Read the given passage carefully and answer the following questions.
The loss of the ancient worlds single greatest archive of knowledge, the Library of Alexandria, has been lamented for ages. But how and why it was lost is still a mystery. The mystery exists not for lack of suspects but from an excess of them. Alexandria was founded in Egypt by Alexander the Great. His successor as Pharaoh, Ptolomy II Soter, founded the Museum or Royal Library of Alexandria in 283 BC. The Museum was a shrine of the Muses modelled after the Lyceum of Aristotle in Athens. The Museum was a place of study which included lecture areas, gardens, a zoo, and shrines for each of the nine muses as well as the Library itself. It has been estimated that at one time the Library of Alexandria held over half a million documents from Assyria, Greece, Persia, Egypt, India and many other nations. Over 100 scholars lived at the Museum full time to perform research, write, lecture or translate and copy documents. The library was so large it actually had another branch or daughter library at the Temple of Serapis.
The first person blamed for the destruction of the Library is none other than Julius Caesar himself. In 48 BC, Caesar was pursuing Pompey into Egypt and in the following skirmish, Caesar ordered the ships in the harbor to be set on fire. Julius Caesar wrote of starting a fire in the harbour but neglected to mention the burning of the Library. He was not in the habit of including unflattering facts while writing his own history. If he was solely to blame for the affair it is very likely significant documentation would exist today.
The second story of the Library’s destruction is more popular, thanks primarily to Edward Gibbons’ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But the story is also a tad more complex. Alexandria had long been known for its violent and volatile politics. Christians, Jews and Pagans all lived together in the city. One ancient writer claimed that there were no people who loved a fight more than those of Alexandria. Once, riots broke out when Hierax, a Christian monk, was publicly killed by order of Orestes the city Prefect. And this riot is often blamed for the destruction of the Library.

So, who did burn the Library of Alexandria? Probably everyone mentioned above had some hand in destroying some part of the Library’s holdings. The real tragedy of course is not the uncertainty of knowing who to blame for the Library’s destruction but that so much of ancient history, literature and learning was lost forever.