![]() In fact, the very first museum or Mouseion, as it was known, was also in Alexandria. ![]() "It's possible that Roman libraries were more like museums, these big monumental spaces where people could walk through and see statues of the poets and these impressive books." "Ancient books were extremely valuable since each one was handmade, so it's unlikely that the Romans were loaning these out to people on the street," says Hendrickson. They and others were referred to as the "heads" of the Alexandrian Library by various ancient authors, and we can easily picture these beard-and-toga geniuses hunched over scrolls inside a magnificent, colonnaded hall. The mathematician and geographer Eratosthenes lived there, as did Aristarchus, the first astronomer to argue that the planets orbited the sun. Great minds of the Hellenistic period studied and taught in Alexandria, a cosmopolitan capital on the Mediterranean founded by Alexander the Great. Built by the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt in the third century B.CE., the Library of Alexandria was said to contain hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls (as many as 700,000 according to one ancient source) as part of one king's Herculean effort to collect "all the books in the world." It was supposed to be the largest single repository of classical knowledge in the ancient world, the holder of all the "books" known at the time. It wasn't the first library ever built but it became one of the best-known in antiquity. This illustration shows scholars using the Library of Alexandria.
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