Library Of Alexandria.

 

More than two thousand years ago, on the shimmering Mediterranean coast of Egypt, a single vision took root — to gather all the knowledge of the known world into one place. This was the dream behind the Library of Alexandria, established around 295 BCE under Ptolemy I Soter and his advisor Demetrius of Phaleron.

The idea wasn’t just to collect Greek literature — although it soon amassed nearly every Greek work ever written — but to embrace a universal library. Egyptian temple records, Mesopotamian archives, Hebrew scriptures, Indian texts, Buddhist writings, and more were sought out.

The Ptolemies’ book-hunting was legendary. Every ship that sailed into Alexandria’s harbor was searched for scrolls. If books were found, the originals went into the library’s vaults, and copies were returned to the owners. These acquisitions were marked “from the ships.” Kings even negotiated (and sometimes tricked) other cities into handing over priceless originals — as Athens learned when it lent out the original plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, only to get back copies.

At its height, estimates suggest the library held 200,000 to 700,000 scrolls. Scholars at the nearby Mouseion worked in every field — science, geography, medicine, history, philosophy. The poet-scholar Callimachus even created the Pinakes, the first great bibliographic catalog, listing authors, titles, origins, and details about each work.

But the library’s fate was a slow tragedy.

• 48 BCE: During Julius Caesar’s siege of Alexandria, fire spread from the burning harbor ships, destroying part of the Royal Library’s collection.

• 391 CE: The Serapeum — the library’s branch — was destroyed under Emperor Theodosius I’s orders to demolish pagan temples.

• By 642 CE: When the Arabs conquered Alexandria, the great library had long ceased to exist. The famous story of its burning by Caliph ʿUmar is now widely regarded as a myth.

What we lost with those scrolls can never be measured — maps of unknown lands, treatises on science centuries ahead of their time, forgotten histories of civilizations now vanished.

And yet, the dream of Alexandria still echoes today — in every public library, digital archive, and project to make knowledge free for all.

Because the Library of Alexandria may be gone, but the idea of it is immortal.