The last ship from Alexandria
According to legend, it was the Christian patriarch Theophilus who burned the library of Alexandria, which once contained most of humanity's knowledge. According to a decree issued by Emperor Theodosius of Constantinople in 391, all pagan temples were to be destroyed, and the library was partly located in a Serapis shrine.
Alexandria, at the mouth of the Nile, was the centre of the Hellenistic era. Here seafarers crowded with philosophers, merchants and warriors. Macedonians and Greeks moved to the newly built city after the death of Alexander the Great. Ptolemy, one of Alexander's famous generals, became ruler, and his dynasty would rule Egypt and Libya until the Roman conquest, from 323 to 30 BC. The last ruler was Cleopatra.
It was in Alexandria that clockworks and astrolabes were constructed, the likes of which were not seen until 2000 years later. They built temple gates that were opened by steam power. The circumference of the Earth was calculated, as were the orbits and orbital periods of the planets. Sculpture, painting, philosophy, science and architecture flourished in the multicultural melting pot that was the New York of that era.
In reality, the Library of Alexandria was destroyed in several stages, first by Julius Caesar, who set it on fire. The Romans were not philosophers, they were warriors and organizers. The Romans exploited the knowledge of the Hellenistic world for their own gain, but they didn't give much back in the way of philosophy and science. Many of the magnificent buildings the Romans left behind were in fact designed by architects from the Greek cultural sphere. Malicious tongues suggest that it was the Romans who sowed the seeds of the Middle Ages.
In 270, it was time again. Emperor Aurelius laid siege to Alexandria during an uprising, and the district where the library was located was damaged. And as I said, a hundred years later it was the Christians who set fire to it, and in 642 the Arabs took the city and destroyed what little was left.
There will always be people who want to demolish what others have built, and they will always have good reasons for their folly. We live in an age of enormous technological achievement, and we find it hard to understand that science can sometimes lose the battle. And that, as a result, humanity will have to endure hundreds of years of poverty before getting back up to the same level.
Sometimes I imagine that a few trusted men and women saved as many scrolls as they could carry, before the Roman, Christian or Arab mob arrived. They loaded the treasures onto a ship, and sailed off to distant lands. The ancient texts live on, but only as a fraction of our many thousands of years of cultural heritage.