THE TIME MACHINE

The loss of the ancient world's 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 had long been known for it's violent and volatile politics. Christians, Jews and Pagans all lived together in the city. One ancient writer claimed that there was no people who loved a fight more than those of Alexandria. Diverse groups crossed path in this ancient city, and rivalries and conflicts manifested themselves.

The Museum or Royal Library of Alexandria was founded in 283 BC. 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. More than 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.

It was at the Library of Alexandria that the scientific method was first conceived and put into practice, and its empirical standards applied in one of the first and certainly strongest homes for serious textual criticism. As the same text often existed in several different versions, comparative textual criticism was crucial for ensuring their veracity. Once ascertained, canonical copies would then be made for scholars, royalty and wealthy bibliophiles the world over, this commerce bringing income to the library. But this area was in constant conflict as foreigners came to conquer the land time and time again. Ancient and modern sources identify four possible occasions for the partial or complete destruction of the Library of Alexandria:

1. Julius Caesar's Fire in The Alexandrian War, in 48 BC
2. The attack of Aurelian in the third century AD;
3. The decree of Theophilus in AD 391;
4. The Muslim conquest in AD 642 or thereafter.

There are some mild parallels to the ancient Library of Alexandria and LOST. The Island has various "science" stations which were experimenting with mind control, polar bears, fertility, etc. It could be compared to the lecture areas in the ancient museum. As in real life, knowledge is power and ultimate knowledge is ultimate power. If one does not understand it, then one must destroy it. And that is what a new king or Pharaoh feared most: someone using the vast array of knowledge against him.

As MIB told Jacob, they come, they fight, they destroy . . . nothing changes. It appears that the visitors to Alexandria came, fought and destroyed the ancient city time and time again. In the end, the greatest "loss" was the vast knowledge contained in the library scrolls. Today's scientists, archaeologists and engineers cannot grasp how the ancient Egyptian could build the huge pyramid complexes when modern mechanical building devices can not recreate the construction. Only bits and pieces of the lost knowledge have been found, which have led to historians be astonished to find the principles of steam engineering 2000 years before its "modern" invention. It is like taking our technology and science today and looking 2000 years in the future: what would our civilization be like? All the sci-fi wonders, Star Trek concepts, immortality, space travel, hover cars are imaginative possibilities with thousand of years of study, experiment and application.

This may have been brought up by the theorists who believe LOST is about the lost city of Atlantis, or an alien spaceship (snow globe) or a parallel dimension, but I have not seen is actual explanation in the blogsphere: that the Island is a Time Machine. Many people have the HG Wells concept of a time machine as a carriage with lots of lights and levers. But in a literary sense, the lost Library of Alexandria is a time capsule where scholars could go back in time and read the knowledge of ancient genius, and then at the same time read about the mythic future from the poets and writers. The physical signs of knowledge on the Island has been Egyptian, Greek, Latin (Roman) and English, all civilizations that prized scientific knowledge. And all those civilizations used knowledge to improve the art of warfare to conquer and control their enemies. It would explain how the "island" could vanish without displacing any water in the ocean; it is not a physical, volcanic structure. The mechanical noises associated with Smokey are a clue to the mechanical nature of the island.

In the end, there will need to be a supernatural explanation for the premise of the show. Stringing together the pieces of historical data to weave a tapestry of time travel, one could argue that the Island is the physical representation of all of mankind's knowledge (a modern Library of Alexandria) with roots in ancient past, long forgotten but by a few priests or scholars, who are the guardians of this powerful secret: that the Island is made up of unique matter and energy which can be manipulated into a time machine. If one can control this knowledge, one could not have to predict future events because they could be known before they happen. What happens will happen, and a person with foresight can be in the right position to profit from that knowledge. And with knowledge of the future, comes total power. That is why men would be desperate to find the Island and kill anyone to take it back. If the Island is a Time Machine, then one could manipulate it to become an immortal god on Earth.