Since writing exists, humanity has searched for a way to accumulate books, either for practical reasons or simply for pleasure, until the Internet is currently the closest thing we have to the infinite library imagined by the Argentine writer. Jorge Luis Borges.
Alexandria's is the library of the past that best symbolizes humanity's desire to gather and preserve universal knowledge. Why do we talk more about it than about others as important as those of Antioch or Pergamum? Not because of its antiquity (there are other earlier centers), but because it was the largest in the ancient world, according to chroniclers.
The Library of Alexandria came to store more than 400,000 volumes (according to some sources, 700,000). We are not talking about bound books, which did not yet exist, but about papyrus scrolls. Each scroll was equivalent to about 64 pages of current text, which would allow us to talk about about 80,000 modern books. Today it is not an extraordinary amount, but for the time it was something unheard of.
It was a cultural initiative that was part of a very ambitious project, promoted by the monarch Ptolemy I, a former general of Alexander the Great who became ruler of Egypt. As a foreign king, Ptolemy needed to shore up his power well. One of the ways he found was to turn Alexandria into the Mediterranean capital of knowledge.
At the monarch's request, a large temple dedicated to the nine muses, the Museion, was founded near the royal palace. This place was conceived as a center for research and exchange of knowledge, more similar to our idea of a university than a current museum.
A community of scholars recruited from among the most illustrious of the Greek world were housed in this complex. There were geniuses like Euclid, the father of geometry, or Eratosthenes, who was able to calculate the circumference of planet Earth.
Free from financial worries, the most brilliant minds of their time were able to devote themselves to thinking, researching and writing. Mathematical studies, medical manuals, astronomy treatises were written...
Everything was kept on papyrus. That was the germ of the great library of Alexandria. A completely different library from those of today: it did not have a reading room and it was not even necessary to keep quiet. Greek scholars read aloud.
In Alexandria, these large projects were endowed with a budget. Scholars went crazy for books and monarchs spared no expense. Between one thing and another, the collections of the Museion library grew so much that, in the end, it had to be expanded by opening a second one, that of the Serapeum. Unlike the first, it was open to the public. It was one of the first public libraries in history.
However, the legend of the great library of Alexandria is not only fueled by stories about its size. Paradoxically, what made her a myth was her mysterious disappearance. Did Julius Caesar burn it? Did the Christians destroy it in their fight against the pagans? Perhaps the Arabs, in the 7th century, did away with that immense patrimony? Did it simply disappear after a long decline? This podcast addresses what is true in these hypotheses.
The feeling of loss for all the works that we will not get to know is what has turned the ancient library of Alexandria into an enduring myth. Today, a modern eleven-story building, the Alexandrina Library, tries to revive his spirit.
To go deeper into the subject, Isabel Margarit, director of History and Life, and the journalist Ana Echeverría Arístegui recommend some titles, among them The libraries of the ancient world (Bellaterra), by Lionel Casson, who was a professor of classical studies at the University from New York. O Infinity in a reed (Siruela), by Irene Vallejo, in which the author takes a journey through the thirty centuries of history of books.
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