The Rise And Fall Of The World's Greatest City | Alexandria | Timeline

[Music] just imagine a city that housed all the knowledge of the world all the mathematical from scientific treatise all the works of literature and the vorlix of philosophical fancy [Music] the place where writers and artists and scientists met to debate and to pioneer forth just think of what I did an invention that city was produced our knowledge would bring to its ruler just [Music] think of what would happen if that wealth of knowledge was destroying burned to the ground or scattered to the wind a terrible moment when civilization itself in its tracks this sounds like some kind of science fiction fantasy that this was a reality and this was the real place where it happened a city where its secrets are hidden beneath the theme and the music street this city of Alexandria and this is it's extraordinary story you [Music] well then we might think that Athens and Rome were the greatest cities in antiquity for my money that claim could well go to Alexandria for over 2,300 years the city has occupied a key junction between the eastern and western worlds lying in Egypt at the top of the Nile Delta on the coast of the Mediterranean today it's a sprawling place and every inch is jam-packed with activity but curiously the ancient city is conspicuous by its absence [Music] the modern people here really fuzzy with life but it can be a bit hard to get a handle on ancient Alexandria you could say we fit that realizing that this is what was really a role for raping for food of antiquity because it was here that panics and is a great was very here that Cleopatra produced Mark Antony and Caesar and this was home one of the seven wonders of the ancient world piecing together the scattered jigsaw puzzles I'm going to explore the incredible story of this extraordinary City where the Pharos lighthouse shown its B canal over spectacular theaters temples and colonnades monuments as grand as anywhere in the ancient world scholar seduces a yeren skill it's more than 30 meters high which combined the best of Greek Roman and Egyptian design to create a dynamic hybrid culture we're mixing and matching we're being purely Alexandria we're taking what we want sticking it together we're open to everything [Music] and most importantly where intellectual advances new philosophies new sciences were a driving force of the city and that's what makes this place so special although Alexandria was immensely wealthy it didn't just fall for grand monuments it put an absolute value on wisdom because wisdom meant power and it was Alexandria's ultimate ambition to become the most powerful city on earth by capturing all the world's knowledge within its walls and ambition which stemmed from it's very beginnings and divisions of its founder [Music] by ancient Egyptian standards Alexandria was a relative new build it was founded only 2,300 years ago halfway in time between the pyramids and 430 BC were the colors in screen time of history and buildin age Athens has limbs and Roman Philips provincial back wall set such a very unlikely corner of northern Greece was about to have a huge impact from there was going to come a man he would be a real player on the world stage in fact he was somebody is going to change the world order [Music] that man was Alexander the great great because Alexander's achievements were truly outstanding from provincial Macedonian beginnings United the Greeks of the nation defeated the Persians and set about creating the largest empire the world had ever seen from northern Greece his territories stretched out across the Mediterranean deep into the Middle East and towards North Africa Alexander was prodigiously ambitious body age of 24 he was already cutting a swathe through the territories of the known world but he did not rest easy until he'd laid his hands on the really big prize Egypt because this was one of the most admired and envied countries in the whole of antiquity the Nile River which watered the land gave it last agricultural well creating the manpower resources to cover the land and glorious artworks and engineering triumphs even the Greeks who thought they was culturally superior for everyone else and described anyone who wasn't Greek as Barbara barbarians respective Egyptian achievements the Greek father of history Herodotus said that nowhere else in the world were there more marvellous things more works of Unspeakables greatness such a rich prize was irresistible to Alexander in 332 BC he invaded Egypt and overcame the Persians who dominated the Egyptian people for the past two centuries but to seal his victory he now had to win over the hearts and minds of the Egyptian people whose unique religion and culture had been rooted in the land for over 3,000 years [Music] by the time Alexander arrived in Egypt this pyramid was over 2,300 years old but the locals they didn't think of it as some kind of an curiosity because this is where a gold King had been buried Egyptians believed that it places a secret power [Music] confronted with a culture so alien to his own tag Xander didn't underestimate the challenge that faced him he realized he'd have to come up with an ingenious approach to get the Egyptians onside and upset his new Greek rule and typically when it comes to making sense of the story of Alexandria the clues to how he did this are buried deep beneath the desert sands so have you been walking down here and Alexander's day what would be absurd you would have seen something quite different it would have been far grander you have had these limestone beautifully cut blocks we would have inscription there would have been a big processional way line distinctive so it would have been quite glamorous not quite what it is now and make it typical to have things underground loaded for the ancient Egyptians yet in the underground stuff is a good place to rebirth and resurrection and anything secret so they used it a great deal let me put it and ferry and that's what Alexander had to get to grips with a culture which not only believed in life on earth but which was obsessed with life after death Wow Wow I knew does a sarcophagus Danny I have no idea with this side it is absolutely enormous with sort of three meters by 5 meters between more than 60 tons an estimated absolutely solid granite and I've got guests on it yep yep seriously just make out this is in fact the name of who it belongs to and is happy in glyphs and it actually returned into APIs by the Greeks and so it's happening because the great bullguard the APIs Explorer and this is his sarcophagus sits a ball buried in here yeah it's a ball I just reviewed it's so kind of glorious it would be a human no it actually is a ball burial because this was a sacred incarnation of one of the Egyptian gods and so he was very clear after death [Music] from here it says a pious son of beloved son of Osiris making be given life eternity and prosperity and so on and yes it's name one more time so he was really near to whom it belongs I mean the evictions do do that in the religions only they mix up animals and men very happily very much served with the Egyptians each guard hard-ass atomic animal so they're always carefully allege is very different from the green and I have Alexander deal with that very alien landscape when he arrived here Alexander was brilliant I mean he instead of coming in and chant for sure all are fools he instead said ah I am part of this whole thing and he came and heat meat offerings to the APUs he gave money and land to the temple the gyptian thought wow one of us we love him and then in addis brilliant move he also visited a temple where he was hailed as the son of the chief egyptian god so he was spiritually the divine we were on earth which fits from the Egyptian belief system that there Pharaoh in divinely born and a gardener and today was Alexander as a pharaoh really and Egyptian select him [Music] Alexander was canny by choosing to embrace Egyptian custom and smaller and just stomp on them nice to effect the very sympathetic kind of regime change the Egyptian people's didn't think of him as one of them but one of us yeah he had done remarkably well he realized his grand Egyptian dream and now he was being celebrated here not just as a conqueror or king of a true Living God but even that was enough for Alexander he didn't just want to be another in a long line of Pharaohs he really wanted to dominate the country and that meant creating a new city that would bear his name for all time but first he had to find a suitable location the Indian Egyptians had always looked inwards their key cities centering on the Nile but in this Alexander differed he also wanted his new city to look back towards his Greek homeland and outwards towards his new empire and it was said that he had a very illustrious figure for guiding on his way the agent also Plutarch tells us that Alexander withdrawn because this very playful feral dream then in the night of Alexander lay asleep he saw a wonderful vision a vulnerable man with shaggy hair and a beard appeared to stand by his side and recite these verses now there is an island in the much dashing sea in front of Egypt Pharaohs is what men call it Alexander believed that the mysterious visitor was none other than true Marin felt the great epic bars and as well as being a hard load for efficient he was an incurable romantic so he took his advice and this is where he came to family fifty but the barren stretch of coastline Alexander encountered couldn't be more different from today's hectic metropolis when Alexander got here Pharaohs was still just an island and there's a tiny little settlement here and the coastline of Egypt was very jagged which meant it was very difficult to boats to land but Alexander had a grand plan to link sparrows to the mainland and so he built a causeway running all the way across almost a mile long and he expended fists it here to create a man-made Harbor this would become the busiest port in the world the Gateway to one of the richest and most multicultural cities on earth and that was only part of the dream Alexander and his successors the Thomas Rabin's for knowledge knowledge that give them the power to trade to build to conquer their ambition the Alexandria to become the intellectual engine room ancient world [Music] ancient Egypt land of the mighty Pharaohs Living God Kings whose people build fantastic monuments in their honor a civilization which have been a key player in the region for over 4,000 years in the 4th century BC the Greek Alexander the Great conquered this land winning over the Egyptian people and making it his own creating a new city in his name Alexandria starting from scratch Alexander enriched a unique model city strictly laid out from an innovative grid system where Greek and Egyptian culture came together to create one of the richest places on earth [Music] today so little have left above ground to give a sense of the ancient cities you have to descend deep beneath the modern metropolis into a city of the Dead I mean an inspector phone well this is its phenotypically Alexandrian Rico there's a mishmash of different styles could be that the reducer a purely Greek debt would be man Greek but then Egyptian elements the freeze up there of Cobra heads and little solar disks on top all of the Egyptian traditions and this was just the dream for one family well one family we presume we're not sure there's three sarcophagi in there no bodies were ever found the tomb robbers got here long before the archaeologists they might not have left anybody's but they've got some pretty lifelike goes into the zoo well archaeologists over the years have presumed the statues and either side of the entrance represent the owners of the tomb but what's interesting about them if you look at the head of this milk tank over here the face is detailed the hair style is pure Roman greco-roman tradition and yet the body you know stiff one leg forward arms for the side typical of Egyptian stature it's quite ugly in a way that the way the two have been stuck together though it's not particularly well done no but that's part of the charm of this place is we're taking we're mixing and matching we're being purely Alexandria we're taking what we want sticking it together we're not melding creating a new art form we just were just we're open to everything we're very receptive and there's a great example just inside the the doorways here to the left to get another really good example of it as well yes because this is the Anubis figure yeah Anubis was the Egyptian government bombing the dog-headed figure but look how he's dressed he's dressed as a Roman soldier but with his Egyptian head guarding that whoever's buried within this tomb it is fantastic just like top and Tails no he said he's got a very Egyptian head and then this kind of Romans little little Roman skirt but it looks much yeah everything anything I think knows that throughout the ancient world you do get this exchange of cultures you know in classical Athens you've got Eastern Colts and the Romans are very good at taking on the east as well so one is Alexandria particularly good at it I think because Alexandria was a new and had to sort of he had to create its own legitimacy it was a new town on a very very ancient land which had a certain weight within the ancient oral as well I mean Egypt the Greeks are in awe of Egypt so there was all this sort of cultural baggage here already but they also brought with him their their their notions of the Hellenic culture of Greek culture and by doing that it grated up the mantle of Egypt but at the same time brought with it its it's Greek notions it was also an extremely wealthy time and it's a porch time and they're always open to influences [Music] what you have to remember is that this was no ordinary city and hasn't grown up organically as the Bronze Age or the Classical Age like so many of the great cities of antiquity this probably like a kind of an high-minded new town the brainchild of visionary and highly educated man from the age of 13 Alexander has been taught day in day out by the philosopher Aristotle and spirit of inquiry was imbued in if we sell of his body and when he founded Alexandria he passed that spirit on into the very DNA of the city this was a place where knowledge was valuable a currency of grain or gold and Jena precious archaeological oasis in the heart of the city Kamel dica archaeologists have begun to find the evidence to prove it a Polish team have been working on a discovery which reveals exactly where Alexandra's ideas were played out here we are in the one of the lecture halls probably it was one lecturers from the complex of the university it's really in Tunis so you got the lecture rooms right on the Main Street yes it was the centre of the social life in the late antique Alexandria and now here here we are here three rows and benches in the classrooms and the the branch is devoted for the students and here we have their names to the most tips for the parable for the teacher you can just imagine how intimate this lecture hall would have been seating just 30 students studying law rhetoric and science and here we have a single block of stone probably this kind of platform or kind of volume for the student reclamation so our case the students have two years the kind of proposal emissary to the teacher I'm going to be the teacher source so if I'm sitting Hays on a teacher very comfortably on your steps and then the student would be they're giving their paper or presentation did it get hot here you know this the electrodes were covered probably by their set rules we don't have any indication but probably the identity high as up to five comma five meters at the level of the columns a teaching rooms like this are so far away found twenty lecture halls well being it was not a bigger these teaching rooms were a hot hand knowledge in the very heart of Alexandria this was in a way of sitting in ivory towers it was buzzing with provocative and cutting-edge ideas it's rulers had wanted to acquire the intellectual tools to unlock the mysteries of the universe to allow them to rule the world it was where the mathematician Eratosthenes proved that the earth was round and accurately measured its circumference where a thousand years ahead of his time Aristarchus suggested that the earth moved around the Sun and where the greatest minds and most extraordinary thinkers began to map their way through the Stars you now I've got to confess that Alexandria has got a particular allure for me too one reason and it's a rather wonderful and mysterious woman called Hypatia now her patient ran her own philosophy school here and by all accounts she was quite extraordinary her patient was born in around 350 AD and the very fact she was a woman in a world dominated by men makes her achievements doubly exceptional for over 40 years she made groundbreaking advances in algebra and revolutionised astronomy and correspondence from a fellow philosophers he sums up just how much she was valued it's a collection of letters written to her by one of her former students called Vinicius and the language used is a very intimate so you get a real sense of her character and just how respected she was and Phoenicia says that nothing in the world is more wonderful than her and that even in Hades she is the only thing that he'll remember actually she's been remembered by some others too a crater on the moon surface bears her name a journal of philosophy is called cepacia and she's just been immortalized in a new film a girl [Music] imagine if acacia working late into the night the famous Alexandrian street lamps burning outside staring up into the night sky for inspiration she was a philosopher in the true sense of the word in that she would have Phyllis sauce and lover of wisdom what's really interesting about her patience with so many of her Alexandrian colleagues is that she didn't just feel an abstract thought but she had a very practical application for her ideas and for instance used her mathematics and her geometry to redesign this amazing gizmo and it was really a kind of multifunctional instrument the sort of iPod of her day if you like only in her day had a much more romantic name but this was called an astrolabe literally that means a catcher of the star [Music] one of the things that was worked on here in Alexandria and perfected with this amazing instrument the astrolabe you're clutching one yeah what did it allow people to do the astrolabe has many functions telling the time of the day telling your latitude your altitude it can measure the height of mountains it can measure the width of rivers but I'll tell you how to measure the time of the day okay now here is the astrolabe and here is the pointer this is what we call the pointer we align these two holes pointing to a star okay when we align these two holes like this pointing to get a reading with the pointer right here we take this reading here which is elected an Arabic letter but for them it's a number okay we take this number we turn the astrolabe and we have this spider here we point the pointers here to the number that we have taken from the back and when we point it to here we get the reading you see that pointer here it will point to the degrees the degrees that the Sun has risen or the the star has risen from the horizon okay 360 degrees is equal to 24 hours so each one hour is 15 degrees so if we have here number of degrees I can know the time of day it's a very powerful instrument because it allows you to do all kinds of things when if you know the likes night sky you know your latitude if you know the height of a mountain you can explore recent rage it has actually changed the way they function [Music] Alexandria's did sponsor pure reason kill thought ideas just for ideas say it's also an immensely busy and practical place a fierce relay for example was very beautiful but when it was applied allowed men's trade travel and to conquer the whole stick they were very enterprising and outward looking and that Aesop's was directly in line with the vision of its founder Alexander had created a unique City a central point between east and west where the greatest thinkers not only explored pure thought but applied their ideas to become real players on the world stage the scale of Alexandra's intellectual ambition was immense to house within it walls all knowledge and with that knowledge make its rulers the most powerful people on earth [Music] although ancient Alexandria is virtually invisible but ghosts of its presence is there in the layout of the modern city actually what is very exciting and because the modern city is lay down on the ancient grid plan when you walk down these three you are physically walking in the footsteps of a patient although other fantastic Wahpeton masters very good place to be [Music] as a cultural melting pot with intellectual ambition ancient Alexandria became a unique environment scholarship a place where the extraordinary thinker hip Asia schooled in Greek thought also drawn Egyptian wisdom and pebbel omean science to help her map stars where a wealth of traditions from around the world combined enabling the greatest thinkers to make scientific advances achievable nowhere else creating a new Egypt and a model for society in the future one of the great characters of medical history came to Alexandria a news man called Galen and even though he travelled right across eastern Mediterranean it was the Napolitan conditions of this city that allows him to make quite extraordinary advances in factors here he made scientific breakthroughs that wouldn't be bettered for another 1,600 years somehow these treasures that you're removing positive there are a variety of things there's a brain of a horse and this one with with a spinal cord attached oh is dog cop it's lovely don't you have a nice straight - vegetarian not something way beyond my life experiences so I mean I'm not expecting to eat them so good just explain to me did you're a veterinary anatomist so why'd you got a particular interest in Galen it's really because of the brain is I think gain was the central mover in the history of studying the brain who's the first person who realized what it was and what it did and why was Alexandria such a key city fan in the European part of the Mediterranean world that there were two boos and then eventually laws against chopping up dead people dissecting dead people which make life very difficult for him so he had to use animals like these where really what he wanted to know is he wanted to know about what was going on in humans and this was much easier and easy because the Egyptians had much more of a tradition and partly because of mummification they had much more of a tradition of dealing with parts of dead human people and perhaps not worrying about it so much that the brain was not only particularly important to be Egyptians because there are stories as they when they're doing the mummification have been pulling the brain out through the nose for instance yeah we don't know whether as Herodotus he said that we don't know whether that's actually treated in enormous nose to get a brain out tree but it's certainly true the thing that the Egyptians the Greeks had in common neither we thought the brain was very important until Galen came along Aristotle said it's probably just the radiator for the heart the heart creates all this heat and the brain is just a way of radiating it away out of the body and so while I was getting different how did he come to realize that there was something else going on because he looked at the brain you look at the human brain you look at animal brains and he said well if you look at them they're incredibly complicated he said for example here's the cerebrum at the front of all its folds and here's the cerebellum at the back there's even finer folds you look on the inside and you see it sees it there's the brain stand down there it's even more complicated so it's got all these different bit so it doesn't look something that's just there to radiate heat away said it must be doing something more complicated than that the other thing he noticed about it was first of all if you look at the brain it has the sensors attached to it if you dissect a brain I get this out this is a sheep brain with the eyes still attached yes lovely elegant and that but the important thing he said well the brain is connected to the special senses by these large thick nerves he said that must mean something and he had this wonderful phrase he used where he said the brain is surrounded by the special sense organs as if they are the servants and gods of the great king so he'd already elevated the brain to being in the position of a king in control of the special senses I'm glad he add a bit of poetry to something fairly distinct inspector and so he demonstrated them not only it's the brain where all the sensory information comes in but also he chants where all the nerves radiate out to the body to move the body so he's really saying the brain takes the information in processes it puts it out and really the brain is where you think it's where where you are and really he was the first person to show that that is immensely important if you prove just how powerful the brain is that's going to revolutionize what people think about the human body and I mean all sorts in the human soul as well he completely changed the way we think about the body and especially the brain Alexandra had created a buzzing environment where men like Galen and women like acacia can meet light minds and begin to reveal the workings of the universe [Music] because these thinkers weren't working in isolation and that possibly Alexandria's greatest achievement it had created an environment where great minds could gather to discuss and develop their ideas the largest store of knowledge the world had ever known like so much of ancient Alexandria its libraries have long since disappeared but modern Alexandrians have begun to acknowledge their amazing heritage with a new state-of-the-art library capturing his predecessors spirit there have been collections with texts and books and other ancient cities but the ambition of the library here was quite extraordinary Alexandria wanted to be the repository of all knowledge on earth and so a copy of every single book in the world was to be stored here [Music] every word literature tragedy comedy and poetry every history every scientific treatise from math to medicine physics to astronomy I'm not just green text but works from around the world in Hebrew Latin Babylonian and blatant Arabic even today putting together such a collection would be quite a feat but this was the age before mass publishing each work existed as a handwritten papyrus and that Scrolls might be the only copy of that papyrus in the whole world today the majority of the fragments that remain now survives not in Alexandria but another bastion of learning Oxford University how many of these texts would they have been in the libraries I reck'n'd half a million everything from Homer the year of some of the earliest Greek papyri where texts of the Homeric poems the Iliad and the Odyssey to Plato philosophy written in Greek on papyrus to emma later period Arabic and even earlier Hebrew the scale of ambition is extraordinary it's a hurt physically how do they get the work into the city they were sending people out to all parts of the Mediterranean they had a list of the nine canonical lyric poets that they wanted their works of and they sent people to the festivals where their works had been composed Olympia and Delphi and they borrowed the official copy of the Athenian tragedies from the Athenians so that they could make a copy of it then they refused to give it back so they were in some ways acting like bent Aquarian book collectors in other ways acting like a institution building up a fundamental collection for scholars to work on if you've got this massive volume of work how are they keeping tabs on it or how are they organizing it they developed a system which was really the invention of the modern book catalog the Alexandrian scholar callimachus invented the first book catalog which simply had an entry for author title genre type of work in this case comedy and also the total for the number of lines at the end scribes were paid by the number of lines they copied so here you can see the name of the comic poet Aristophanes you just about like their staff it's a yes Stefan off and in Alexandre are they mainly copying material or are they actually adding to it are you getting new scholarship there as well absolutely they're constantly commenting on them book this is a copy of Plato's Republic in which there's tie a tiny hand has been writing a marginal commentary into the margin explaining and correcting the text so you get the feeling of kind of team hive of readers and scholars working and operating on the text so impressive isn't it so you've got this genius of Plato and you've got somebody else centuries later adding their own ideas access to information enabled the Alexandrians to revolutionize scientific thought but they also Scottish theology it was in Alexandria that the Hebrew Bible was first translated into Greek by understanding of wealth of cultures and beliefs they had the power to master and control they were so intent on obtaining all the knowledge in the world that law passed so that no books could leave the city and even ships entering its harbor were search to see if new texts would be found to be added to its famous library the Modern Library of Alexandria has got over half a million books which is actually almost exactly the same number as they have from the ancient library but what it's also got here is this mega computer which every few days saves all the information on the World Wide Web in 21st century we're just so used to that ease of access to information where everything is stored electronically but in the ancient library they often have the single existing copy of a book so just imagine if that was lost you lose those ideas forever and tragically that's exactly what happened in Alexandria knowledge has made the city an intellectual powerhouse of antiquity it has made thinkers like a patient powerful forces within the city it was an environment where new thoughts could flourish and evolve where anyone from anywhere could voice their ideas so perhaps it was inevitable that at some point some ideas would come into conflict and to the ancient world Alexandria its libraries and education ourselves the result would be catastrophic [Music] by the end of the fourth century AD Alexandria had been flourishing for nearly 700 years producing extraordinary thinkers like the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia it was an immensely powerful city second only to Rome in might yet its power wasn't built on military force but on the strength of ideas and the ambition to have all the knowledge in the world and that included beliefs from the latest school of thinking the fledgling religion Christianity Alexandria is always attracted in cutting-edge thought and men who are at the top of their game so it should be no surprise that from the first century AD the key leaders of a new religion should want to come here to play out their ideas only a few year after Christ's ascension the gospel rise of mark came to Alexandria to spread the news bringing Christianity into Africa as one of the most forward-thinking places on earth with its tradition fusing Eastern and Western cultures Alexandria was an ideal place for Christianity to gain a foothold but reconciling a multi-state environment with a religion whose followers believed exclusively in one God proved a testing challenge for the city said mark himself died at the hands of pagans for preaching his faith it was a foretaste of the violence to come yes for centuries Christians and pagans did manage to live alongside one another happily productively the very early Christians spent a great deal of time and energy trying to square pagan and Christian thoughts and for instance one of the most prolific early church fathers who lived in Alexandria said that the works of Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics were science tinged with piety as long as they were righteous now in a world like that where Christianity is just another stream of thought then cepacia has a very secure place but the problem came and the Christians wanted not just spiritual but temporal power and then all that tolerance and piety becomes muddied with power politicking fortunately for hip Asia she'd come to conflict with one of the greatest political operators of the day cepacia herself wasn't anti Christianity many of her students were in fact Christian but the problem came when a new bishop Cyril was ordained in the city Cyril not only wanted spiritual authority but power on earth and he didn't want to share it with pagans his arrival would change the face of Alexandria forever you walk in to somewhere like the Caesar in and you see what originally we built as a as an Egyptian and Greek temple with all the heads removed from the statute and the cult statue has gone and in its place you have a huge cross looking down and you see how people like Cyril could change a world he is a man seeking power and he wishes to gain control not just of the religious state he wants to really run a theocracy be in charge of everything I pay sure is a wealthy educated pagan to him that means which he puts around rumors about all of the objects you makes their astronomy her instruments clearly they're used for divination they're for finding out what will happen in the future it is black magic and as such she has to die and in one contemporary account we learned that it was her patient's work with the astrolabe in particular that sparked hatred against her spurred on by one of their leaders the blood of the Christian moth was art they felt her to seek the patient out through the city and found her driving through these streets on her way home [Applause] they dragged her out of her carriage and ripped off her clothes for the highborn woman like her this would have been terrible public disgrace but then things got even uglier they pulled her into the Caesar a.m. which had been a temple and then recently converted to a church and they're picking up anything they could find we're told they were a strata which probably broken pots or broken roof tiles they started to slay her alive once she was dead they pulled her body limbs and limb and then they took her dismembered body parts at the edge of the city they burnt them on a pyre in effect this was a witch his death [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] he paid his tragedy was the tragedy of Alexandria the destruction of its spectacular Monument the desecration of his extraordinary library and with that the heartbreaking demands of the wealth of knowledge which had made it great for over 700 years [Music] there are few lines desperately sad written by a pagan who was wandering through the streets about X Andrea watching the world he knew crumble around him [Music] [Applause] is it true that we Greeks are really dead and only seem alive [Music] and in our fallen state we imagined that a dream is life or are we truly alive and his knife itself dead to some Alexander's dream was becoming a living nightmare after centuries of on sort only 1% of Alexandria's vast book collections has survived into the modern world rather bizarrely and one of the survivors of Alexandra's destruction has ended up here it's that massive lump of red granite the obelisks that we very affectionately now called Cleopatra's Needle and it was brought here from Egypt in 1878 but in its heyday it stood just at the edge of the Caesar in so it was only a stone's throw away from where her patient was killed I Sigma in many ways cepacia was an incarnation of Alexander's dreams she was living proof that knowledge is power to the mentally knowledgeable and therefore the extraordinary city that she lived in allowed her a huge amount influence but the key word here is extraordinary because Alexandria was a city left all three [Music] ambitions that that dream to acquire and care take all the knowledge of the world was just too perfect to last we should bear that in mind because it is a sort of very modern dream when I saw that is what the World Wide Web does and so when we know that Alexandria fails and as a result a whole epoch fail and to take the very careful mode for that reason we mustn't bury the memory of Alexandria but celebrate [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 1,206,849

Rating: 4.7013097 out of 5

Keywords: BBC documentary, stories, 2017 documentary, Channel 4 documentary, TV Shows - Topic, History, Documentary, real, Documentary Movies - Topic, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, history documentary, documentary history

Id: pixDj1NlRok

Length: 47min 46sec (2866 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 03 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/fractalmagic]

A lot of the scenes from that documentary are from a recent movie

[u/noahb1996]

I've heard they have a great library! Would love to see it one day.