Intellectual Sanctuary
Many visit Egypt with the anticipation of seeing the relics from Ancient Egypt such as mummies of Pharaohs and the Pyramids. But Egypt has been as much Ancient Egypt as it has been Greco-Roman Egypt and Arab Egypt, to name a few. That was why Alexandria came to my attention, and as its name suggests, the city was founded by Alexander the Great in 332 BC. And the Ptolemaic Dynasty constructed the Library of Alexandria, which was one of the largest and most significant libraries around the world then. The library is believed to have been destroyed in 48 BC, but modern Egyptians revived it in 2002, commemorating the original one and its spirit.
As I stepped inside, I was naturally overwhelmed by the imposing scale of the space. And it took me a moment to get used to the contrast between the inside of the library and the streets of Alexandria. Egyptian streets tend to be very ‘dynamic’ with constant sounds of car horns and people finding their ways between moving cars and motorcycles. Inside the library, I kept thinking about the word ‘sanctuary’. The place was a sanctuary for long-term human concentration and serious discussions, activities that are not easily cultivated in the ‘streets’. In fact, one of the critical purposes of ancient libraries must have been to provide a protected space from the outside world of chaos, so that scholars can only concentrate on intellectual endeavors.
Looking back, I realize I’ve been enjoying visits to university campuses and libraries when traveling. I think I believed that by visiting those places, I could have peeks into the kinds of values that the local people wanted to preserve, which cannot be otherwise observed ‘in the streets’. So I was happy to visit the library and see other aspects of Egypt, at the expense of missing a few other ancient Egyptian temples.
@ Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria, Egypt, February 19, 2019
