Why was the library of alexandria's knowledge lost, and was it a single event?

[Kyle.L]

I’ve always accepted the textbook explanation that the Library of Alexandria’s destruction was a gradual process, but I recently read a paper arguing its main scholarly role had actually ended centuries before the famous fires. Now I’m wondering if we’ve overstated the single catastrophic event narrative. What really caused the loss of that concentrated knowledge?

[Natalie.J]

I’ve stuck with the standard narrative too, but my gut says the loss wasn’t a single moment so much as a long process—texts getting copied less, scrolls kept in private hands, and institutions drifting away from that central hub.

[Luke67]

On a trip to a museum exhibit about the Library of Alexandria, a curator stressed that many volumes left the site gradually, not all at once.

[JosephMG]

So maybe the real problem is the ecosystem, not a single fire—the fading networks of copying, teaching, and cataloging; could it be we are chasing a ghost of catastrophe when the issue was quieter vanishing of the means to pass on texts?

[AdamDM]

I tried tracing a specific book’s lineage and it disappears from the records long before the famous fires, so I’m not sure what to trust.