An Introduction

When I chose this topic, I felt sort of lost.. because to tell the truth.. I had never heard of the Library of Alexandria.! But in my search for material on the topic, I unearthed some quite interesting information.

My first search was from google (obviously!) and I came up with a related Wikipedia page and the page of the actual Library of Alexandria!! (isn't this is supposed to be a Historical Library??) http://www.bibalex.org/English/index.aspx

Then I found out that it was actually the Library of Alexandrina which is a modern version, aimed to recapture the spirit of of the ancient Library. This website had a page on its historical roots, which helped me to get into the picture.

The Swinburne University Library had several good books (!) on the subject and in the end I was able to compile a lot of information on the subject.

Library of Alexandria - an Introduction

A library is more than a building, more than a mere collection of books. A library is a collection of books assembled for a purpose. That purpose has varied through history- and the library is a social institution as old as history itself.

On the Nothern coast of Egypt, in 331 BCE, Alexander the Great founded a new city; Alexandria. His successors, the Ptolemies, made it the intellectual capital of the world.

In this city there was a great historical structure, the Ancient Library of Alexandria. Launched in 288 BC by Ptolemy I (Soter) under the guidance of Demetrius of Phaleron, the Mouseion it was initially called the Museum of Alexandria. This institution was part academy, part research center, and part library. The library was not housed in a separate building but was housed within the museum itself.

The library comprised of a walk, gardens, a room for shared dining, a reading room, lecture halls and meeting rooms. However, the exact layout is not known. This model's influence may still be seen today in the layout of university campuses. The library itself is known to have had an acquisitions department (possibly built near the stacks, or for utility closer to the harbour), and a cataloguing department. The hall contained shelves for the collections of scrolls known as bibliothekai. Carved into the wall above the shelves, a famous inscription read: 'The place of the cure of the soul". The museum gave a special place for books and scholars. It provided a colonnade with seating areas for scholars to discuss the books they read. The courtyards of the museum offered additional room for reading and discussion and the museum also had a dining hall which offered free meals for resident scholars.

Another smaller library; often referred to as the "daughter library," of the great library, existed in the same era. This library was actually a complex of buildings connected to the Serapeum Temple, originally built as a place of worship for the cult of Serapis. It had a collection numbering only in the tens of thousands. It was largely available to anyone in the general public who had enough education to enjoy the benefits of reading.

Serapeum Temple which housed the "daughter library" of the Library of Alexandria. Source www.alexandrinelibrarian.blogspot.com

The Collections

Artist's impression of a manuscript storage room in the ancient Library of Alexandria. In this reconstruction, the doors from the Museum lead to storage rooms for the Library. Most of the books were probably stored in armaria, closed, labeled cupboards that were still used for book storage in medieval times.. Source: Carl Sagan's Cosmos television program (1980)

The Library of Alexandria's collection of scrolls and manuscripts comprising of either papyrus or leather was the first, grandest, and most extensive in the ancient world. The 700,000 scrolls, an equivalent of more than 100,000 modern printed books, filled the shelves.

Because texts often circulated in many different forms in the ancient world, editing to ensure the truth of a document became highly important, thus, the Library of Alexandria focused mainly on scholarly editing and research, and access to materials was limited to only those with special qualifications. Similarly, there was minimal and restricted access to materials if you weren't a researcher, and if you wished to view something, library workers would retrieve your materials and monitor you in a small hallway where you were only allowed to be for a short amount of time.

How the Library obtained books

The library obtained books in many ways. It purchased books from the bookshops of Athens and Rhodes which were important centres of the book trade. One ruler of Alexandria, Ptolemy III (246-221 BC) had little regard for intellectual property. He ordered that all ships calling at the port to be searched, and any books or manuscripts found to be brought to the library. Then copies of these books were made and returned to their owners, while the originals were kept at the library. Also, it is said that he wrote to all the world’s sovereigns asking to borrow their books for copying. However, when the books were lent, he had them copied and retained the originals while returning the copies to the owners.

The library of Alexandria produced some of the books itself. The scholars of the museum wrote many volumes of prose and verse and these were deposited at the library. Translations were commissioned of important works in other languages. As a research institution, the library filled its stacks with new works in mathematics, astronomy, physics, natural sciences and other subjects. It was at the Library of Alexandria that the scientific method was first conceived and put into practice, and its empirical standards applied in one of the first and certainly strongest homes for serious textual criticism

The Librarian
The librarian was appointed by the king and he was chosen from among the leaders of Alexandrian intellectual society. It was the duty of the Librarian to tutor the children of the royal family and to select books for the king’s reading. Also the librarians often advised the king on political and literary matters

Hypatia of Alexandria: Close up of Hypatia, the last head librarian of the Great Library. She was brutally murdered by members of the early Christian church , around 415 AD, in Alexandria, Egypt. Source www.alexandrinelibrarian.blogspot.com