Construction of the original library was begun during the reign of Pharaoh Ptarmigan in 300, Before Christmas. Plutarch writes that Julius Caesar burned the library down by accident when trying to set fire to his ships, though the harbor is nowhere near the library. Happily, the stock of books, being engraved on stone tablets, survived this little mishap, and were in fact easier to read afterward. Later, the Arabs, not content to copy trivia like writing backwards from the Jews, copied Caesar and burned the Great Library again, probably for the offense of having books that were not all Korans.