Modern Egypt Revives Ancient "Great Library"
Insight on the News
August 6, 2001
Down by the coastal shelf in Alexandria, Egypt, a
legend of classical antiquity is rising from the ashes as
miraculously as a phoenix. This June, the new
Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a spectacular piece of
architecture billed as the revival of its ancient
namesake, opened quietly to the public, more than 20
years after the idea was conceived and seven years
after construction began.
The formal grand opening—with presidents, kings
and sultans—is due next April.
"I want it to be true to the spirit of the old Library of
Alexandria—a vibrant intellectual center, a meeting
place for civilizations," says Ismail Serageldin, who
recently resigned as vice president of the World Bank
to become acting director-general of the library.
As part of his program, Serageldin has arranged an
international board of trustees, and the library has
strong support from international educational and
cultural organizations such as UNESCO. In 1990, at a
meeting in Aswan, Arab leaders competed to make the
largest cash contribution to the project. Sheik Zaid bin
Sultan of the United Arab Emirates offered U.S. $20
million, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein put up $21
million and Saudi Arabia contributed $23 million.
(Saddam's check cleared days before the beginning of
the Persian Gulf War.)
By any measure, re-establishing the stature enjoyed by
the ancient library will be a tall order. Two millennia
ago, Alexandria was one of the greatest cities on Earth,
and its library was the beacon of Hellenistic civilization.
It was at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, its Greek name,
that Euclid devised his geometry, Archimedes
formulated basic principles of physics, Aristarchus
concluded that the Earth revolves around the sun and
Erastosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth
with astonishing accuracy.
It was there that a team of 70 rabbis translated the
Pentateuch of the Old Testament from Hebrew into the
Greek Septuagint—and Herophilus dissected the human
body and concluded that the brain, not the heart, was
the seat of intelligence.
Then, mysteriously, the library vanished into history.
Scholars still are divided over its fate. Julius Caesar, the
Christians and the Arabs have all been blamed for its
disappearance.
In 48 B.C., Caesar, having entered the Alexandrian War
on the side of Cleopatra, found himself under attack
from sea. "When the enemy tried to cut off his fleet,
Caesar was forced to repel the danger by using fire,
which spread from the dockyards and destroyed the
Great Library," the Greek historian Plutarch wrote.
Around A.D. 391, Christians destroyed Alexandria's
Sarapeum, a pagan temple that housed a daughter
branch of the Great Library. In A.D. 642, Arabs heated
bathhouses of Alexandria for six months by burning
scrolls, according to a 12th-century account of the Arab
conquest of Egypt.
Whatever the truth, the Great Library, wrapped in
myths and legend, has come to epitomize the ideal of
free thought and independent scholarship. "One ghostly
image haunts all of us charged with preserving the
creative heritage of humanity: the specter of the great,
lost Library of Alexandria," said James H. Billington, the
US. Librarian of Congress, in a 1993 speech.
Global Competition
The idea to revive the ancient library was born among
scholars at the city's university in the 1970s. As the scale
and ambition of the project grew, planners announced a
global competition for the library building, prompting
500 entries from architects in some 40 countries. A jury
selected a design by a group of young, unknown
architects from the Norwegian firm Snohetta.
The architects at Snohetta—three Norwegians, an
Austrian and an American—designed a cylindrical
building sunk halfway into the ground. Some of the
world's most famous libraries, such as the old British
Library, are round. The circle symbolizes the unity and
perfection of knowledge, according to Christoph
Kapeller, the Austrian member of the design group.
The building also acts as a sundial rising from Earth,
tilted and frozen at an angle of 16 degrees. The roof,
inspired by a computer microchip and symbolizing the
future, is made of aluminum and glass, insulated against
the strong sun with the same material and technology
used for aircraft wings.
The outer wall along the building's perimeter is clad with
unpolished Aswan granite, upon which Norwegian artist
Jorunn Sannes, with the help of computers and
automated machinery, has engraved signs and letters in
different sizes from every known system of writing.
"I see the library as a window for the world on Egypt
and a window for Egypt on the world," says Serageldin.
"One question we will have to answer is: 'What does it
mean to be a research library in the age of the
Internet?'"
One thing is for sure: The Information Age has made
the old dream of a universal library, with the creative
heritage of humankind gathered under one roof,
impossible as well as unnecessary. The world's largest
library, the Library of Congress in Washington, with
more than 120 million items in its collections, is hardly
complete.
Two millennia ago, however, the Library of Alexandria,
with 700,000 scrolls, came close to being universal,
lacking mainly scholarly works in Chinese and Sanskrit.
The hunger for books of the Ptolemaic kings was
legendary. According to one story, every ship calling at
Alexandria was ordered to hand over its books to the
library, where experts inspected them as to their worth.
Ptolemy III, in his quest to obtain manuscripts of the
Greek tragedians Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, is
said to have tendered the enormous sum of 15 talents as
security for permission to borrow and copy them; as
soon as he received the literary treasures, he informed
the governors of Athens that they could keep the money,
since he intended to keep the original manuscripts.
With the new library open informally, its collection,
numbering about 500,000 items, is taking shape. The
city of Alexandria has handed over 5,000 original
manuscripts from its archives. France has donated
copies of documents from the Suez Canal Co. Spain has
sent copies of the famous Escorial and Cordoba
collections, with thousands of important documents in
Arabic relating to Moorish Spain. Norway, Brazil, the
United States, Russia, China, Japan, Oman, Turkey, and
many other countries have donated books, manuscripts,
and other items. Greece has donated a facsimile copy of
Claudius Ptolemy's famous world map, which
Christopher Columbus used 1,500 years later as he
searched for a passage to India but discovered America
instead.
"It is a beginning," says Mohsen Zahran, director of the
Bibliotheca Alexandrina Project. "It is a big baby which
is being born. We will make it into what we want it to
be."
Copyright 2001 Insight on the News
Dang Arabs again. Thanks.