The Library of Alexandria

In celebration of the opening of the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library later this spring, Nancy Spiegel, the Library’s bibliographer for art and cinema, will write a series of posts about the history of libraries and library architecture, pointing readers to interesting works in the Library’s collections. This posting, the first in the series, examines the Library of Alexandria, perhaps most famous of the libraries in classical antiquity.

Built by Alexander the Great’s successors, Ptolemy I and II, in the third century BC, and supported through public funds, the Library of Alexandria was located within a larger museum complex that included facilities for the dozens of scholars who lived and worked in the building. Instead of being a museum in the modern sense of the word, the complex was more similar to a Center for Advanced Studies, drawing academics from throughout the world for collaborative study and research.

The Library’s founders aspired to support scholars-in-residence with a universal collection of texts, incorporating not only all of Greek scholarship, but also translations into Greek of the literatures of peoples under Hellenic rule. A second aspect of the Library’s mandate was its editorial program. Alexandrian literary experts created standardized editions of Homeric poems from the many local variants, divided works in “books” to fit standard papyrus rolls, and introduced new forms of punctuation.

The papyrus fragment pictured here, one of several held by the Special Collections Research Center, represents the type of permanent writing on paper that would have been common during this era. The Library at Alexandria also introduced several bibliographic innovations—including the first systematic catalog of texts divided into classes by subject—and the compilation of a national bibliography, a function that continues to be associated with government-supported libraries.

The fate of the research complex has been the subject of much scholarly debate. The museum disappeared by the fourth century and left no physical remains. The library collection moved to the Temple at Serapis, a branch location established outside the original Palace quarters, which itself was destroyed during the waning years of the Roman Empire.

To learn more about the Library of Alexandria, consult some of our many library resources.