Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/167

 The Museum and Library at Alexandria 147 These strips were kept on rolls which were very unwieldy to wind to and fro and read, and very inconvenient for reference. It was these things that prevented the development of paged and printed books. Printing itself was known in the world it would seem as early as the Old Stone Age ; there were seals in ancient Sumeria ; but without abundant paper there was little advantage in printing books, an improvement that may further have been resisted by trades unionism on the part of the copyists employed. Alexandria produced abundant books but not cheap books, and it never spread knowledge into the population of the ancient world below the level of a wealthy and influential class. So it was that this blaze of intellectual enterprise never reached beyond a small circle of people in touch with the group of philosophers collected by the first two Ptolemies. It was like the light in a dark lantern which is shut off from the world at large. Within the blaze may be blindingly bright, but nevertheless it is unseen. The rest of the world went on its old ways unaware that the seed of scientific know- ledge that was one day to revolutionize it altogether had been sown. Presently a darkness of bigotry fell even upon Alex- andria. Thereafter for a thousand years of darkness the seed that Aristotle had sown lay hidden. Then it stirred and began to germinate. In a few centuries it had become that widespread growth of know- ledge and clear ideas that is now changing the whole of human life. Alexandria was not the only centre of Greek intellectual activity in the third century B.C. There were many other cities that dis- played a brilliant intellectual life amidst the disintegrating frag- ments of the brief Empire of Alexander. There was, for example, the Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily, where thought and science flourished for two centuries ; there was Pergamum in Asia Minor, STATUETTE OF MAITRE- YA: THE BUDDH4 TO COME A Graeco-Buddbist sculpture of the Third Century a.d. {From Malakand, N.W. Province, KOTO in the India Museum)