The Great Library of Alexandria
Proposed by Greek-Egyptian king Ptolemy I and eventually built by his son, Ptolemy II around 280 BCE, the Alexandria Library was the greatest center of scholarship in the ancient world; attracting scholars from around the Mediterranean, making Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great, the preeminent intellectual center of its time.
The library not only housed a repository of hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls but became a research center where scholars compiled editions of Homer’s epics, scientists measured the size of the earth, and Euclid discovered the rules of geometry. In 48 BCE, during the time of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, a fire destroyed 400,000 of the library’s papyrus scrolls.
Overview
The Alexandria Library, built by the Greek-Egyptian king Ptolemy I around 300 BCE, was the greatest center of scholarship in the ancient world. The library was not only a repository of hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls (ancient books), but it was also a research center where scholars compiled editions of Homer’s epics, scientists measured the size of the earth, and Euclid discovered the rules of geometry. In 48 BCE, a fire destroyed 400,000 of the library’s papyrus scrolls.
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