THE NEW LIBRARY - Rebuilding an Ancient Glory

The library project is especially important to Dr. Mohsen Zahran, a professor of literature at Alexandria University and executive director of the General Organization for the Alexandria Library (GOAL). In his office in the sprawling Mediterranean port city of four million, Zahran underlined that the Alexandria Library project is significant not just for Egypt or the Middle East but for the entire world.

"Having this beacon of culture here will bring a great deal of attention and many visitors to Alexandria, but this is not the intent," Zahran said. "We have no alternative in this region but to develop the mind. Thus Egypt has been training and graduating teachers, engineers, architects and sending them to work throughout the Arab world. Yet, we do not want this new library to be in the service of Arabs only. We must rally all countries."

Historians generally agree that the ancient library was founded by Aristotle's pupil, Demetrius of Phalerum, in the fourth century BC. Demetrius, expelled from Athens, sought refuge in Alexandria, where he suggested to King Ptolemy I Soter that "he should assemble and study a collection off books on royalty and the exercise of high command," and should launch the project with volumes from Aristotle's personal library Ptolemy went further, and ordered the establishment of a library to contain "all the books of the world" and "the writings of all the nations."

No one knows with certainty what the great institution looked like, but the Greek geographer Strabo described it as part of a richly decorated complex of buildings and gardens. The whole complex was a center for learning and research, organized into faculties, whose salaried scholars were paid from they royal purse.

The library's broader mission was to rescue Greek literature from decay-almost literally, for conservation involved a perpetual battle against the disintegration of papyrus, cloth and leather scrolls, and, in its most rudimentary form, consisted simply of recopying texts. As Peter Greek points out in his 1990 book Alexander to Actium: The historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age, there was some justification for the fear that the literary heritage of classical Greece was threatened: In that era, after all, survival of texts was matter of supply and demand, and unpopular writers attracted neither scribes nor booksellers.