The Ancient Library of Alexandria

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC you good afternoon I'm Chris Murphy I'm head of the Near East section here in the Library of Congress's African and Middle Eastern division the division consists of three sections the African section whose focus is on sub-saharan Africa the Hebraic section whose focuses on hebraica and Judaica worldwide in the near east section of which I'm head on behalf of all of my colleagues in the division and particularly our chief dr. Mary Jane deed I wish you welcome these continuing lectures given at noon are part of divisions outreach the division as you noted from the description has a very broad purview covering some 78 nations the Near East section of which I'm head basically covers the entire Arab world turkey the Caucasus former Soviet Central Asia Iran Afghanistan Muslims in western China Russia and the Balkans we as the Hebraic section are custodial meaning we hold collections of the local language materials and they range but Lee total about four hundred and eighty thousand volumes of which approximately one-half are in Arabic and there are 75,000 approximately volumes in Persian and in Turkish and Ottoman Turkish and our smallest collection of materials is in English a language of the North Caucasus of which we have 12 volumes however that equates to a 33 and 1/3 percent growth over last year when we only had nine beyond the materials held here and made accessible for researchers the specialist and reference librarians who are charged with developing the collection from and about what I've just described is the Near East reside here and work here and it is through their efforts that we generally find the individuals who give these noontime lectures and in this case our senior reference librarian for arabic noel kawar has found mr. Tahir and now I'm going to ask Noel to come forward and introduce today's speaker good afternoon and thank you very much all for coming joining us today for this important lecture about a particularly significant monument in humanities history we are fortunate to have a lecturer who has lived part of his life in the city where that monument existed that is Alexandria Egypt mr. al-taher is a retired official of the government of canada he is presently an adjunct lecturer with the canadian foreign service institute and was also a former lecturer at the universities of Ottawa Carleton and Calgary mr. al-taher who speaks five languages Arabic English French Italian and German graduated first from the Christian Brothers French schools in Cairo Egypt and eventually obtained a BA in political studies and international relations from the American University of Beirut then an MBA in aviation management with distinction from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in the USA he is a published writer and has just released a book earlier this year under the title aviation and maritime security intelligence for many years prior to coming first the USA in 1978 then to Canada in 1981 he lived and worked in Egypt Lebanon Saudi Arabia Libya Tunisia and Morocco though his working career has taken him over 35 countries aside from his multi-dimensional professional career mr. Tucker's life has an additional cultural angle he offers public lectures on cross cultural aspects of the history and religions of the eastern Mediterranean Arab and North African countries the public as well as specialized growth he is a member of the Canadian Institute for Mediterranean Studies he is also a member of the Middle East Studies Association Mason in the USA as well as the American Society for industrial security he is a co-founder of the Canadian Institute for Middle Eastern research in Calgary as well as the forum of Alexandria in Ottawa without further ado thank you very very much noise now they know everything about me believe me nothing is hiding we heard some music at the beginning and that music has been detected immediately by this is Mary Jane deep with the boss of this place and because she also lived in the city of Alexandria and those who know that kind of music and this instrument are either people who grew up in Alexandria or people or that the grandparents or people who live in Istanbul Constantinople in the old Peres here era and this is this music box which you see in the picture here is God latina and they used whether in Alexandria or in Constantinople they used to go around the coffee houses and stop in front of people or bars and then they would play and people to give them some money this has existed until about the mid 60s but then it doesn't exist anymore so it's quite by itself is quite a historic part of this of this whole thing of Alexandria I would like to talk today about the the old library and I would like to talk about the new library and depending how time is going to do to deal with us we will have inshallah hopefully a little bit of time for our question answers where for those who are interested now the talking about the you see when we talk about Egypt we think always of ancient Egypt we think sometimes of Islamic Egypt or Coptic Egypt but we hardly talk very much about Greek isn't and the the the by the Greeks were in Egypt were not just in Alexandria because there were all over the country and they spread all over it with time and so on and they became part and parcel of Egyptian society with their own culture most of them spoke Arabic and many of them did not at the same time so this is the importance of the Greeks so let's assume we are today in Alexandria looking west toward the Mediterranean Sea as you see in the picture here and then all you you see the Sun setting like in in this image but then as you move your face towards the city you will see rising in front of you and imposing mass another Sun the mass of another Sun but this son is reincarnated as a temple of knowledge whose real foundations were laid 2,300 years ago the new this is legend just been the new Library of Alexandria now a city of Alexandria with home of the famous wonder of the world the lighthouse as we all know which for many centuries was the cultural center of the Western world was built as we all know by Alexander the Great in about 332 BC and became the seat of power of the Greek solemnise who were the rulers of Egypt at the at that time now by the time Alexander set foot in Egypt Egyptian civilization was already some 3,000 years old the pyramids of the old kingdom were already over 2,000 years old and while the magnificence of King Tut's cocoon from Amon had faded and passed a millennium before so you see if you try to look at it from the time perspective there is no way you can really establish within parameters how old that could be it's very old as simple as that now most of us take it for granted that two cities Athens and Rome completely dominated the classical world in fact there was a third city that at its height the worst both of these in wealth and population as well in scientific and artistic achievement while Greece and Rome spread their influence through trade and war this city set out to on another adventure that not at the point of a sword but on the tip of a pen the triumph was to be a conquest of the mind rather of goods and and physical physical things and not led by legions of soldiers by by dynasties of scholarly people navigating on a sea of books this was the importance of the Library of Alexandria most modern scholars are inclined to credit or am I the first sorter for establishing both the library because had to they which is the the brewery on and then you have the moosian or the shrine of the music muses so that was two of them and I will explain why at that time and this took place in 295 BC trust between brackets I met a pure and wonderful English speaker we said do you know guys later than tell me what does BC means it means before computer and do you know what ad means he stays awaiting digitizing digitization keep that in mind it's fun now this is this is how the library is supposed to have looked like and according to Christian Jacob who is the author of the book called Alexandria in the 3rd century BC and I'm quoting here the Library of Alexandria was the first attempt at collecting all that existed at the time I but at that time in terms of human knowledge now this outlook was completely different from prevailing outlooks in Athens at that time in Athens an antique book who had no value per se unless it represented a certain value for the present so it has no value then we don't collect it we don't put it on in our holdings in and it is Umbria however the idea was to collect everything that was written in the past even if they did not agree with its content or even if it did not represent a particular interest at that time now independently from the intrinsic value of the work at hand they retained the item and translated it into Greek because many of these items were in Arabic in Hebrew in whatever languages of the whole world as as its name spread many noted scholars took up residence in the library among them let me say just a few of major importance here are fellows the father of Anatoly all of that of course two to three hundred years disease so I'm not going to list the date so here uh Phyllis father of anatomy you cleared the great geometer Aristophanes who calculated the circumference of the earth 284 busy imagine kolima who's the grammarian poet and father of librarianship if you have a degree in library science you have studied about kalamarez and what he did at the Library of Alexandria you have our Easter Easter host of Samothrace who was first to theorize that the earth revolved around the Sun he purpose was the first to accurately compute the length of the solar year then you get Claudius Ptolemy the father of cartography and by his time it was agreed that the world was Fira called in shape so it's not flat anymore it's wrong doing degree not not seen not in Middle Ages of Europe the idea of measuring the world by dividing it into vertical and horizontal lines had been used by this gentleman Aristotle Aristophanes what he made his astonishingly astonishingly accurate measurement of the earthís circumference and then it was truly my in his book geography which you can certainly find reproduced in this library and other libraries you can borrow it from your virtual library he developed the idea into the notions of longitudes and latitudes based on what our friend Alice told him still and including the division into into degrees and minutes so it's not only just long as latitude but even the baby the little measurements in between all of that finally it was at the Library of Alexandria that the Old Testament was translated from Aramaic and Hebrew into Greek and this is the beginning of the entrance of the the holy books before Islam into the modern world now the overwhelming number of manuscripts in the library prompted the building of a major annex outside remember I said at the beginning there is more than one big they built something called the therapy room and the Serapeum was nicknamed the daughter library there is the big library the museum and then there was the daughter library why this you'll see now the Serapeum house excellent quality copies not originals of everything that they had in the moosian which kept only the originals so they were farsighted there is no hard drives in at that time in order to to bookmark the books or to save them but they did copy it by hand on parchment and scrolls and kept it just in case something happened to the original now the let me talk about their classification system under the Greeks the father book classification in libraries is probably Kalima horse as I said who classified every field of learning as they were there then known he organized them in tables or pinnacles in Greek that's how they're called his basic method of classification was by subject by subject think of de and the Library of Congress classification systems and let's see where it all comes from and started here now what are the Service Committee epic history law lyrics poetry mathematics Maxim Natural Science rhetoric tragedy and Michelin's different other things under each subject individual furs were arranged in alphabetical order each name was followed by a short bibliographical notice and critical account of the author's writings and by the middle of the first century BC the library contained perhaps as many as 700 thousand many scripts on scrolls or papyrus don't forget the Greeks were in papyrus land which is Egypt as we all know the pin now here is something interesting the pinnacles those tables they created became a model and have eventually influenced librarians in the Middle Ages and it was eventually borrowed by the famous 10th century Arab scholar evening Madame who produced his famous work Alfa rest or index which has fortunately reached us intact so what happened is that the table of contents of the old Greek library and we all know that what happened to the Greek library it was destroyed because of Wars and this and that but the table of contents survived through the translation that was made eventually and event and in other languages journeyed to Arabic and from Arabic it went into Latin with the presence of the Muslim dynasties in Spain it for about 750 years so that's how the transfer of technology happened and how we know today what did the Library of Alexandria contain in terms of books and manuscripts because we never got anything left of that library unfortunately it was also thanks to this Arabic translation that Claudia story my book on geography was discovered the book was lost since the fall of Alexandria and about AD 1300 when the Arabic translation was discovered at that time so that's how they got to know about that now at the time of the Library of Alexandria it was not the only library in that existing world there were other well-known libraries ix 'va which is in iraq today or in Pergamum in Turkey or in Rome itself under the Roman so there were other libraries but because of the philosophy behind the Library of Alexandria that library survived some things were eventually borrowed or received from the other libraries including some like gift from from the one of the Roman emperors who fell in love with Cleopatra to his beloved and then they put it in the Library of Alexandria now you can read a lot about that speaking of reading I have a list of about nine reference books which you are welcome to have and if you give me your email address I will send you that by email and then this way you can if you are interested in the subject you can read more about it some old some not so old now then they it was decided that we have to build a new library and that was in about seven 1970s a professor at the University of Alexandria called Mustafa Bedi came up with the idea and I had a correspondence with him and eventually he did some research with UNESCO and so on let me let me take things in order so they are the idea then it was taken over by the University of Alexandria from dr. Abadi and in 74 or already since that time a hand-picked international jury of architects and librarians interesting they put them together which is you can't work on some subject matter without talking to the experts not just the experts in construction but those who know how this place is going to be used otherwise it's useless to build buildings that don't help what we are going to do is you need a lot of stacks to store all these books so anyway so they started looking for a design that symbolized a meeting of tourists and present of the local and the universal this is what the builders had in mind in September 1988 an international competition was launched by UNESCO the United Nations education and scientific organization and Cultural Organization and the International Union of Architects to find the design that would rise to the architectural challenge so in 89 the winning design chosen from more than 500 entries from 77 countries from around the world was produced by an architectural firm and landscape company from Norway called Snohetta which has an office in New York City as a matter of fact and Snow Etta the design was ordered the price for the past construction design in the world for the year 2000 at that time seven architects including Norwegians two Americans and Austrian and the Czech and two landscape architects as well as several consultants from all over the world worked on the project along with an Egyptian construction consortium as a matter of fact there was one Canadian from a town a small city in Ontario who was chosen just to do the measurement and the style of Windows they are going to put that and when I gave that lecture the first time just just before the elaborate was inaugurated he was in the audience and we pointed to him and he stood up and everybody but he did not mess up with a large speaker like I did we now the real challenge was to define the concept of the new library in both its architectural perspective and its intellectual mission while profiling its past glory now while the newness famous Lighthouse of Alexandria guided ships to the safe haven of its harbor the ancient library guided people to the temple of knowledge the new library was designed with the same objective so if you look at his comparative pictures one is the on top is the artist rendition of how the library could have looked like with a little ray or the small heart the eastern harbor as is called Alexandria and the the same location where the library is today is behind us in this picture and looking at the jetty and the location of the ancient Pharaoh's where today you have the the fort of Calais the mem look for the bright day and there have been several several underwater exploratory works done specifically by drawing on Peru the French the French archaeologists to try and find the remains of the lighthouse they found a few things but nothing really corroborated the fact or confirmed that this is really the remains of the lighthouse now let's look at symbolism here the architects who designed the new library wanted the new building to have the forum they wanted the design to symbolize a meeting of past and present you see architecture is like painting it's like a symphony when you write it you have to live it you have to imagine so many things of the same time so when you bring them together and you play them or you paint them it all has a meaning not just individual scenes and so on and this is what they're doing so a meeting of past and present the local and the universal through Egypt and the rest of the region while rising to the architectural challenge of providing in one structure a functional library and inviting public building and a monument to civilization to be monumental because of the power of the ideas represented by its history and at the same time to a vote Egypt's great monuments through massive scale but simplicity at the same time which is the most important feature of the new design as we will see in the coming slides finally they wanted it to be the river timeless and contain associations from different cultures during different periods of time now how to turn all these ambitions into a building the prize-winning design features a cylindrical building set in a pool that and the cylinders gridded glass roof and which is that and we will see it from inside to the cylinder to agree the glass roof slants downwards until part of it disappears below the ground level as you can see in that picture you have in front of you the library complex is built on a 45 on a about 500,000 square feet sight and the cylinder itself that comprises the main building is about 1,700 square feet in diameter the roof itself the outside roof resembles a giant microchip but it's sixth floor plan also echoes the hieroglyph rock of the sun-god you see the red the red sun god sign on on his on the head of the Pharaoh on Horus head this is another symbol of ancient Egypt in there now about two-thirds of the building as I said before is surrounded by water the level surface of the pool emphasizing emphasizes the tilting motion of the structure and provide dynamic reflections of the walls which I'm going to talk about the water also serves as a cooling device for the air-conditioning system and they had chosen specific types of plants and algae that are self-cleaning for the pool so they don't have to keep emptying it and do vacuum cleaning luckily we don't have to do that so that the plants do that for us and it also contains they under the water you have spotlights that turn on at light and the spotlights are arranged in such a way that they represent the constellation in the sky as they were at the time of the ancient library so they did the astronomical research and when you see the lights you think this is how the sky looked like in those days before Christ amazing they tell you when there is a will there is a way these guys had a will and they did the impossible with nothing on him they have nothing in those days now what does the library complex contain today the library complex contains a conference centre well actually a few of them not just one it has a planetarium which is that round football sized ball which is the planetarium there it also includes an international center for information studies and the Center for documentation and research next to the planetarium there is an Exploratorium that's how they call it which contains hands-on specifically for children interactive exhibits as an educational medium so that right under the planetarium now there is an archeological Museum of ancient Egypt then you'll find a calligraphy Institute and as we most of us know in this room the Arabic calligraphy is beautiful and the Arabist whether we understand Arabic or not it's beautiful decorations and many ladies who go to the Middle East Dubai in particular they buy a little necklace with their name written in Arabic in 21 or 22 karat gold so that's that's worth the trip and then they have a manuscript Museum and a conservation and restoration laboratory as should be should be fit a major library now there are various special and private collections that were donated to the library and one of them in particular of Mohammed our collections of Alexandrian archives somehow he collected some wonderful things whether from the anisa palette is from architects from old finds or from reproductions about the structures and the municipal services in that city over the ages wonderful things to see and he donated that to the library there is there is another one also donated by shadi at the Salam shanty of the Saran is a well-known Egyptian Arab movie director and he produced many many well-known movies in the regions in the 1960s and you can go there and watch his movies inside the library at the ASEAN air sometimes on a on a computer or a TV set or sometimes they have a major viewing for the overall public the the library also has a children's library well let me let me explain something about this which you can see panel or strip this is part of the Kaaba Kaaba being the cubic building that's at the center of Mecca which is covered by a dark green kind of curtain that is change every year and there is a workshop in the city of Mecca that's in Saudi Arabia of course full with people gentlemen and people from Central Asia whose specialty to spend the whole year doing the with all the all the embroidery in gold thread and it has all kinds of appropriate Quranic verses and about life and God and the supremacy of God and you you know you know what religious shrines do have and the most important part or the biggest part is the cover to the door that leads inside the Kappa Kappa doesn't have anything inside it because that was a relic from the old atheist and I got a quick times of Arabia before Islam Christianity and Judaism made an appearance in that part of the world so they have a beautiful carpet all designed like that and every year the government of Saudi Arabia would donate parts of this of this curtain and the door curtain to Chiefs of states or important organizations if you go to New York City to the United Nations General Secretariat you will feel one of those original covers of the door of the Kaaba and it is exquisite the trick is to if I don't remember if they had an explanation in English of what does it say in Arabic because what you use if you can't understand what you say but if you go and you don't find an explanation ask the guide where can we get an a translation of that because maybe they will think of that it's it's worthwhile to read speaking briefly about Kaaba you see you know Muslims go for Hajj every every year if they can if they can afford it health-wise money-wise and they go and do their prayer there and go around it if we were today in Alexandria what are the programs being offered at the library there is one ongoing program for several semesters called hellenism Judaism and Christianity in Alexandria it's a three-month program that you can follow the route the library they have a program on introduction to Greek culture they have a course on human rights they also host a lot of science and economic and cultural programs with people who are from outside the library but they just join together in doing it and these days they have the first international Coptic Studies conference which is an important thing since Egypt is a balance between cops and Muslims and okay like everyone they have a children a children brave wing we're sure they can go and do their own thing I will talk a little bit more about children in Egypt in particular and they have a cafeteria a beautiful cavity which is run actually by the Hilton chain I don't know why but it's the helping chain they run it they have beautiful espresso and mint furry so if you love that or you wanted a luncheon you just go there and have a beautiful view of the Mediterranean right in front of you wonderful place we talked I said something about the outer world the outer wall as you can see it here and I'll bring a close up the massive outer wall of the library is pattern with telegraphic carvings and these carvings are in most of the world written languages living and dead and they produce a texture resembling Egypt's striated nine side cliffs along the Nile especially in Upper Egypt which is the south of Cairo so this is supposed to see and you will see all these calligraphic things and depending on your culture which language you speak or read you can find it represented on that wall now the interesting thing also you noticed on the side of that pool around the world they planted something particularly not impressive but and I speaks much better about the library they print papyrus reeds so you have real papyrus reeds growing there I know you can buy them by the pyramids and I can do them for you or in front of you but here you see the real green plant and how it looks like so that was very thoughtful on their part the interior of the building consists of seven primary and fourteen secondary levels in the four of terraces the stepping of the floorplan avoid the claustrophobic effect common to some libraries around the world and then this way remember the windows and then you can see directly through those windows at your level out to be to the scene the view within the interior is not obscured by the height of the book stacks as each terrorist has viewing platforms to allow for unobstructed view of this year which I have already said as a vanity project the library should have little trouble doing for Alexandria what the Pan Pacific Center did for Vancouver all those who don't know Vancouver the Pan Pacific center of Vancouver or the Opera House did for Sydney or the Borden relief I did for Dubai the moment you see the structure like the the tower the Eiffel Tower you know exactly where you are you don't have to guess so they eventually the library could possibly see that but because behind the library they still have parts of the buildings of the campus of the University of Alexandria it kind of towards the building but you can't you can't demolish a university unless you give them another such campus that is worthwhile already they took part of the gardens of the university to build the library so the I promise certainly they had to get the Egyptian ruling elite get involved in that too for it to happen now talking about collections consisting of 11 stories three stories underground totaling over 743 square feet of space the library focuses on building collections in four areas about the ancient library itself about Alexandria about Egypt and about the world of knowledge that's why they try to collect as much as possible that is meaningful from all over the world and the world has been helping as I will mention now as the library was built the technology has changed and you don't always only have books on shelves in stacks or photocopies of book you have to digitize so they had to go back and digitize at least the most important things electronically and link them to the World Wide Web and you can go into the website of the library which I can give it to you if you wish and you can go into the holdings the catalog and pick books you like and if it's your only copy in the whole world you can get it through higher than in the rival alone and that will be useful for resources otherwise why not go to an example it's fun lots of good swimming so digitizing and the storage of titled electronic link to the worldwide web gives vast potential capacity to an international library with ambition to become like its predecessor universally the transfer of manuscripts and rare books onto optical discs will guarantee a more lasting conservation of books imagine described how many hundreds of years they had to spend in order to copy from the old languages now some of many libraries around the world including our hosts here have been cooperating with the Library of Alexandria before day one it is pre-opening and they were supportive both financially and and from the point of view of training the point of view or sharing ik technology and bringing Egyptian librarians to come and be trained at this library as did Canada and so many other countries around the world and for instance one of the thing is that the library here has some Arabic manuscripts you know everything was written by hand so some of the scientific political or scientific treatises written by the Arabs during their history were handwritten we've called all kinds of illuminations and so on like the old Bibles some of these documents are in this library here in Washington DC and if you want to know more about them the two to dr. fauci Tadros who is here with us Fauzi where are you he's right there stand up please this is the man to talk to if you want to know what's going on here in terms of it it's not a commercial for the library this is the real the real McCoy now currently the Library of Alexandria holds close to half a million items including books rare manuscripts maps and so on and it is targeted to contain 5 to 8 million volumes by the year 2020 and then they have also several websites so one will lead you to the other the main one be bollocks that work which I will give to you later and then you have called net and eternal Egypt and it's an amazing array or thing that they keep up-to-date and through my dealing with the library as an outside reader or interested party I was surprised to see the level of sophistication when it comes to the using the English language and they are not there are some expatriates from Europe nor in the United States and so on but most of the young people who work there are Egyptian girls and boys or men and women and fantastic work they do over that now the world did not give the library alone the total cost of the library was two hundred and thirty million dollars and they took 11 years to complete UNESCO which helped save the temple of Abu Simbel remember those with gray haired like me when when they went out in Upper Egypt and saved the temples to them up the cliff well they did the same thing by raising interest and awareness and money for the Library of Alexandria and it looked like that this is UNESCO and the countries not in any particular order that have supported Egypt by a variety of things some directly financially other did it by providing training or equipment or the Germans provided the system of bringing the book and returning them to the stacks electronically so they probably don't have to go somebody to pick it up as we used to do in all the days another thing that has been going on in the world since the library was inaugurated they have something called the Friends of the Library of Alexandria and in every country in the United States there is several of them particularly in California some on the East Coast some in the in the Midwest who have a group of people who would meet talk about the Library of Alexandria organize lectures collect money or books in support of the library and I think this is great for the Egyptian workers I'm going to be closing down slowly not for the Egyptian workers and international consultants who worked on the project and for millions of Egyptians the recreation of the 2300 year-old Alexandria library is a great source of national pride everybody is proud that he or she put their hand in it the beauty of the project lies in the leap from an intrinsically greet library to a repository of multiple layers of knowledge this knowledge is manifested through meticulously preserved ancient Egyptian papyrus next to innovative Greek treatises in philosophy arts and sciences and and in what I'd I call an integrative arab arab culture that integrated several things together why integrity because it integrated knowledge that blossomed from a triple religious heritage Jewish Christian and Muslim captivating European Turkish and easy attic influenced and buttressed by modern technological wizardry and this is what they have put all together and the Bureau of culture is when you feel that you are part of it all and it is part of you even if you don't speak the language but you learn about it and to say that I am this or that and pigeonhole ourself is not sufficient in the new world where we are now we go on picnics in Mars I'm going to be too far here but we are getting there to an impossible world and we have to be ready intellectually and scientifically to to give them that we'll look at the space station they are not only Americans or Russians or Chinese that we have with them Europeans and they have all kinds of people now there there are stark differences who between the ancient world and the age of DVD Bluetooth iPods and blackberries and so on today note it is not is not just the domain of the select few we are no more in an age where only a handful of people can read and write today there is so much information and notice that some of us do not know what to do with it and some of us or some of our countries try to curb knowledge from being disseminated with a big loss to humanity and in in our self-righteousness we we think that limiting the flow of knowledge will allow us to better control the people but if we can better control the people for a limited period of time those same people are going to wake up no matter what and the result will be something like Arab Spring or this or that but hopefully it works the way we hope it works not the way it evolves in some places can't think of it nobody has a monopoly on knowledge no one ideology no one religion no one political system and no one political discourse can claim that it has the answer to everything it is the collective diversity of human thinking that makes us who we are tomorrow's users of the library are today's school children for them to fully benefit from its potential they need to be trained into using libraries at school and in the community as part of the learning process all the way to University on beyond well if this is the case in Canada the United States and most European countries in some other countries it is still not necessarily a reality everywhere where hundreds there are seven many countries where there is no library in their schools and they don't encourage having library in their school kids don't learn that they have to go and do some research learn the process of borrowing a book that does not belong to them look after it benefit from it maybe share its content and return it in one piece without frying eggs on it and at the same time - when they grow up they know that at university they also have to do research ladies and gentlemen a lot of universities that don't have research they don't do any research they memorize what they learn in books they recited in the exam then they come with phd's I don't know how they do that but that's what happens in parts of our world in the world of finance what do we say we say that money creates money and which is true I guess I can use the same metaphor and say that knowledge creates knowledge and the more we know the more we realize that we don't know and hence we have to look for more because knowledge is power and sometimes when I give my training program or mine pre-deployment or pre posting program at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canada I say any little thing you know about the culture or the religions or whatever in the country or assigned to you may not know the whole detail but you just mention the name that you are aware about that your interlocutor who will assume at the beginning that you are tabula rasa as John Locke would put it you don't know anything that you are you really know something about them and they will pay attention to you and I say and this is knowledge is power that what why you have to know now modern times may have caught up with Alexandria the ones romantic lady of famous writers such as Lawrence Durrell Constantine Cavafy for ianforster but the special dreams it has always conjured in the imagination of the people of Egypt and the world are still there when you hear Andrea even Alexandria Virginia understand we have represented he from the library of our Library of Alexandria Virginia are they here there they are Alexandria Virginia that's the closest orange Anya is it you can get so the the more the more these people get to to visit and see the Alexandria of today especially those who lived in it today they are more willing to help them matter of fact after all Alexandria has never been just the city it was and has always remained a symbol of yearning freedom youth happiness and love Alexandria specially during the thirties forties and fifties used to be the California of Egypt what you don't do on the East Coast or somewhere in some more regulated conservative state you do it in California so is it Alexandria is a bit of California what in the real in the midst of the stormy intellectual and political discourse enveloping the region in those day in these days Egypt's continued commitment to the library will reflect a commitment to into intellectual freedom that's very important to watch and really make sure that they continue on that because without opening their eyes that the world is watching not just Cairo and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but also the educational and learning institutions they will tend to forget about that it's important for them it's important for us too with the library as a launching pad perhaps Alexandria will succeed in reclaiming its former position as a pantheon of knowledge and the Center for multiculturalism and diversity or as Lawrence Durrell described it the home of five races five languages and twelve faith my dear friends by resurrecting the Library of Alexandria Egypt has set up its own challenge it set up my own challenge I got the library of congress card yesterday I think that the chance to scan it here but I will the Library of Alexandria is a major project of major cultural and historical significance which is the title of this talk now it has to live up to it however by inviting us all to be her partners that is vision and the library in this enterprise and by us accepting the challenge the challenge has become ours - thank you very much we have few questions a few minutes for questions and anyone who will be asking a question it will be webcasted which means you will be giving permission to the library to a casual question I will ask Hassan or me sir Taher to repeat the question so everybody would know what you are asking if I hear because there is no traveling microphone so any question ma'am I bought luckily okay not it take it this is the first time I get the negative comment about those actually and I I was on one of the actually let me just finish it well taken I I don't think it was meant to be like that but I had one of the audience was a robbery and at the end of one of my luxury he said Hassan I would have given that same presentation the way you gave it so I consider that to be kosher to say if you can use the tub anyway people are free to say what they want any other question sir yeah I didn't know that the important detail but is there anything published about this yeah he said that they are the whole idea of the Library of Alexandria actually germinated first here in this library and then it was passed on or shared with the Egyptians correct and my question to him is that has there been anything because I have never written read that anywhere anything written or in an article or something that we could refer to in that I see your point I see your point so anyway it started here now I have to do the homework and do the research and find out who started here any more question sir as you notice I did not get into that particular dicey subject and the references I have will clarify lots of things there has been a general say that the library was described was destroyed over various phases the real destruction happened during the war between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra when part of the storage spaces of the library burned because of warfare at the time and then eventually what happened is that when Christianity came to Egypt and the people became Christianized they did that before Islam they were not very happy with any teachings that are against Christian Creed so they wanted to get rid of that and they say there is no cooperation in writing like if you put that to to the FBI for an investigation they will have a hard time trying to establish truth from from mythology so anyway they say that the Christians contributed to the destruction of part of the library then there is another story that says oh when the Muslims and the Arabs came to Egypt they the commander ethnological Ramirez was asked by some of the people in Egypt including Egyptian Christian what are you going to do with what's left of the library we have no idea what was left what was left what does it mean in terms of quantities or quality of material and in may in several books and what in particular they tell you that there were so many Oh the commander of the armed forces said I cannot decide on the future these books but I have to ask my my boss and his boss was a Calif homer and he had to refer to him so he sent a message to ferry over to us we found these documents what do we do with them and the story goes that caliph Omar told him more or less in those in this in this world the he said that if these papers this scroll agree with Islam there is no point in the placated things burn them if these things are contradictory to Islam we don't want them around burn them and then the conclusion was that we they it took six months to burn what's left of the Library of Alexandria in four thousand public battles in Alexandria now you know something that saturated by the numbers in those days about six hundred something there were no four thousand public bath is in Alexandria because perhaps a population of Alexandria was close to 4,000 so no corroboration and they rely on one person whose name is commander Dean Abner fifty who was an Egyptian and they say that evening fifty was the originator of that story but nobody got to know much about evening fifty or corroborate that he was the author of the story or it was attempting a publication I have with me a very interesting article it's not an article actually it's a it's an article okay in the New York Review of Books and you have Bernard Lewis we most of us know who Bernard Lewis is he and a couple more thinkers were writing and responding to each other on the pages of the review about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and certain they're not lewis and some of the others of course a dispute and say this is absolute authority whether it this is how it was destroyed or not simply don't know as simple as that however if you need to take reference to this article we can do it after the talk and then you can search it in the library that's why Marian vibrance and very interesting like to find Bernard Lewis involved and Bernard Lewis was defending the Muslims against the others which doesn't always happen yes it's free of charge this afternoon the library visitors and the users are mostly so far students University students and you have some researchers who are writers authors who are looking for a particular thing which they may know that it does exist at the library or the library helps them find it in other libraries like the Egyptian National Archives or the Tunisians and the Moroccans have very good archives to which often get to be forgotten but they have lots of manuscript so this what the government is doing you know every year for instance in Canada I think it happens in the US the same thing where students high school students are brought to the national capital on a tour so that they recognize and feel the bond between them and the national capital so they bring students from all over Egypt to visit the library and learn more about libraries and soil and explain to them and this is a magnificent step before they really have working libraries at school so these are the type of you tons of tourists many of the tourists actually buy library membership cards and you can buy that on a lot like mine they mailed it to me but you can go there and then they will take your picture and give you a library not just for the fun of it there's no anything else I'm here I'm here for another week this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 10,089

Rating: 4.6559138 out of 5

Keywords: Egypt, Library, Alexandria

Id: dZ9_YM54c-c

Length: 65min 7sec (3907 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2013