Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Alexandria's modern library, built as a successor to the most famous library of the ancient world. It is a working library and cultural centre rather than an ancient site, and in our judgement its value on a visit is the story it answers to.

The question is what the ancient Library actually was, and what it did.

The ancient Library was part of the Mouseion, an institution founded by Ptolemy I to make Alexandria the centre of Greek culture, modelled on the schools of Plato and Aristotle in Athens. The Ptolemies hunted for books across the Greek world. Toby Wilkinson tells how Ptolemy III borrowed original editions of the Greek classics from Athens against a huge deposit of fifteen talents of silver, then kept the books and let Athens keep the money.

How big it grew is uncertain, and the sources disagree. Toby Wilkinson gives half a million papyrus rolls at its height; Alan Lloyd writes that by the end of the Ptolemaic period it appears to have held no fewer than 700,000 volumes.

What it produced is clearer. Euclid organised the whole of Greek mathematics into one system; Aristarchus of Samos argued for a sun-centred solar system; and Eratosthenes, director of the library from 245 BC, calculated the circumference of the earth from the length of shadows cast at the same time of day in Aswan and Alexandria. The poet Callimachus compiled a catalogue of the library's books, and Manetho, an Egyptian priest, was commissioned to write a history of Egypt.

The modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina carries some of that purpose into the digital age. The Oxford Handbook cites its digital edition of the Description de l'Égypte, the great survey of Egypt made under Napoleon.

A contemporary library building with reading rooms, exhibition spaces and museums. Our suggestion is to come here after Qaitbay Fort and Kom el-Dikka, so that the modern building closes a day spent with the city that once kept half the world's books.