The Dystopian Collapse of Alexandria | Alexandria: The Greatest City On Earth | Odyssey

[Music] just imagine a city that housed all the knowledge of the world all the and scientific treaties all the works of literature and the flights of philosophical fantasy [Music] a place where writers and artists and scientists met to debate and to pioneer thought just think of what ideas and inventions that city would produce what power its knowledge would bring to its rulers just think of what would happen if that wealth of knowledge was destroyed burnt to the ground or scattered to the winds a terrible moment when civilization itself was stopped in its tracks this sounds like some kind of science fiction fantasy but this was a reality and this was the real place where it happened a city where its secrets are hidden beneath the sea and beneath its streets [Music] this is the city of alexandria and this is its extraordinary story although 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 the modern city here really fuzzes with life but it can be a bit hard to get a handle on ancient alexandria you could spend weeks here without realizing that this was once home to what was really a roll call of the great and the third of antiquity because it was here that alexander was a great fairies it was here that cleopatra seduced mark anthony in caesar and this was the home to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world piecing together the scattered jigsaw puzzle i'm going to explore the incredible story of this extraordinary city where the pharos lighthouse shone its beacon out over spectacular theatres temples and colonnades monuments as grand as anywhere in the ancient world scholar uses a human scale 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 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 sponsor grand monuments it put 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 an ambition which stemmed from its very beginnings and the vision of its founder 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 us fourth century bc was a kind of in between time of history and golden age athens had dims and rome was still a provincial backwater but a very unlikely corner of northern greece was about to have a huge impact from there was going to come a man who would be a real player on the world stage in fact he was somebody who's 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 he united the greeks as a 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 and by the age of 24 he was already cutting a sway through the territories of the known world but he could not rest easy until he'd laid his hands on the really big prize egypt [Music] 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 fast agricultural wealth creating the manpower and resources to cover the land in glorious artworks and engineering [Music] triumphs even the greeks who thought they were culturally superior to everyone else and described anyone who wasn't greek as barbaroi barbarians respected egyptian achievements the greek father of history herodotus said that nowhere else in the world were there more marvelous things more works of unspeakable 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 alexandra arrived in egypt this pyramid was over 2 300 years old but the locals here didn't think of it as some kind of antique curiosity because this is where a god king had been buried the egyptians believed that it pulsated with a sort of sacred power confronted with a culture so alien to his own alexander didn't underestimate the challenge that faced him he realized he'd have to come up with an ingenious approach to get the egyptians on side and accept 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 we been walking down here in alexander's day what would we have seen we would have seen something quite different it would have been far grander you would have had these limestone beautifully cut blocks and he would have inscription and they would have been a big professional way lined with distinctives so it would have been quite glamorous not quite what it is now i mean was it typical to have things underground like there um for the ancient egyptians yes i mean the underground stuff is a good place for rebirth and resurrection and anything secret so they used it a great deal certainly pretty atmospheric 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 well because i knew there was a sarcophagus down i had no idea it was this size it is absolutely enormous it's sort of three meters by five meters and it weighs more than 60 tons and it's made of absolutely solid granite oh it's got glyphs on it yep yep here see you can just make out this is in fact the name of who it belongs to and it's happy in glyphs and it actually turned into apis by the greeks and so it's happening it was the great bull god the apis bull and this is his sarcophagus so it's a bull buried in here yeah it's a ball i just presumed it's so kind of glorious it would be a human no it actually is a bull burial because this was a sacred incarnation of one of the egyptian gods and so he was buried here after his death [Music] and here it says april's son of beloved son of osiris may he be given life eternity and prosperity and so on and here's his name one more time so you're really near to whom it belonged i mean the egyptians do do that in their religion don't they they mix up animals and men very happily very much so for the egyptians each god had a titanic animal so they're always closely allied which is very different from the greeks and so how did alexander deal with that very alien landscape when he arrived here alexander was brilliant i mean he instead of coming in and checking with you all our fools he instead said ah i am part of this whole thing and he came and he made offerings to the apis he gave money and lands to the temples the egyptians thought wow one of us we love him and then in this brilliant move he also visited a temple where he was hailed as the son of the chief egyptian god so he was supposed to be the divine ruler on earth which fits in with the egyptian belief system that their pharaoh is divinely born and a god on earth and so there was alexander as a pharaoh really and the egyptians loved him alexander was canny by choosing to embrace egyptian customs rather than just stomp on them he managed to affect a very sympathetic kind of regime change the egyptian people didn't think of him as one of them but one of us you know he had done remarkably well he realized his grand egyptian dream and now he was being celebrated here not just as a conqueror or a king but as a true living god but even that wasn't 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 ancient 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 to guide him on his way the ancient author plutarch tells us that alexander was drawn to this very spot a place called pharos by a prophetic dream then in the night as 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 faros is what men call it alexander believed that the mysterious visitor was none other than homer himself the great epic bars and as well as being a hard-nosed politician he was an incurable romantic and so he took his advice and this is where he came to found his city but the barren stretch of coastline alexander encountered couldn't be more different from today's hectic metropolis when alexander got here faros was still just an island and there was a tiny little settlement here and the coastline of egypt was very jagged which meant it was very difficult for boats to land that alexander had a grand plan to link faros to the mainland and so he built a causeway running all the way across almost a mile long and he extended this bit here to create a man-made harbour 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 alexandra and his successors the tommies ravened for knowledge knowledge that would give them the power to trade to build to conquer their ambition for alexandria to become the intellectual engineer of the ancient world ancient egypt land of the mighty pharaohs living god kings whose people built fantastic monuments in their honor a civilization which had 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 envisaged a unique model city strictly laid out on an innovative grid system where greek and egyptian culture came together to create one of the richest places on earth [Music] today so little is left above ground to get a sense of the ancient city you have to descend deep beneath the modern metropolis into a city of the dead i mean they're fantastic well this is it's you know typically alexandrian we've got this mishmash of different styles because you know the the medusa purely greek the demon greek but then egyptian elements the freeze up there of cobra heads and little solar disks on top all of the egyptian tradition and this was just the tomb for one family well one family we presume we're not sure there's three sarcophagi in there no bodies were ever found um the tomb robbers got here long before the archaeologist they might not have left any bodies but they've got some pretty lifelike guardians to the scene well archaeologists over the years have presumed the statues on either side of the entrance represent the owners of the tomb but what's interesting about them is if you look at the head of this milk character over here the face is detailed the hairstyle is pure roman greco-roman tradition and yet the body you know stiff one leg forward arms for the side typical of egyptian stitch 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're just we're just we're open to everything we're very receptive and there's a great example just inside the doorways here to the left you get another really good example of it as well because this is the anubis figure yeah anubis was the egyptian godman 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 is buried within this tomb it is it's fantastic it's just like top and tail isn't it he said he's got a very egyptian head and then this kind of roman body this little little roman skirt let's mix and match yeah i think the only thing i think though is that throughout the ancient world you do get this exchange of cultures you know in classical athens you've got eastern cults and the romans are very good at taking on the east as well so why is alexandria particularly good at it i think because alexandria was a new town and it 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 world as well i mean egypt the greeks were in awe of egypt so there was all this sort of cultural baggage here already but they also brought with them their their their their notions of hellenic culture of greek culture and by doing that it draped itself the mantle of egypt but at the same time brought with it it's it's greek notions it was also an extremely wealthy town and it's a porch town and they're always open to influences what you have to remember is that this was no ordinary city and it hadn't grown up organically at the bronze age or the classical age like so many of the great cities of antiquity this was if you like a kind of a high-minded new town the brainchild of a visionary and highly educated man from the age of 13 alexander had been taught day in day out by the great philosopher aristotle and a spirit of inquiry was imbued in every cell 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 as valuable a currency as grain or gold and in a precious archaeological oasis in the heart of the city com el dica archaeologists have begun to find the evidence to prove it a polish team have been working on a discovery which reveals exactly where alexandria's ideas were played out here we are in the one of the lecture halls probably it was one lecture from the complex of the university it's really interesting so you've got the lecture rooms right on the main street yes it was the center of the social life in late and alexandria and now here here we are here three rows of benches in the classrooms and the branches devoted for the students and here we have the main chair topmost seat for the probably 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 singular block of stone and probably this kind of platform or kind of podium for the student's reclamation so okay so the students have to yes do a kind of very comfortably on your steps and then the student would be there giving their paper or presentation did it get hot here you know this the electro horse were covered probably by the flat roof we don't have any indication but probably the auditorium could be high as up to five comma five meters as the level of the columns and how many teaching rooms like this are there so far we found 20 lecture halls probably it was much bigger these teaching rooms were a hot house of knowledge in the very heart of alexandria this was in no way a city of ivory towers it was buzzing with provocative and cutting-edge ideas its 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 [Music] now i've got to confess that alexandria has got a particular allure for me for one reason and it's a rather wonderful and mysterious woman called hypatia now hypatia ran her own philosophy school here and by all accounts she was quite extraordinary hypatia was born in around 350 a.d 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 revolutionized astronomy and correspondence from a fellow philosopher really sums up just how much she was valued it's a collection of letters written to her by one of her former students called sinesius and the language used is very very intimate so you get a real sense of her character and just how respected she was and sanesia says for instance that nothing in the world is more wonderful than her and that even in hades she is the only thing that he'll remember [Music] actually she's been remembered by some others too a crater on the moon's surface bears her name a journal of philosophy is called hypatia and she's just been immortalized in a new film [Music] agora [Music] imagine a hypatia working late into the night the famous alexandrian street lamps burning outside her staring up into the night sky for inspiration she was a philosopher in the true sense of the word in that she was a philosophos a lover of wisdom what's really interesting about hepatia though as with so many of her alexandrian colleagues is that she didn't just deal an abstract thought but she had a very practical application for her ideas and for instance she used her mathematics and her geometry to redesign this amazing gizmo and it was really a kind of multi-functional instrument the sort of ipod of her day if you like only in her day had a much more romantic name because this was called an astrolabe and literally that means a catcher of the stars [Music] one of the things that was worked on here in alexandria and perfected was this amazing instrument the astrolabe yeah you're clutching one yeah what did it allow people to do the astrolabe has many functions uh 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 astral app 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 we get a reading with the pointer right here we take this reading here which is a letter in arabic letter but for them it's a number okay we take this number you turn the astrolab and we have the 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 the day it's a very powerful instrument because it allows you to do all kinds of things and if you know the like night sky you know your latitude if you know the height of a mountain you can explore where you can trade it has actually changed the way they functioned [Music] alexandria did sponsor pure reason pure thoughts ideas just for ideas sake but it was also an immensely busy and practical place the ashley for example was very beautiful but when it was applied it allowed men to trade and to travel and to conquer the whole city was very enterprising and outward looking and that ethos 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 alexandria's intellectual ambition was immense to house within its walls all knowledge and with that knowledge make its rulers the most powerful people on earth [Music] although ancient alexandria is virtually invisible the ghost of its presence is there in the layout of the modern city [Music] i'll tell you what is very exciting and because the modern city is laid out on the ancient grid plan when you walk down these streets you are physically walking in the footsteps of hypatia and all those other fantastic philosophers and that feels like a very good place to [Music] be [Music] as a cultural melting pot with intellectual ambition ancient alexandria became a unique environment for scholarship a place where the extraordinary thinker hypatia schooled in greek thought could also draw on egyptian wisdom and babylonian science to help her map the 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 [Music] one of the great characters of medical history came to alexandria he was a man called galen and even though he traveled right across the eastern mediterranean it was the cosmopolitan conditions of this city that allowed him to make quite extraordinary advances in fact it was here he made scientific breakthroughs that wouldn't be better for another 1500 years so what are these treasures that you're removing from the tubs here there are a variety of things there's a brain of a horse and this one with the with the spinal cord attached oh that's the dog it's lovely so i hope you guys are very strict to vegetarians it's not it's way beyond my life experience so it's all right i'm not expecting you to eat them it's all right good just explain to me because you're a veterinary anatomist so why have you got a particular interest in galen it's really because of the brain because i think galen was the central uh mover in the history of studying the brain he was the first person who realized what it was and what it did and why was alexandria such a key city for him in the european part of the mediterranean world there were taboos and then eventually laws against uh dropping up dead people dissecting dead people which made 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 in egypt because the egyptians had much more of a tradition and partly because of mummification they had much more tradition of dealing with parts of dead human people and perhaps not worrying about it so much that the brain wasn't of any particular importance to the egyptians because there are stories of them when they're doing the mummification of them pulling the brain out through the nose for instance yes we don't know whether it's herodotus he said that we don't know whether that's actually true you need an enormous nose to get a brain out through um but it's certainly true the thing that the egyptians and the greeks had in common neither of them thought the brain was very important until galen came along aristotle said it was probably just the radiator for the hot the heart creates all this heat and the brain is just a way of radiating it away uh out of the body and so why was galen 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 up the front with all its folds and here's the cerebellum at the back it's even finer folds you look on the inside and you see it's even there's the brain stem down there it's even more complicated so it's got all these different bits so it doesn't look like something that's just there to radiate heat away he 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 senses attached to it if you dissect a brain i get this out this is a sheep brain with the eyes still attached yeah lovely and that that's 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 guards 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 added a bit of poetry to something fairly disgusting and so he demonstrated that not only that's the brain where all the sensory information comes in but also he changes where all the nerves radiate out to the body to move the body so he's really showing the brain takes the information in processes it puts it out again 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 and 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 of things in the human soul as well he completely changed the way we think about the body and especially the brain [Music] alexandria created a buzzing environment where men like galen and women like hypatia could meet light minds and begin to reveal the workings of the universe because these thinkers weren't working in isolation and that's 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 [Music] 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 its predecessor's spirit there have been collections of texts and books in 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 work of literature tragedy comedy and poetry every history every scientific treatise from maths to medicine physics to astronomy and not just greek texts but works from around the world in hebrew latin babylonian and later 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 scroll might be the only copy of that papyrus in the whole world today the majority of the few fragments that remain now survive not in alexandria but another bastion of learning oxford university how many of these texts would there have been in the libraries oh i reckoned half a million everything from homer some of the earliest greek papyri were texts of the homeric poems the iliad and the odyssey to plato philosophy written in greek on papyrus to in the later period arabic and even earlier uh hebrew the scale of ambition is extraordinary so how physically how did 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 tragedy 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 bantaquarian book collectors in other ways acting like a an institution building up a fundamental collection for scholars to work on but if you've got this massive volume of work how are they keeping tabs on it all how are they organizing it they developed a system which was really the invention of the modern book catalog the alexandrian scholar calimicus invented the first book catalog which simply had an entry for author title uh 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 can just about make it out yes and in alexandra are they mainly copying material or are they actually adding to it i mean are you getting new scholarship there as well absolutely they're constantly commenting on them this is a copy of plato's republic in which there's a tiny hand has been writing a marginal commentary into the margin explaining and correcting uh the text so you get the feeling of a kind of buzzing hive of readers and scholars working and operating on the text so impressive isn't it so you've got the genius of plato then you've got somebody else centuries later adding their own ideas [Music] access to information enabled the alexandrians to revolutionize scientific thought but they also studied theology it was in alexandria that the hebrew bible was first translated into greek by understanding a 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 laws were passed so that no book could leave the city and even ships entering its harbour were searched to see if new texts could 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 had in 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 held the single existing copy of a book so just imagine if that was lost you'd lose those ideas forever and tragically that's exactly what happened in alexandria knowledge had made the city an intellectual powerhouse of antiquity it had made thinkers like hypatia 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 for the ancient world alexandria its libraries and for hypatia herself the result would be catastrophic by the end of the 4th century a.d 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 house 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 thoughts and men who are at the top of their game so it should be no surprise that from the first century id the key leaders of a new religion should want to come here to play out their ideas [Music] only a few years after christ's ascension the gospel writer 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 [Music] but reconciling a multi-faith environment with a religion whose followers believed exclusively in one god proved a testing challenge for the city saint mark himself died at the hands of pagans for preaching his faith it was a foretaste of the violence to come yet 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 hepatia has a very secure place but the problem came when the christians wanted not just spiritual but temporal power and then all that tolerance and piety becomes muddied with power politicking and unfortunately for hypatia she'd come into conflict with one of the greatest political operators of the day hepatia 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 into somewhere like the caesarean and you see what originally we built as a as an egyptian and greek temple with all the heads removed from the statues 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 hypatia is a wealthy educated pagan to him that means which he puts around rumors about all of the objects she makes for astronomy her instruments clearly they're used for divination therefore 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 learn that it was hypatia's work with the astrolabe in particular that sparked hatred against her spurred on by one of their leaders the blood of the christian mob was up they started to seek her 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 a highborne woman like her this would have been a terrible public disgrace but then things got even uglier they pulled her into the caesarean 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 straka which were probably broken pots or broken roof tiles they started to flay her alive once she was dead they pulled her body limb from limb and then they took her dismembered body parts to the edge of the city where they burnt them on a pyre in effect this was a witch's death hipaa's tragedy was the tragedy of [Applause] alexandria the destruction of its spectacular monuments the desecration of his extraordinary libraries and with that the heartbreaking demise of the wealth of knowledge which had made it great for over 700 years [Music] there are a few lines desperately sad written by a pagan who was wandering through the streets of alexandria watching the world he knew crumble around him [Music] [Applause] is it true that we greeks are really dead and only seem alive and in our fallen state we imagine that a dream is life or are we truly alive and is life itself dead for some alexander's dream was becoming a living nightmare after centuries of onslaught only one percent of alexandria's vast book collection has survived into the modern world rather bizarrely one of the survivors of alexandria's destruction has ended up here it's that massive lump of red granite uh the obelisk that we very affectionately now call cleopatra's needle and it was brought here from egypt in 1878 but in its heyday it stood just at the edge of the caesarean so it was only a stone's throw away from where hypatia was killed i think that in many ways hypatia was an incarnation of alexander's dream she was living proof that knowledge is power she was immensely knowledgeable and therefore the extraordinary city that she lived in allowed her a huge amount of influence but the key word here is extraordinary because alexandria was a city less ordinary and perhaps its ambition that that dream to acquire and to caretake all the knowledge of the world was just too perfect to last we should bear that in mind because it is of course a very modern dream i mean after all that is what the world wide web does and so when we know that alexandria failed and as a result a whole epoch failed we should take a very careful note for that reason we mustn't bury the memory of alexandria but celebrate it you

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 139,033

Rating: 4.8151503 out of 5

Keywords: odyssey, classical history, classic history, ancient history, ancient civilisation, alexandria, ancient greece, wonder of the world, alexander the great

Id: 6eMKOoZdvJo

Length: 47min 27sec (2847 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021