It is a rare moment when I have such a length of time to sit in front of the computer to take in a string of videos more than a few minutes long. I'm glad that moment of time and this link coincided. Overmanwarrior's narrative and the Hypatia videos are worth MAKING the time to read and view. Thank you, Overmanwarrior, for putting this up.

An amazing post. I believe man was more advanced in the past than our history tells us. A book titled "Interstellar Travel" proposes that the North and South Pole flip about every 5,000 years. The result would be devestating and plunge man back to the stoneage.

The film "Agora" (2009) (see IMDB here http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1186830/) was a retelling of the story. Unfortunately, the official movie website has been taken down. The film was the highest earner in 2009 in Spain, but failed to achieve international distribution. I got it on DVD from the local library. You can find several trailers on YouTube.

It is fictional - Rachel Weisz is stunning, but at maybe 30 years younger than the real Hypatia at the time of her death. (Helen Mirren might have been the better choice.)

All of what we know about Hypatia is from one paragraph in "Historia Ecclesiastica" (also called "The Suda") by Socrates Scholasticus, before 439 CE. The death of Hypatia was an event in a rolling history. Realize what the years of her life mean: 335-405. In the movie, one of the men outraged at Christian excesses says that in his father's time, they were thrown to the lions. Persecution of Christians only stopped in 311 with an edict from co-augusti Constantine and Licinius. It was a little more than his father's time ago... but the fact remains that Christians were now on the ascent, legally, as well as de facto among the population. It was still only ONE cult of several inter-related and inter-twined. Mithric materials often appear with Christian artifacts into the 500s AD. As late as 500 AD, the Christian cleric John Chrysostomos condemned in writing those people who wore Alexander the Great's image on necklaces, bracelets and anklets as good-luck charms.

"Paganism was made illegal by an edict of the Emperor Theodosius I in 391. The temples of Alexandria were closed by Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria in AD 391." -- Wikipedia "Library of Alexandria." That included the religious areas "Serapeum" of the great Library. The actual loss of the books is a matter of some debate.

The bottom line is that empires come and go. Knowing that, we can do more than sit by and watch it happen.