The Library of Alexandria

The Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt was the most significant library of the ancient world. Founded in the 3rd century BCE under the Ptolemaic dynasty, it aimed to collect all the world's knowledge — dispatching agents to buy books from ships entering Alexandria's harbor, copying scrolls, and commissioning translations. At its peak, the Library may have held 500,000 to 700,000 scrolls — representing a significant portion of all written knowledge in the ancient world. It attracted the greatest scholars: Euclid developed geometry there, Archimedes studied there, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth there. The Library's destruction is one of history's great "what ifs" — its loss is blamed on Julius Caesar's fire in 48 BCE, or the Christian emperor Theophilus in 391 CE, or the Arab conquest in 642 CE. Most likely, it declined gradually through underfunding and political instability. What knowledge was lost? We cannot know. But the scrolls that survived — often in copies made elsewhere — form the foundation of Western science, philosophy, and literature. The New Library of Alexandria, opened in 2002, attempts to continue the tradition.