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need for specific consultation rather than from the desire to be all-embracing. The Library of Alexandria revealed a new imagination that outdid all existing libraries in ambition and scope. The Attalid kings of Pergamum, in northwestern Asia Minor, attempted to compete with Alexandria and built a library of their own, but it never achieved the grandeur of that of Alexandria. To prevent their rivals from creating manuscripts for their library, the Ptolemies banned the exportation of papyrus, to which the Pergamum librarians responded by inventing a new writing material which was given the city's name: pergamenon, or parchment.15
A curious document from the second century B.C., the perhaps apocryphal Letter of Aristeas, records a story about the origins of the Library of Alexandria that is emblematic of its colossal dream. In order to assemble a universal library (says the letter), King Ptolemy I wrote "to all the sovereigns and governors on earth" begging them to send to him every kind of book by every kind of author, "poets and prose-writers, rhetoricians and sophists, doctors and soothsayers, historians, and all others too." The king's scholars had calculated that five hundred thousand scrolls would be required if they were to collect in Alexandria "all the books of all the peoples of the world."16 (Time magnifies our ambitions; in 1988, the Library of Congress in Washington alone was receiving that number of items a year, from which it sparingly kept about four hundred thousand.)17 Today, the Library of Alexandria has been rebuilt by the Egyptian government following a design competition won by the Norwegian architectural studio Sn0hetta. Costing US$220 million, rising thirty-two metres high
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The new Library of Alexandria, whose first stone was laid in 1988.
and encompassing a circumference of 160 metres, with enough shelf space to hold over eight million volumes, the new Library of Alexandria will also house audiovisual material and virtual collections in its capacious rooms.18
The Tower of Babel stood (while it stood) as proof of our belief in the unity of the universe. According to the story, in the growing shadow of Babel humankind inhabited a world with no linguistic borders, believing heaven to be as much within its rights as solid earth. The Library of Alexandria (on ground firmer perhaps than that of Babel) rose to prove the contrary, that the universe was of a bewildering variety and that this variety possessed a secret order. The first reflected our intuition of a single, continuous, monolingual divinity whose words were spoken by all from earth to heaven; the second, the belief that each of the books made up of these words was its own complex cosmos, each presuming in its singularity to address the whole of creation. The Tower of Babel collapsed in the prehistory of storytelling; the Library of Alexandria rose when stories took on the shape of books, and strove to find a syntax that would lend each word, each tablet, each scroll its illuminating and necessary place. Indistinct, majestic, ever- present, the tacit architecture of that infinite Library continues to haunt our dreams of universal order. Nothing like it has ever again been achieved, though other libraries (the Web included) have tried to copy its astonishing ambition. It stands unique in the history of the world as the only place which, having set itself up to record everything, past and future, might also have foreseen and stored the chronicle of its own destruction and resurrection.
Divided into thematic areas by categories devised by its librarians, the Library of Alexandria became a multitude of libraries, each insistent on one aspect of the world's variety. Here (the Alexandrians boasted) was a place where memory was kept alive, where every written thought had its niche, where each reader could find his own itinerary traced line after line in books perhaps yet unopened, where the universe itself found its worded reflection. As a further measure to accomplish his ambition, King Ptolemy decreed that any book arriving in the port of Alexandria was to be seized and copied, with the solemn promise that the original would be returned (like so many solemn kingly promises, this one was not always kept, and often it was the copy that was handed back). Because of this despotic measure, the books assembled in the Library became known as "the ships' collection."19
The first reference to the Library is by Herodas, a poet from Cos or Miletus who lived in the second half of the third century B.C., in a text that mentions a building known as the Museion, or House of the Muses, that almost certainly lodged the famous Library. Curiously, in a dizzying game of Chinese boxes, Herodas lends the kingdom of Egypt an all-englobing universal-library nature, so that Egypt includes the Museum, which in turn includes the Library, which in turn includes everything:
And [Egypt] resembles the house of Aphrodite:
Everything that exists and everything that is possible
Is found in Egypt: money, games, power, the blue sky above,
Fame, spectacles, philosophers, gold, young men and maidens,
The temple of the sibling gods, the benevolent king,
The Museum, wine and whatever else one might imagine.20
Unfortunately, in spite of passing references like this one, the truth is that we don't know what the Library of Alexandria looked like. We have an image of the Tower of Babel, probably inspired by the ninth-century spiral minaret of the Abu Dulaf mosque in Samarra and rendered in dozens of paintings, mainly by sixteenth- century Dutch artists such as Breugheclass="underline" a snail-like, unfinished building crawling with industrious workers. We have no familiar image, however fantastical, of the Library of Alexandria.
The Italian scholar Luciano Canfora, after surveying all the sources available to us, concludes that the Library itself must have consisted of a very long, high hall or passageway in the Museion. Along its walls were endless bibliothekai, a term which originally designated not the room but the shelves or niches for the scrolls. Above the shelves there was an inscription: "The place of the cure of the soul." On the other side of the bibliothekai walls were a number of rooms, used perhaps by the scholars as residences or meeting places. There was also a room for communal meals.
The Museion stood in the royal neighbourhood, by the seafront, and provided bed and board to scholars invited to the Ptolemaic court. According to the Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century B.C., Alexandria boasted a second library, the so-called daughter library, intended for the use of scholars not affiliated with the Museion. It was situated in the southwestern neighbourhood of Alexandria, close to the temple of Serapis, and was stocked with duplicate copies of the Museion library's holdings.
It is infuriating not to be able to tell what the Library of Alexandria looked like. With understandable hubris, every one of its chroniclers (all those whose testimony has reached us) seems to have thought its description superfluous. The Greek geographer Strabo, a contemporary of Diodorus, described the city of Alexandria in detail but, mysteriously, failed to mention the Library. "The Museion too forms part of the royal buildings and comprises a peripatos [deambulatory], an exedra with seats, and a large building housing the common room where scholars who are members of the Museion take their meals,"21 is all he tells us. "Why need I even speak of it, since it is imperishably held in the memory of all men?" wrote Athenaeus of Naucratis, barely a century and a half after its destruction. The Library that wanted to be the storehouse for the memory of the world was not able to secure for us the memory of itself. All we know of it, all that remains of its vastness, its marbles and its scrolls, are its various raisons d'etre.