This month's museum pick...

Library of Alexandria

The Modern World Puts Right An Ancient Wrong

Perhaps one measure of people’s level of civilization is their reaction when they first learn the story of the destructions of the Library of Alexandria.

In a 700-year span, this greatest of the ancient world’s achievements, with its accumulation of 400,000 manuscripts, was sacked and burned three times: first by Roman legionnaires, then by a Christian mob and then by Muslim soldiers.

What was lost? We will never know, though there are tantalizing hints: Plays by Euripides and Sophocles that we know about from mentions by the Romans but for which no manuscripts exist.

Perhaps there were the orations of Demosthenes and an account of the construction of the pyramids.

Certainly we lost comprehensive Greek theories of physics, grammar and philosophy; and commentaries by Phoenician explorers, Hittite conquerors and Persian clerics.

Possibly the library contained an accurate description of the destruction of Minoan civilization in 1400 BC by the volcano called Thera – an event some scholars say was the basis of the myth of Atlantis.

A civilized person gasps at the loss and sighs with regret at all of the what-might-have-beens that come flooding to mind. Where might our science and art have been if the treasures of that library had escaped destruction?

Long live the Library of Alexandria

Two thousand years from now, we may have a different answer to that question, thanks to UNESCO and the Egyptian government. In 1999, four years after its construction began, and 1,300 years after the final destruction of its predecessor, the new Library of Alexandria opened.

Called the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the soaring 11-story structure stands on a 21.5-acre site near where the legendary pharos (lighthouse) of Alexandria once stood. The $170-million complex includes reading rooms, conference facilities, classrooms, laboratories, theaters, a museum and planetarium.

With 600,000 square feet of space, the successor library contains as much working space as a medium-sized skyscraper.

As modern scholars begin duplicating the habits of their ancient counterparts by gathering in Alexandria at a superb research facility, a tradition broken by centuries of darkness is revived, phoenix-like. — Patrick Totty