(BQ) Part 2 book “The vanished library” has contents: Aulus gellius, isidore of seville, library traditions, strabo and neleus, the soma of rameses, the elusive library, the dialogues of amrou, revisions of aristeas, and other contents. | PART II THE SOURCES I Gibbon E ow ARD Gibbon commented that if Omar really ordered the books to be burned, 'the fact is indeed marvellous' (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1838 ed., vol. VI, p. 452). Gibbon's source was the Specimen Historiae A rabum of Gregory Abulpharagius, a thirteenth-century Jewish doctor known as Bar Hebraeus, in the seventeenth-century Latin translation (1649) made by Edward Pococke, the great orientalist of Corpus Christi College. Gibbon goes on to remark that the solitary report of a stranger who wrote at the end of six hundred years on the confines of Media is overbalanced by the silence of two annalists of a more early date, both Christians, both natives of Egypt, and the most ancient of whom, the patriarch Eutychius [AD 876-940], has amply described the conquest of Alexandria. He notes also the 'silence of Abulfeda, Murtadi, and a crowd of Moslems'. He then comments: The rigid sentence of Omar is repugnant to the sound and orthodox precept of the Mahometan casuists: they expressly 1°9 The Vanished Library declare, that the religious books of the Jews and Christians, which are acquired by the right of war, should never be committed to the flames. His authority here is Hadrianus Reland, the distinguished Dutch Arabist who lived at the end of the seventeenth century. In his De jure militari Mohammedanorum, Reland explains that the religious books of Jews and Christians were not burned for reasons 'derived from the respect that is due to the name of God'. Gibbon does not question the view thatJohn Philoponus was still alive when the Arabs conquered Alexandria, a view founded on the Arabic sources, beginning with the important Index (al-Fihrist) made by the son of 'al-Warraq' ('the bookseller'), which lists every Arabic book and translation into Arabic that its compiler had examined up until the year 988. This dating accords with what we can infer from Philoponus's commentary on the fourth book of Aristotle's Physics,
