Counterfactuals: The Great Library

Welcome to the History Guy Podcast: Counterfactuals. What is a counterfactual? At it’s most basic, it is a ‘what if’. It’s a way of understanding history as it is by discussing what it could have been.

On today’s episode, we talk about one of the most famous what ifs in human history: What if the Library of Alexandria hadn’t been lost? The famous story is that the library was burned, but the actual history is more anticlimactic. Huge numbers of scrolls were nonetheless lost to history. What might the world be like if they weren’t?