Our knowledge of public libraries is purely literary: we have no archaeological evidence of them. They seem to shrink and become impoverished in Late Antiquity, like those in the West. Of Alexandria's two great libraries, the Museum and the Serapium, nothing remains after the 4thcentury .
A city like Alexandria, a major intellectual center, could not do without libraries. Manuscript production contributed to its renown: John of Ephesus recounts that Thomas the Armenian (late 5th/6th century) obtained his books here. Some libraries, such as that of the famous Origen, were owned by the teachers themselves. The bishopric of Alexandria certainly had its own library, as did its counterparts in Jerusalem and Hippo. Emperor Julian requested certain books from Gregory of Cappadocia, successor to the great Athanasius.
Of the libraries that did not belong to private individuals, the only ones that have come down to us depended on monasteries or churches, such as that of the White Monastery (founded in 350 opposite Panopolis), the only library found in situ to have given us its catalog.
In 1883, Gaston Maspero discovered thousands of Coptic folios piled up on the floor of a hidden room, which served as a secondary book depository. Inscriptions on the walls provide a catalog and, by their spatial distribution, outline a classification: the north wall was devoted to the New Testament, the east wall to homiletical or historical works, and the south and west walls to the lives of the saints. These inscriptions, like the vast majority of preserved books, date from well after Late Antiquity. Most of these manuscripts were written between the 9th and 13thcenturies . Many, however, are copies of earlier copies, reflecting a part of the late antique library. It is for this reason that we are interested in them, limiting our examination to the few works that shed light on the fate of classical culture in a monastic context.
The first books to come to our attention are medical receptacles that derive very strongly from Greek pharmacology, particularly galenic pharmacology (as can be seen from the analysis of a recipe for treating tumors), while also incorporating Christian elements.
