The historical significance of the burning of the Library of Alexandria is absolutely overstated but not for the reasons most think. Like most Libraries today, the bulk of the collection most likely consisted of reprints of works that could be found other libraries littered across the Mediterranean. (And there was a LOT of them: (Royal Library of Antioch, Imperial Library of Constantinople, Academy of Gondishapur, not to mention local city libraries) The best analogy I've read was it would be like the equivalent of the library of congress burning; sure we'd lose some stuff but most of the collection still exists in one form or another.

Obviously that isn't to say it wasn't a tragic event, just that in terms works that were forever lost has been vastly overstated in public consciousness.

One thing that we definitely lost forever was all the notations made by contemporary scholars as the Library was a mecca of intellectual thought for hundreds of year... Truely heartbreaking to think about about all the information we could of gleaned about their worldview from the annotations they made on those works.

Where are talking about when it was supposedly burnt during the civil war with Caesar/Cleopatra? Or some other event?

> for hundreds of year > Truely heartbreaking to think about about all the information we could of gleaned about their worldview from the annotations they made on those works.

It’s heyday supposedly lasted ~100 years. It was unavoidable though because how unstable rhe ancient world was. Basically you had to have an extremely stable central authority willing to dedicate enough resources to it for hundreds of years for that to happen. While in reality libraries like this rarely survived for longer than a few generations. Decentralization seems to be a lot more sustainable longterm (e.g. 50 medieval monasteries instead of a single massive centralized library)