The accounts vary, but if it did exist, and the general theme was destruction by fire around the death of Julius Caesar and the birth of Jesus Christ..............40 bc to 50 ad........somewhere in there a fire destroyed it...........now, what could have happened, and since scrolls, books, etc..........there are usual multiple copies...........they did burn down a bunch of it.......but made copies of many they did not have beforehand.........therefore it would look like it was all destroyed by a fire...........

Over the centuries, the Library of Alexandria was one of the largest and most significant libraries in the ancient world. The great thinkers of the age, scientists, mathematicians, poets from all civilizations came to study and exchange ideas.  As many as 700,000 scrolls filled the shelves. However, in one of the greatest tragedies of the academic world, the Library became lost to history and scholars are still not able to agree on how it was destroyed.

An artist’s depiction of the Library of Alexandria. Image source.

Perhaps one of the most interesting accounts of its destruction comes from the accounts of the Roman writers. According to several authors, the Library of Alexandria was accidentally destroyed by Julius Caesar during the siege of Alexandria in 48 BC. Plutarch, for instance, provides this account: