Missing History

Despite what your US history textbooks may have tried to tell you, we will never have a complete understanding of history.  History is essentially one infinitely long game of telephone: things get corrupted and then accepted as fact, some parts drop out, some parts get added.  The view of history changes so often that there's a whole field dedicated to just studying views on history.

The reason that people are able to study how our view of history has changed (and a major part of studying history itself) is books.  Books are able to keep records of knowledge for thousands of years, passing their wisdom onto future generations.

Our wisdom for future generations.

Which is why it's such a shame when books, especially famous and important books, get lost.  The worst example of this is the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.  At the time, the Library was the single largest collection of knowledge anywhere in the world.  It was originally ordered by Alexander the Great, who wanted a collection of his empire's knowledge.  Although he never lived to see its completion, his dream lived on.

For a while, anyway. Like the lighthouse before it, the library proved that nothing famous in Alexandria can stay forever.  Amazingly, no one even knows who destroyed the library.  Suspects have ranged from Julius Caesar to Theophilus, a Patriarch of Alexandria, to Caliph Omar.  What is known, however, is that very few of the works held in the library survived.

The loss of the Library of Alexandria is possibly the reason that there are holes in every World History textbook.  No one really knows exactly what was lost with the library, but there is no doubt that invaluable historical texts were destroyed.  If the library still stood, who knows what we would have access to?