I said, Ptolomies did, then Cassiodorius and Boethius started the trend once they realized the Latin world and older traditions were dying off. In between it was just people having whatever edition they could find copied by a slave of a book seller on a street corner, shove it in your Capsa, tug it home, you die… it is bequethed… once in a while, a Emperor may patron a memorial library for a victory or as a mortuary, or a Senator would. Books had a precarious transmission, shit regularly went missing.
This Emperor, for reasons I don’t get, decided to lovk up everything he could find in a Alexandrian tomb. A lot of that would of been absurd myths such as we have inherited from Alexandria or the middle ages, some alchemy or magic. A lot would of had fragments.
This sounds like the stuff the Arabs found. I know of a text, I’m relation to the search for the Voynich Manuscript, mentioned on a blog that mentions a translation if a Arab work, that I mentioned above. Long out of print, but next to unknown in the west. I found a lot of the excepts fascinating. My instinct says look there.
amazon.com/Egyptology-Missin … 1598742809
I just lost my kindle today, went to a Chinese buffet, then watched the new Captain America movie… realized it was gone upon leaving. I won’t be able to get this book for a while, thought it was out of print.
amazon.com/Egyptology-Missin … 1598742809
From the blog I read it on.
amazon.com/Egyptology-Missin … 1598742809
My instinct usually is correct. Got a bad feeling I’m gonna find a reference to a mamluk “archaeological” excavation where they found the works of Hermes Trismegistus, then burnt all the pagan and infidel texts so as to keep warm while figuring out where the treasure was, and found the secret formula and tasted it and saw angels descend, and stripped naked dancing around the bonfire becommimg one with Allah… middle ages tended to suck just about everywhere.