The countdown has begun: one of the most celebrated and colossal institutions of ancient times, a symbol of our culture and philosophy, is about to come to life again.
The great library of Alexandria has been rebuilt and will be officially opened on April 23rd by the Egyptian President Mubarak. The futuristic complex is clearly a product of the 21st century, yet it has been designed to link the past with the present. It lies in the Silsila district, in front of the sea, where the original library and museum used to stand, signifying its close ties with the distant past.

The structure has the shape of a solar disc, with one side bending towards the sea and the other stretching out to the sky.
Mohsen Zahran, who supervised the project, is proud of the results: “In our intentions, the disc represents the sun god Ra, that rises, dies and rises again, in a never-ending cycle. Somewhat like Alexandrine culture, that has no ending.” The shape of the construction is also intended to recall a microchip, thereby declaring its unequivocal belonging to the third millennium – the library is in fact provided with all the modern instruments to facilitate user Alexandria, founded in 332 B.C. by Alexander the Great when he was at the summit of his power, remained a symbol of classical culture even under Roman domination; it has always been a city of libraries, which were distributed in every neighbourhood as in present-day cities.
Even now, the concrete of the modern city still conceals parts of private or public libraries, ready to expose themselves to anyone having the patience to dig them out.
All of them were designed after the original, which was built by Ptolemy I around the year 300 B.C. Actually, the library was the more frequented and interesting part of the “mouseion”, the great intellectual undertaking of Alexandrine Hellenism. Ptolemy I, who succeeded Alexander, was imbued with Greek culture and fascinated by Aristotle, who had been the great general’s educator and spiritual guide.
Ptolemy instructed Demetrius Phalerus, formerly one of Aristotle’s disciples, to create an institution resembling Athens’ “museum”, which was also the storing place of the Stagirite’s own collection of volumes, meticulously detailed by the geographer Strabo.
The result was monumental: the new institution was larger and more furnished; it was directed by a priest appointed by the sovereign and controlled by the court. Here converged famous scholars and men of letters, as well as some of the leading Hellenistic poets of the time, such as Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes – many fiercely contending the privilege of being appointed librarian. The entire knowledge of the Greek world, from Homer onward, flowed into the library.
The first philologists, in the modern sense of the word, began to lay down the definitive editions of the giants of Greek literature.
More than 400,000 scrolls of papyrus were preserved in the library halls – and all of them were lost in the great fire that, for reasons still unknown (a palace plot?), destroyed the building, in what would be the greatest cultural tragedy in history.
The year was 48 B.C., and the leading figures in Alexandria were then Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, both entangled by emotions and reasons of State in one of the most notorious affairs in western history.
Cleopatra herself resolved to have a new cultural centre built on the hill called Rhakotis, next to the Serapeum, where the Greeks worshipped the god Serapis. The “second-generation” library was well worthy of its predecessor. It was enormous, and its frescoed halls, designed to preserve priceless volumes, can still be seen today. For 400 years it would be the repository of the world’s largest corpus of knowledge.
Then the situation changed: the classical world was declining, and Christianity was establishing itself with the strength of its Truth. In 391, Theophilus, patriarch of a now Christianised Alexandria, led a mob of fanatics to tear down the temple of Serapis and, with it, the library. That was the end of the ancient world, which is now rising from its ashes with this new construction projected towards the future. This will be the place of conservation of every testimony of human history: ancient manuscripts, rare volumes, maps of every age and, above all, eight million books, more than those contained in the United States Library of Congress.
The entire collection will be digitized, and there will be audio-visual and multimedia aids to help in consulting documents.
There will also be special optical tools for examining old papyri: instruments capable of enlarging without losing definition, high-resolution scanners, and of course the latest software providing the widest possibilities of research through ancient texts, since the entire body of classical literature is in store and retrievable. The collection will have to be continuously updated with new publications, in an never-ending work of compilation.
As there will be no end to human thought, of which Alexandria was a luminous beacon.
(transl.by Interpres)