During the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes, a daughter library was established in the Serapeum, a temple to the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis.ĭespite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries. Many important and influential scholars worked at the Library during the third and second centuries BC, including, among many others: Zenodotus of Ephesus, who worked towards standardizing the texts of the Homeric poems Callimachus, who wrote the Pinakes, sometimes considered to be the world's first library catalogue Apollonius of Rhodes, who composed the epic poem the Argonautica Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who calculated the circumference of the earth within a few hundred kilometers of accuracy Aristophanes of Byzantium, who invented the system of Greek diacritics and was the first to divide poetic texts into lines and Aristarchus of Samothrace, who produced the definitive texts of the Homeric poems as well as extensive commentaries on them. It is unknown precisely how many such scrolls were housed at any given time, but estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 at its height.Īlexandria came to be regarded as the capitol of knowledge and learning, in part because of the Great Library. The Library quickly acquired many papyrus scrolls, owing largely to the Ptolemaic kings' aggressive and well-funded policies for procuring texts. The idea of a universal library in Alexandria may have been proposed by Demetrius of Phalerum, an exiled Athenian statesman living in Alexandria, to Ptolemy I Soter, who may have established plans for the Library, but the Library itself was probably not built until the reign of his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus. The Library was part of a larger research institution called the Mouseion, which was dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts. The Great Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world. Probably during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BC) Įstimates vary somewhere between 40,000 and 400,000 scrolls, perhaps equivalent to roughly 100,000 books Įstimated to have employed over 100 scholars at its height Von Corven, based partially on the archaeological evidence available at that time Nineteenth-century artistic rendering of the Library of Alexandria by the German artist O.
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