Oh Alexandria, how keenly your death stings.

At the time of your death, the only emotions felt were that of hate.

Now, with your halls in ashes and your knowings only a legend, we weep.

Some wonder what secrets you held, but to name them a secret is to misunderstand your intentions. You did not hold anything secret, you collected and gave wisdom as all bookholders did, it was man who made you secretive. You were gagged and stolen, not a silent and reclusive creature.

You held the writings and thoughts of the ancients, the accumulation of those that had laid the foundation for what men would step higher and be a step themselves, as wreath turned to crown turned to Mitre.

Your birth comes from those Hellenic teachers, the first of many great European people to expand man’s knowledge, and it was also them who built it that set the momentum for its death.

You did not die a quick and painless death. It was a score of people that plunged their gladius’, their hand-and-a-halves, their scimitars into you.

The first blow to your majestic halls started in the war between those that your creators were loved by. Julius Caesar’s Civil War sent fire through your halls, consuming the bounded pages, each crafted and inscribed with care, pouring what they deemed worthy to spend their precious hours in writing, and their years in learning into. It was only one of many to come.

Next came the same entity that store your treasures, it is to this that we attribute most of your death. It was likely here that the lethal blow was dealt, when a queen revolted and was soon but down by the powers that be from Rome, across the sea that had no waves.

It was then, after Rome was no longer pagan, and your halls were now mostly charred did the next two Abrahamic warriors finish you off. The Papal Church, the one that had replaced your previous abusers, those wishing to erase their pagan past that ordered its destruction. Then came the Caliph Omar, who with a final command took Alexandria of Egypt in the name of Muhammad, ordered the death blow of the Library, and you were no more.

History will hopefully forget your selective nature, the books you burned yourself, but in either case you held was meant to be sacred to man, the wisdom of our past, and it is beyond shameful what became of you. How then can we replace what you held? How then can we regain your knowledge? That is the most frightening of them all, the simple truth that when you died, your death was significant because it echoed throughout time, not an echo of sound, but an echo of silence.