Sagan correctly identifies the Serapeion as having originally been a temple, but he incorrectly claims that it later stopped being a temple and was converted into the “annex” of the Great Library of Alexandria. 31 BC).Īlmost as soon as he starts speaking, Sagan starts spewing out inaccuracies right away. The segment starts out with Carl Sagan visiting the ruins of the Serapeion of Alexandria, a temple to the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis built under the orders of Ptolemaios III Euergetes (ruled 246 – 222 BC), a member of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, a dynasty of Makedonian Greek monarchs who ruled Egypt during the Hellenistic Era (lasted c. Introducing the Great Library of Alexandria This should give you some impression of how historically accurate Carl Sagan’s documentary really is. I have therefore decided to undertake the ambitious task of going through the entire segment about Hypatia and the Library of Alexandria and correcting all the inaccuracies I come across. In both of those articles, I have noted that many of the misconceptions I debunk originated from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, but, in those articles, I did not address Carl Sagan’s PBS miniseries directly. I wrote an article in August 2018 debunking misconceptions about Hypatia and another article in July 2019 debunking misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria. In this one segment, Sagan manages to promote what seems like roughly half of all the misconceptions about the ancient world that I have ever debunked. Perhaps the most influentially wrong segment in the whole series is a twenty-two-and-a-half-minute segment in the last episode about the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria and the murder of the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia. Because Sagan was a scientist with an established reputation, though, many people have assumed that everything he says in the miniseries must be correct and, as a result, these misconceptions have spread and become embedded in popular culture. Unfortunately, while Carl Sagan may have been a brilliant scientist and a great science popularizer, he was an unbelievably terrible historian and, in the show, he gets a boatload of facts about history blatantly wrong. Many people say that watching Cosmos growing up was what inspired them to go into STEM. The miniseries, which is, broadly speaking, about the history and importance of science, has had a massive influence on both our culture as a whole and on individual people’s lives. Carl Sagan’s thirteen-episode documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which originally aired on PBS in 1980, is the most watched PBS documentary series in history.
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