This is a common refrain but in reality I'm not sure it made much difference. Papyrus just doesn't age well and most manuscripts from this era would've been on papyrus.
What really decided what texts survived and what didn't was monastic traditions in in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages [1]. At this time, a monk might spend their entire life transcribing a particularly long manuscript. The materials were also expensive. So monasteries were selective in what got retain and unsurprisingly it skewed heavily to texts of religious significance and then to texts of significance to, say, Roman and Greek tradition and history given that monasteries were European.
Greek was the language of most fields of learning besides law in the Roman Empire. But the Greeks themselves wrote works on these papyrus scrolls that crumbled fast, so anything not actively used by the Romans was quickly lost.
There's a good chance that if the papyrus scrolls in any library (Alexandria or otherwise) weren't being copied regularly they were crumbling even before they burned or were lost to time for other reasons.
Towards the end of the Roman Empire, a few philosophers took the time to transmit Greek knowledge in Latin as knowledge of Greek faded in western Europe. What these guys happened to translate was the basis of most of European learning in philosophy, math, and other fields for centuries.
But they weren't monks (the most famous, Boethius, was not Christian either but a lot of later writers thought he was), the monks in scriptorium came later and grew slowly.
St. Benedict said that monks should be taught to read and do so regularly, which required copying books, but he prioritized physical work (to create self-sufficient communities) and prayer. But future Benedictines responded to the incentives of the time and began scaling up the copying and doing less agricultural work as the years went on.
Boethius was a Christian. He wrote a book explaining the Trinity, for example (De Trinitate). The work for which he is most famous today, the Consolation of Philosophy, does not mention Christ by name, which have led some to speculate that he lost his faith later in life. There is an absence of direct evidence for that claim.
It is not an uncommon view among scholars that humidity and age caused more papyri to be lost than the burning down of the library of Alexandria did. Many of which would have survived by being repeatedly copied and disseminated throughout the region.
It probably held a bunch of relatively boring local administrative records as far as "documents found only in the Library of Alexandria" from what I've read. Of course some scholars of the boring administrative history of the world would be thrilled though.
I don't discount the scholarly value of these works as you note. They provide a very important insight into these early and semi-documented societies but they don't have a visceral impact for the public like "The Hidden Mysteries of Things Previously Unknown" we accord to the Library of Alexandria in popular acclaim
People say this without any evidence. This ai-post is just regurgitating hn-thread "received wisdom". The evidence for the existence of a library is thin and hard to piece together, but points to more than a myth.
I appreciate that people want real proof of anything, but dumping an ai-slop summary is hardly doing any better than accepting the existence of a large library.
The sieges and fires you are referring to were hundreds of years before the supposed destruction at the hands of Christian mobs (e.g. as depicted in the movie Agora or in Sagan’s Cosmos). The latter is unsupported.
If you want to know what the science says on some topic, you have exactly two valid options:
1. Become an expert in said topic, reading the broad literature, becoming familiar with points and counterpoints, figuring out how research actually works in the field by contributing some papers of your own, and forming your own personal informed opinion on the preponderance of the evidence.
2. Look at the experts' consensus on said topic
Of course, you have other options. A popular one is to adopt the view of one expert in the field that you happen to like, who may or may not accept the consensus view - but this is far more arbitrary than 1 or 2.
Of course science is consensus based ... consensus is a fundamental part of the scientific process, which is conducted by a community of scientists. Consensus is the end result of attempts at reproducibility and falsification, of the ongoing process by which scientists challenge the claims and purported findings of other scientists. Without it, all you have are assertions from which people can pick and choose based on their biases (as we see, for instance, with people who deny climate or vaccine science by cherrypicking claims).
And even if you reject consensus as being essential to science, calling the consensus view "the non scientific view" is obviously mistaken, a basic error in logic.
This is all well understood by working scientists so I'm not going to debate it or comment on it further.
I have seen several real historians say the same thing. I'm not a historian myself, but when I see professors of history in various institutions saying something, I tend to suspect they actually have a consensus, although as others pointed out, maybe it's not a consensus and I would have no way of knowing.
I'm not doubting the library existed and it was destroyed possibly burned more than once but the common trope that Christians did it does not seem to be backed up by history.
What bothers me is the Vatican library. It's too vulnerable to fire. There should be staff taking photos of the pages, and store those copies elsewhere.
Yes, you can quickly photograph an entire book with a phone camera. No, you do not need archivists to do it. No, you do not need a scanner. No, you do not need special lighting.
Don't believe me? Pick a book of yours, open it, and take a photo with your phone.
For some reason, there is a gigantic and ancient monastery on Mount Sinai with a commensurate collection of ancient manuscripts and papyri. Totally coincidence.
those are certainly Christian curated documents. The previous six hundred+ years had seen the development of vivid and exotic religion, philosophy and arts. The Christians famously slew the Dragons, condemned Herod as a sorcerer and astrologer, and replaced the Apollo cults with the scripture that many know well.
I imagine that the Library of Alexandria was plural and diverse with respect to the traditions and inquiry that was represented there.
The early Egyptian Christians were a particularly violent bunch. Lots of murders and political scheming against each other and other Christian authorities in the larger world of the Late Antique. They came to power in Alexandria by murder and looting, specifically
What really decided what texts survived and what didn't was monastic traditions in in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages [1]. At this time, a monk might spend their entire life transcribing a particularly long manuscript. The materials were also expensive. So monasteries were selective in what got retain and unsurprisingly it skewed heavily to texts of religious significance and then to texts of significance to, say, Roman and Greek tradition and history given that monasteries were European.
[1]: https://spokenpast.com/articles/medieval-monks-erased-preser...