The Great Library of Alexandria: 700,000 Lost Papyri

In the 3rd century BCE, the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt founded an unprecedented institution in Alexandria: a library intended to gather all the knowledge of the known world. At its peak, it may have held up to 700,000 papyrus scrolls -- works from Greece, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and India. This documentary investigates what archaeologists and historians have actually discovered about this monument of human intellect.¹

The library was associated with the Mouseion -- the ancestor of our universities -- where scholars from across the Mediterranean world lived and worked. Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth there with remarkable accuracy. Euclid wrote his Elements there. Archimedes is said to have frequented these learned circles. The Oxyrhynchus papyri, discovered in Egypt from 1896, give a glimpse of the richness of the texts these libraries preserved.²

The question of the library's destruction remains one of the great debates in ancient historiography. Several events have been proposed: Caesar's fire in 48 BCE, the decrees of Theophilus in 391 CE, or the Arab conquest of 642. Modern historians generally agree, however, that the library was not destroyed in a single catastrophic event, but declined gradually for lack of royal funding and systematic acquisition of new texts.³

Archaeological excavations in Alexandria since the 1990s have uncovered foundations that may belong to the Mouseion. In 2004, a Polish-Egyptian mission discovered remains of a Ptolemaic-era building in the Chatby neighborhood, interpreted as a possible lecture hall. These discoveries remain fragmentary, but they confirm the scale of the intellectual complex of ancient Alexandria.⁴

The new Library of Alexandria (Bibliotheca Alexandrina), inaugurated in 2002, symbolically perpetuates the ambition of the original. While the ancient library is lost forever, its intellectual legacy -- the transmission of Greek knowledge to the Arab world, then to medieval Europe -- shaped the entire course of Western and Eastern civilization.⁵