They went up in flames, thousands of original works by some of the world's greatest thinkers, not a single scroll survived. Today, 1600 years after the destruction of the great library, Alexandria has built a new library, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in the spirit of the original. Ismail Serageldin is its first director.
"It is certainly a dream that most of humanity has cherished the celebration of universal knowledge, nationality, tolerance,respect for science and for the contrarian view. All of these values are values that have lived with us to this day."
This port city is at the crossroads of three continents, a natural place for people and cultures to converge, just as it was when it was founded in 332 B.C.. For 700 years, ancient Alexandria flourished as a center of learning. But the library saw its share of troubles. In 48 B.C., Julius Caesar invaded the city and accidentally torched part of the library. Over the next few centuries, Alexandria's glory faded and historians are still not sure how the library vanished completely. That event may have helped usher in the Dark Ages by erasing centuries of precious knowledge. The loss still haunts us today.
The thing you can never have again is the literature and the poetry. Suppose all the works of Shakespeare had been...had disappeared except for two or three.
In the late 1980s, the Egyptian government along with the United Nations decided to build the new library as a center for research and the open exchange of ideas. When the library opened, Greeks helped with antiquities, the French with a science museum, and Americans with some of the most advanced computer systems in the world. Italians worked with Egyptians to preserve rare manuscripts. This one is about 500 years old. Ultimately, the original library collected some 500,000 scrolls. Although tens of thousands of books lie in the shelves, today's library isn't trying to gather the entire intellectual legacy of humankind under one roof, instead it's building special collections on Egypt, the Middle East and Islam. And in the ancient tradition, the Bibliotheca will try to attract researchers and scholars, and anyone eager to learn. In this so-called Capital of Memory, the spirit of the ancient library is alive and well, and this time, it's fireproof.
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