Just found out about Helen Dale’s Kingdom of the Wicked. It’s a novel set in an alternative history where the point-of-departure is that Archimedes does not die after the fall of Syracuse. For various reasons, this leads to an industrial revolution during the Late Republic.
I found out about this piece through Mark Koyama’s Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?, a blog post on Medium.
David of Eurogenes suggests that the recent paper on proto-Tocharians mixed up the Tocharians with the Huns. This is a post-publication review. I wouldn’t dismiss David’s judgment out of hand. I didn’t know what to think about the Tungusic affinities some of these people, and his model makes nice sense of that.
Why Kenyans Make Such Great Runners: A Story of Genes and Cultures. This is 2012 story in The Atlantic by Max Fisher is pretty even-handed. I am skeptical The Atlantic would commission something like this today. Here’s the interesting point: “The researchers estimated that the average Kalenjin [a Nilotic tribe in Kenya] could outrun 90% of the global population.” If the average is so shifted from the median in this population the implications for the tails are pretty clear under normality (came on my radar when I saw Jesse Singal tilting at windmills).
The High Priest of Heterodoxy. About Jon Haidt.
How the Catholic Church Created Our Liberal World. Old post Tanner Greer. I agree with it in broad strokes, but always wonder how civilization can even be maintained outside of Western Europe! Weirdly, the first time I was introduced to the role of the Catholic Church in destroying Roman family values was in Adam Bellow’s In Praise of Nepotism.
Triceratops Skull, 65 Million Years Old, Unearthed by College Student, 23.
They look white but say they’re black: a tiny town in Ohio wrestles with race. Basically the culturally important role of hypodescent, and the eventual shedding of the norm in the present generation.
A Prince’s $500 Billion Desert Dream: Flying Cars, Robot Dinosaurs and a Giant Artificial Moon. A sad story. You give a fool billions, and everyone else plays the fool.
Inside Chris Hughes’s campaign to break up Facebook, the tech ‘monopoly’ he helped create. Someone is going to write a bio of Chris Hughes with the title “The Opportunist.”
Nepotism in the movies: it’s time to call out the acting school of mum and dad. I think one reason people don’t care is the number of high paying acting jobs is so small this doesn’t affect most people. And you can only get so good-looking. With the rise of the CGI comic book film, this looks to be passing fad anyway.
Quantifying posterior effect size distribution of susceptibility loci by common summary statistics.
Fast and robust ancestry prediction using principal component analysis.
What have twin studies taught us about educational attainment? Amir Sirialasan has a blog.
The Democratic Party Is Actually Three Parties. On a private channel I’m on I stated that Ta-Nehisi Coates is so popular with white liberals in part because he is what white liberals would like all black Americans to be. Coates is an atheist who is socially liberal, as well as being black and oppressed.
India Launches Mission to Land a Rover on Moon’s South Pole.
Lessons in genome engineering: opportunities, tools and pitfalls.
I could have sworn I had earlier read something you wrote responding to “Kingdom of the Wicked” or Helen Dale.
Much of Tanner Greer’s essay is in line with what hbdchick has been writing about the hajnal line, but I was surprised when he said the atypical thing about medieval western europe was how limited the authority of the church over secular powers was near the end. My understanding was that secular rulers were stronger in Byzantium (and later Russia, both of which exhibited caesaropapism) as well as the Middle East, whereas in western Europe the pope was able to excommunicate an emperor who had to go begging to be let back into the church. It’s really after the Reformation that secular rulers regularly started to defy the Church. Timur Kuran attributes the “long divergence” between the Muslim (and more specifically, Ottoman) world to Islamic law, but to him it wasn’t so much a matter of the religion having a lot of authority as their legal system locking in rules which predated Islam and turned out to conflict with modern innovations like corporations (which the Catholic church had rediscovered in Roman law). When Greer correctly says “the Arab and Turkic kingdoms, which had no formal religious hierarchy capable of spanning the many Sunni lands”, that doesn’t sound like the opposite of “political weakness” (which he instead attributes to the Catholic church) for religious authorities to me.
Chapter 12 of David Epstein’s 2013 book the sports gene
https://www.amazon.com/Sports-Gene-Extraordinary-Athletic-Performance/dp/161723012X
covers Kalenjin runners (most “Kenyan” runners are actually Kalenjin, only ~5M). Makes pretty much the same points as Atlantic story, using same paper and analogies. Though a bit more in depth given he had more space. I thought at the time he was at risk of being attacked, but didn’t happen. Suspect would not pass muster today though. A good book though!
Industrial revolution before England in the 18th Century? I don’t think it would have happened.
There were far too many small technical invocations that had to occur first. Even the brilliant civilization of Song China made lots of technical advances (compass, gunpowder, printing) but did not cross the threshold.
18th Century England had the advantage of many innovations from as far afield as China, but still had to put together a lot of innovations that took a long time.
Example 1. The steam engine. The first commercial steam-powered device was a water pump, developed in 1698 by Thomas Savery. It took a few years before Thomas Newcomen added a piston in 1712. And another 50 years before James Watt added the condenser to produce the first steam engine.
Example 2. Cloth Production. Weaving is among the most ancient arts. The Chinese invented the drawloom around 400 B.C.E. The treadle powered vertical shaft loom was invented in the 13th century. However weaving could not be done on an industrial scale until the flying shuttle was invented in 1733. The flying shuttle increased the speed of weaving so much that devices were needed to increase the availability of thread, such as the spinning jenny in 1764, the spinning frame, later developed into the water frame (1769), and the spinning mule 1779.
I think the correct model is an s shaped growth curve with a very long left tail that takes thousands of years of innovations piling up before it gets to the take off and exponential growth phase. That began in the 18th Century. Its occurrence in England maybe more happenstance than anything else. England had the advantage of a settled political system after 1688, unlike France and Central Europe. Marauding armies are a real problem, so is violent civil war.
I would not say that true scientific advances played much of a role until the last quarter of the 19th century when chemistry and electricity came to the fore. Although the existence of Newton and the Royal Society shows a receptiveness to new ideas that was enabling.
I am in Koyama’s group 3 with Mokyr and McCloskey. That is good company. I think the founder of Group 3 is Schumpeter who pointed out that adding more capital does not create innovation, that adding more coaches and horses to a stagecoach company does not make it into a railroad.
Nepotism in the movies. I am glad I followed the link.
The Grauniad was picking on Maya Hawke. She appears to have very considerable assets of her own. One could wonder if they were purely genetic, but I recall a scene in her mother’s first big movie Dangerous Liasons (1988) between the then 18 yro Uma Thurman and John Malkovich during which Ms. Thurman was not clothed. I was most impressed. (I cannot recall Malkovich’s state of dress. I am sure that the memory gap reflects very poorly on me.)
My daughter was in college with Mamie Gummer, daughter of Meryl Streep and sculptor Don Gummer, and Lily Rabe, daughter of playwright David Rabe and actress Jill Clayburgh. They have both had careers on stage and screen. My daughter decided to get involved with the business side of the arts.
However, I think that the issue of nepotism in Hollywood is about as trivial an issue as I could think of. I can think of dozens of big stars and big producers who had no connections at all. But, so what? I am much more concerned about nepotism in politics.
“a tiny town in Ohio wrestles with race.”
Interesting. It is about an hour away from where I have lived for many years without hearing about it.
“How the Catholic Church Created Our Liberal World.”
I am not inclined to believe it. Semitic societies were polygamous as Jews were in Old Testament times and Arabs still are. The Romans were monogamous, and I think the same was true of the Germanic tribes. The Roman church adopted monogamy from Roman society not polygamy from Christianity’s Semitic roots.
Interestingly, polygamy was not banned among Ashkenazic Jews until the 10th Century, and then only by Rabbinic decree. The custom has been followed since then, but the decree would have not been effective if there had been social resistance.
As for nepotism, it was the way things were in Europe until quite recently. The always terrific Patrick Wyman recently did a couple of episodes that discuss the role of family in Renaissance banking and commerce: Jakob Fugger: The Richest Man Who Ever Lived? May 9, 2019 and The Rise and Fall of the Medici Bank May 2, 2019. Of course the role of nepotism in the Renaissance Church is notorious.
Nor am I sure about the role of cousin marriage. I know it was lawful and practiced in England in the 19th Century. A major plot line in the Trollope novel “Can You Forgive Her?” is whether the heroine will marry her cousin. The problem is the bad character of the cousin, not their relationship.
I think marriage laws follow social practices they don’t lead them.
The Romans were monogamous, and I think the same was true of the Germanic tribes.
german elites practiced polygamy. it wasn’t just romans, it was greeks too. since xtianity among gentiles was initially much more of a greek-speaking phenomenon, i suspect the practice came through that avenue, though roman law entailed monogamy so it was a convenient practice with the mainstreaming of the religion in the west.
I know it was lawful and practiced in England in the 19th Century.
cousin-marriage reappears in large numbers after the reformation.
also, the catholic ban in these marriages was really aimed at the elite. the common people had common-law marriages usually i think. and even among the elite, there were plenty of exemptions given. the rules were simply a tool for the church to regulate family alliances among the elite.
TGGP, I mentioned the book and the review in a comment back in November 2017. You have a good memory.
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2017/11/12/disruptive-ages-happen-and-they-happen-fast/
As regards East Jackson, although they have white skin, many of the residents have distinctly black facial structures. Also, there is documented black ancestry in many of them. Under Virginia’s old One Drop Rule, which ironically is accepted by nearly all civil rights organization, the residents of East Jackson are legitimately black.
@Razib: “also, the catholic ban in these marriages was really aimed at the elite. the common people had common-law marriages usually i think. and even among the elite, there were plenty of exemptions given. the rules were simply a tool for the church to regulate family alliances among the elite.”
Even on the contrary, it was applied to commoners wherever the church could and the dispensation was not easier to get for the common people. Even godparents and their descendents were included.
It was not aimed at the elite alone but rather part of a “reeducation program” to create pious individuals loyal to the church and without extended family. The elite was actually less affected.
Did you look at the Indo-European blog? Everything he could interpret wrong he did. Really no good source for an scientifically based analysis.
R1A as Uralic marker and his comments on early Slavs as examples.
It was not aimed at the elite alone but rather part of a “reeducation program” to create pious individuals loyal to the church and without extended family.
doesn’t seem like it was very effective in italy going by cavall-sforza’s records from what i remember on his book using genealogy records….
Despite the provision for it in Jewish law, polygamy appears not to have been too widespread in the Jewish world post-Biblical times except for some isolated contexts (like the Yemeni Jews, who were practicing polygamy until the 20th century). It was likely reserved for the ultra-wealthy.
A family member by marriage is the grand-daughter of a first-cousin marriage that took place in Canada in the 1930s.
I said whereever the church could. In very isolated places or regions with weaker church institutions things were more complicated.
In the Frankish empire and its successors it was fairly effective overall. Also, even if the church allowed the marriage, it was a grace and the institution was in control and was paid. Contrary to earlier times were two patriarchs and the respective families made a decision on their own. The church got its grip on the people and made the individual prominent while crippling the family in so many ways.
The elite could, overall, fend off this attack much better than the commoners.
It was the same time when the celibacy and monasteries became so prominent.
On “How the Catholic Church Created Our Liberal World”, this is one of those points where I have to be skeptical of Tanner (like on the current and probable future eminence of Tolkien, and the likelihood of the future world’s knowledge of 20th century literature thinning down to the sample total volume as ours of the 12th century!).
It seems hard for me to dismiss pre-Catholic Church “Western” experiments in democracy and republicanism and folk assemblies and so on as *the* decisive difference in laying the foundations for Western social experiments later on. (Lacking in China where central bureaucracies refused to integrate village councils and stymied in India by caste and confession).
That’s the traditional story, that there is that the legacy, and it comes with a relatively less powerful central monarchy in Western nations and a powerful merchant class and the printing press to give rise to representative and ‘liberal’ orders.
The contention seems to be that all this was not decisive and would’ve come to nothing, were it not for the Catholic Church’s encouragement of greater outbreeding and monogamy. But I don’t see how we can be confident of this. Not enough controls.
Joe Q.: Only experience can explain this. Let me assure you, I have never wanted a second wife.
Another forensic DNA case involving data from consumer DNA results from relatives. https://coloradosun.com/2019/07/29/colorado-cold-case-michael-whyte-darlene-krashoc/?fbclid=IwAR3lnGz6kNuKXgCrJ9vShPN-HJBT7861jGyLpMNiQiewQKiEFdP8RJ2k0c0
The great mystery of ancient science is why Greek science and engineering abruptly died; why Rome was not even able to copy it, let alone improve on it. Archimedes is just one guy. Dale puts the industrial revolution 50 years after Archimedes. But Greek science did continue that long, not in Rome, but in the Hellenistic world.
The big center of learning was Alexandria. Its failure is easy to explain: civil war in 144BC. The library survived, proving that books aren’t worth much compared to a living tradition. But the other center of learning in Pergamon was peacefully ceded in 133BC. The mystery is why that didn’t work.
The Romans wanted to harness Greek science, most obviously in the story of Archimedes. They did adopt some practices. The strange omissions of Vitruvius suggest that he was just a figurehead for the waterworks. Probably the real engineers were Greek slaves. So in a sense Greek engineering survived. But why did it regress? Maybe you can’t harness science.
“The contention seems to be that all this was not decisive and would’ve come to nothing, were it not for the Catholic Church’s encouragement of greater outbreeding and monogamy. But I don’t see how we can be confident of this. Not enough controls”
Outbreeding and monogamy is less important per se, but it was part of a bigger program which deconstructed family and tribal affiliations in favour of individualism and institutional loyalty.
While the guilds did hamper economic progress in later times,they played a huge role in medieval times.
Also look at the German city laws, the way they looked at individuals and the economy.
I think England was first, but it could and would have happened in other parts of the North West too.
The coded and standardized professionalism of the Northern and Central European, plus Italian craftsmen, their individual mobility and exchange is not to be underestimated.
When the antique knowledge came back in the Renaissance, the foundation and processing was very different.
The church,the guilds and city law created preconditions for economic and scientific progress together with other factors.
After they were established, they were more of a burden for further progress. Progress was then related to their deconstruction.
They created a world which would not exist without them, but which also meant they became a burden which needed to be disposed. At least the original form.
You might just see da Vinci, but remember all the professional craftsmen and their knowledge which made his achievements possible.
The problem with what the church and the later individualisation created is that it formed “unnatural and unhealthy” social conditions for the humans participating.
They completely neglected the biological foundation of the human existence.
And so did those states and ideologies which came out of it.
If you destroy the clan, the folk and everything above the most basic human relationship above the mother-child duo, you make people helpless without institutions and in the end erode the institutions too.
Rome went that path too by the way. Single mothers with few children, unmarried couples living at the brides mothers house were not that uncommon.
If you destroy something, you need to replace it with something better. But if you dont see the need in your doomsday fanatism, you leave a big hole which will widen up and can be exploited by outsiders. The Western people became like dependent children with institutions of the church and state being their parents.
But what if these institutions dont work for them any more? A lot of people on the world can fall back to their clan, Westerners cant.
Thats why the corrupt “elite” wants all people to be individualised, because that makes them easier to control ans exploit.
Very much the same reasons as for the Catholic church in Medieval times.
Another example of great importance for the role of the Catholic Church’s creation of progress which undermined its authority later are the universities.
After their creation, its progress depended heavily on their emancipation from the church and the religious dogmas.
But without the Catholic Church’s institutionalised, orderly, educational and bureaucratic approach, modern universities might have never come into existence.
Like its celibatic priests, the Catholic church was, after its destructive early phase and to large degree unwillingly a catalysator, a cultural fertilizer.
But in the end they might end like that, without growing themselves.
Western people now want to play the same role worldwide. Fertilize through self-sacrifice in the hope if they vanish biologically, others will see their noble cause and follow their martyrdom and generosity culturally, like adopted children.
As if their current way of life is that desirable minus the consumption and wealth.
Instand others might accept happily the prosperous life, the fruits of modern Capitalism, but without the ideological nonsense.
Like the success of the Catholic church and its educational approach created the conditions for its demise. Most cultures stand and fall with its original bearers.
Also drastic cultural change was more often than not introduced from outside. As if most human societies are largely blind to their own faults and inefficiencies. China for example was very lucky to get such a nice teacher like Western Europeans for another chance for correction and progress.
I doubt anyone would be as friendly if Europeans need their lesson. Rather not.
Most people don’t care enough about the classical world to have educated opinions, and that’s perfectly reasonable. I take a semi-serious interest as a hobby, and imho:
1) “Ancient Rome”- really the Hellenestic East under the early Roman Empire, and especially the city of Alexandria – did have science, and scientists, who continued an unbroken tradition dating back to Aristotle and through Archimedes.
2) Roman era Alexandrian science was a bit more advanced than Hellenistic science because it built on it. They had access to all the books from that time and it seems like the Library/Museum of Alexandria was in continuous existence.
3) However the rate of change in scientific understanding, improvement, while not trivial in the Roman era, was slower than its peak in the 3rd Century BC. They just weren’t as in to it. The Roman government seemed to continue to support the Library/Museum of Alexandria as a tradition of Alexandria. Not because they had any special interest.
4) The Latin west, including Rome, contributed basically zero to science. It was all happening in the Greek-speaking East, although under the Roman Empire.
5) All the mechanical pieces were there for a real steam engine to be built by say 100 AD. They had pistons, valves, gears, crank shafts, and a pretty sophisticated understanding of pneumatics. There were “trick” or magical uses like starting a fire (that through weights and boiling/condensing water) that would open heavy temple doors.
6) So hypothetically someone could have built a model steam engine. But it would be hard to mass produce, because their metal working technology wasn’t that great. They didn’t have cannons and guns to hone their metal working skills.
7) There were no coal deposits in the Greek East. There would be nothing to power said steam engine. There were coal deposits that were even worked in Northern France and England, but those areas were far physically and intellectually from the Greek-speaking centers of learning out east.
8) Roman slavery as an impediment to industrialization is exaggerated. The slave supply had to be periodically replenished through wars, and the Roman empire didn’t have a lot of wars of conquest from 0 AD – 200 AD. Some, but not nearly as many as in the late Republic. There’s evidence slave numbers were decreasing and anyway slavery was not as endemic in the Greek East as in Italy.
9) Water power was quite advanced. There was a lot of economic specialization and I’ve read that the overall level of “development” would have been something like in early 18th Century Western Europe. Some things were behind, but some things were actually ahead.
10) science and engineering stalled out because they didn’t come up with any big new things (like say the printing press, microscopes/telescopes, gun powder, even the compass) that could have catalized science and engineering. They did pretty much all they could with what they had at hand
11) and then the whole thing collapsed in the 3rd century with like 50 straight years of civil war, and after that, a much more statist and later Christian (and anti-intellectual) empire.
“A New Genetic Explanation for Anorexia: The eating disorder, long viewed as a psychological condition, appears to have biological predictors that explain why gaining weight is harder for some patients” by Sumathi Reddy onJuly 29, 2019
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-genetic-explanation-for-anorexia-11564415094
Some of the genetic factors linked to anorexia nervosa are also associated with metabolism, suggesting that there may be a biological explanation for why patients with the eating disorder lose weight so rapidly and struggle to keep weight on.
The new discovery was part of the largest genome-wide association study of the disease ever done. The study, published July 15 in the journal Nature Genetics, found eight genetic regions linked to anorexia. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-019-0439-2
* * *
The study analyzed the genomes of nearly 17,000 patients with the disease and compared them with 55,525 controls from 17 countries. Still, its findings are preliminary and need to be replicated, researchers say.
Researchers also found people with the condition are genetically prone to high physical activity levels and more likely to have other conditions, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, anxiety and schizophrenia.
Dr. Bulik says the goal is to collect 100,000 genetic samples. She expects researchers will find hundreds of genes associated with the disease.
Only about 30% of people with anorexia nervosa fully recover. The research underscores the importance of ensuring that patients get to a healthy weight to allow their metabolism to stabilize before they leave residential treatment programs. This could reduce the risk of relapse after they go home, Dr. Bulik says.
* * *
The study’s limitation, Dr. Hildebrandt says, is that it wasn’t an independent sample. It included samples from 17 separate studies without a uniform set of measurement standards.
Walter Kaye, a psychiatry professor and executive director of the Eating Disorders Program at the University of California, San Diego, contributed materials from earlier genetic studies to the current one.
Dr. Kaye says he’s noticed how hard it is for some of his patients to gain weight. Anorexia patients might need to consume 4,000 to 5,000 calories a day to do so. The average woman needs 2,000 calories a day to maintain her weight. “That’s an enormous amount of food,” he says.
* * *
And for context, scientists in the early Roman Empire would have included Ptolemy (arguably the greatest atronomer in the Classical World), Galen (almost certainly the greatest doctor/medical researcher in the Classical World), and Heron of Alexandria (the guy who’s work includes the first “steam engine” and all kinds of other novelties that seem to have been intended as demonstration devices). All three did experiments and utilized something like an experimental method at times. But the balance between experiments and armchair thinking was much more tilted toward armchair thinking than during the real European scientific revolution after the Renaissance. They weren’t as hands on, although to be fair to the Roman Empire there seems to have been a slight movement toward experimentation in the 2nd Century AD.
And science was much more niche than in Early Modern Europe. Most educated/rich people gravitated toward literature or philosophy (really metaphysics).
Catholic Christians were practical workers. Just think about the Cathedrals and the craftsmanship behind it.
In Antiquity it was much more about winning arguments and status, including demonstrations of theoretical principles.
Less so about practical usefulness and even less so economic exploitation.
A lot of the early advancement in the West was not done by “academics” but independent craftsmen.
Just think about the watchmaker which allowed exact positioning on sea with his exact watches.
What they really lacked is the cooperation of different spheres for solving problems.
From intellectuals to craftsmen, to entrepreneurs, traders, state and military investors.
All of that was present in Renaissance Italy, but not before.
Its not by chance that the first economic cycle in modern history had its center in Northern Italy.
While the general thrust of what you are saying, that Medieval people were more hands on, is probably true, I think you exaggerate. It’s not like people in the Roman Empire had nothing practical, and were just a bunch of philosophers in togas arguing about theory.
Double action piston water pumps for fighting fires were widespread all over the empire. Those pumps were used for a very practical purpose by the way, but would never have been built without Hellenistic scientific advances in pneumatics. It wasn’t just tinkering that built them.
The Antikythera Mechanism (a very sophisticated analog computer using gearing) was probably not a one-off, because a simpler but similar mechanism was found from the 6th C Byzantine period.
Simple mechanical reapers were in widespread use in Gaul for hundreds of years (they didn’t spread elsewhere because they needed flat ground to work, and the Med basin is hilly).
Plumbing, including sophisticated valves, was all over the empire.
Not to mention the more famous stuff like very practical roads, ports, concrete, aqueducts, public baths, and large ornate buildings.
Literacy was very widespread – it’s debated exactly how much, but suffice it to say there was a ton of quite casual graffiti all over Pompeii, a smallish city in Italy. No one would bother writing graffiti about dirty jokes or political ads or brothel advertisements in a provincial town unless many/most people were literate.
And by the way, cathedrals required a lot of constant maintenance. Roman stuff is often still around after 2,000 years.
Oh, and recent scholarship has really changed understanding of the Ancient Roman economy. At least in the early Empire, it seems like most transactions were market based, and price clearing. Credit was pretty sophisticated, there was shipping insurance, understanding of opportunity cost, international (or rather interprovincial) banks, and even something like joint-stock companies. It wasn’t quite like 18th C England or the Netherlands, but it was a lot more advanced than Medieval Europe.
I think medieval had more and better professional and educational standards.
In Rome a lot of things might have been actually too liberal and marked based in comparison.
I see more regulations and higher standards for practical issues in Medieval Italo-Frankish Europe.
Romans had great big projects and stuff for the upper classes, but the lower level innovative spirit seems to have been weaker.
The cathedrals are so remarkable as they were often build by craftsmen with limited theoretical background and understanding.
To give concrete examples, the guilds standardized the education of the craftsmen and their products. Competition was limited economically, but their was a strong competition for the best products and high quality craftsmanship. If a craftsbusiness did not fulfil the minimal standards, the penalty could be harsh.
A period as travelle/journeyman was mandatory in the education of the craftsmen. So new techniques and products spread pretty fast even before book were cheap and widespread.
The advancement and steep development from early to high medieval times must be, for many parts, attributed to the growing skills of professional craftsmen. When the universities started with more secular teachings, there was a good exchange with masterful, professional (work ethos too) craftsmen.
This is not to be underestimated and formed the basis for a lot what came later. The guilds and church did slow down economic progress later, but they build the fundament which made it possible.
Renaissance Northern Italy was just small steps away from the economic breakthrough, but Rome, all aspects considered, would have to go a longer way. Other civilisations even more so.
Bulbul,
That is a common narrative. Certainly it is better to remember Roman Alexandria than to forget it. But a some of details of this narrative are easily seen to be wrong, just by looking at a list of scientists.
The chain from Aristotle to Ptolemy was broken. There is a 200 year gap 150BC to 50AD with no known scientists. Ptolemy says that he is building on Hipparchus (although he doesn’t have the complete corpus). Hero says that he is reproducing Ctesibius. This definitely shows that books have some value. Since we don’t have any work of Hipparchus or Ctesibius, it is hard to evaluate which period was more advanced. Was Ptolemy a braggart or was Hero displaying false modesty? The conventional wisdom is that the Roman period was more advanced, but the only evidence is Ptolemy’s history of astronomy. It seems to be mainly Whig history. Following Lucio Russo, I hold the opposite.
Was there progress in Roman Alexandria? Yes, it was better to read the library than not. Hero, Ptolemy, and Galen were progress over the dark age that came before. But after this brief flare, was there any progress at all in the Roman period? It was a steady decline from the brief flare of these intellectual archeologists. It was dead before the crisis of the 3rd century. (Except mathematics. That peaked in the 3rd century.)