Bibliotheca Alexandrina

by Keith Grenville

The fate of the original Great Library of Alexandria is shrouded in mystery. It was built during the reign of Ptolemy Soter, one of the Greek Ptolemies who ruled Egypt for the last 300 years of the first millennium BC. The library is said to have contained more than 500,000 texts from through-out the known world. After 245 BC, 120,000 scrolls were catalogued by Calimachus of Cyrene, who became librarian that year. Among the library’s alumni can be included Euclid, Archimedes, Philo, Plotinus and Plato. According to Seneca, Julius Caesar inadvertently set alight a book storage depot close to Alexandria harbour when he was under siege by Cleopatra’s brother Achilleas in the city in 47 BC. It is said he did not deliberately set the library ablaze, and the book store did not contain more than a fraction of the library collection.

Roman Emperor Theodosius I, in 385 AD, outlawed all teaching centres run by pagan philosophers causing the ancient library to be taken over by the Bishops of Alexandria who used the facilities to train aspirant priests in rhetoric and logic. The “Bishop’s School” was dissolved in 641 AD when Egypt was conquered by the Muslims. A fire broke out during the battle for the city – the conquering general is said to have ordered the rescue of the books coupled with instructions to destroy any that contradicted the Koran.

Fire was a common danger in ancient cities and the Alexandria library was threatened more than once. In additional to 641 AD, there were fires in the 300’s and 400’s when Alexandrian Christians rioted in response to theological arguments. Following each damaging fire before 641, the persons responsible for the library would have been able to replace the losses to a certain extent. There were, after all, other libraries in the Greek-speaking world.

Out of the ashes, the modern library grows – , when complete in late 2000, it will look magnificent on the 63,000 square metre site. The size of the bookshelves is the basic unit of the entire design, with the size of books therefore the basic unit of the building. The circular 10 storey building (32 metres), suggesting the disc of the sun, tilts forward at an angle of 20 degrees towards the sea to the north with the front part sunk below ground level. To the south, a windowless back wall of red granite from Upper Egypt will carry representative inscriptions in the varied scripts of the region. An imaginative use of light, facilitated by a complex arrangement of skylights which form the disk-like roof, will provide natural light at the same time deflecting the harsh Egyptian sun.

The future is symbolized by the two-thirds of the building that is above ground level, consigning the past 2,000 years to below ground.   An assorted array of letters and symbols from all languages will be carved into a rough-hewn wall encircling the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The budget for the project is $167 million from the Egyptian government, UNESCO and other subscribers.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s $1.5m annual book budget is intended to lead to the creation of a collection numbering 8 million books by 2002, along with up to 4,000 newspapers and periodicals, 50,000 manuscripts and rare books, as well as 50,000 maps. Alongside the traditional collection, the library intends to amass up to 250,000 audio and audio-visual aids, as well as establishing links to overseas computer databases and permanent internet access.

The library is envisaged as a resource centre for the study of Mediterranean civilization and, like its famous ancestor, the library will be connected to a complex of scholarly facilities and museums.  It is situated on the Corniche, near the city centre and the University of Alexandria’s arts faculty, close to the presumed site of the original library. The team of young Norwegian architects won an architectural competition with their earthquake-proof building, have also included in the complex a science museum, a calligraphy museum, a planetarium, a school of information science, exhibition areas and auditoria, a restoration and conservation laboratory and employment for a staff of 400.