Starting at Square One Again

The ancient library of Alexandria is being revived, 2,185 years after the original was founded to collect “all the books in the world,” and 1,599 years after the last remnant of the first institution was destroyed.

There are no records of the form and fabric of the ancient library, but the impact of its collection is measured as a milestone in the intellectual history of the world. Zenodotus of Ephesus, the grammarian who served as the first superintendent of the library around 284 B.C., began collecting and editing what once had been only the oral record of Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” Scholars produced a Greek translation of the Old Testament in 250 B.C. Euclid collected the theorems of geometry. Aristarchus of Samos proposed controversial theories of the Earth’s rotation. The pioneer medical works of Hippocrates were edited and expanded. It was, above all else, a place that brought together the genius of the Egyptian and Greek civilizations.

So the new library will also focus initially on the humanities of the Eastern Mediterranean. Its collection will be a vastly different departure from the 500,000 papyrus scrolls of the ancient library, growing over the years to 4 million volumes, linked through electronic information networks to the other great libraries of the world.

The library is a project of the Egyptian government and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, with an international commission to help raise the necessary $160 million. Construction will begin at the end of this year, with the opening planned for June of 1995, according to UNESCO.

Its meaning was summed up by Daniel Boorstin, former librarian of Congress and a member of the international commission, in these words: “The re-creation of the ancient library of Alexandria can remain a symbol of the transcendance of culture over politics, of knowledge over partisanship, and of literature over polemics.”