The new Bibliotheca Alexandrina opens this spring on the shores of the Mediterranean atop the foundations of a great lost legend. Will it be a beacon of intellectual hope and openness for a country sorely in need of one? An ordinary library with none of its precursor’s ancient luster? Or simply the world’s largest phone booth?
Late this April, in a storied spot on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, international dignitaries will gather for the dedication of a sparkling new building whose tilted cylindrical shape is intended to evoke the power of the rising sun. The granite exterior wall is patterned in alphabets, an assortment of characters and hieroglyphs from 200 different writing systems ancient and modern. They mingle to project the sense that the building is a mysterious receptacle of some sort—a jar, a jug, a scroll—crammed with strange messages. And the impression is exactly right, because the building promises an implausible but somehow still thrilling answer to an old dream. Since 1990 its builders have been claiming that, when it opens, it will be a new, gloriously revived incarnation of the ancient library of Alexandria.
What could be more romantic than the idea of resurrecting the Great Library of antiquity, where the riches of classical learning, accumulated over centuries, were stored—only to be lost in a conflagration whose details remain in shadow? On the other hand, what could be more ridiculous? The ancient library was, after all, famed not for architecture or material monuments but for the vast store of knowledge it contained, most of it now irretrievably lost. You can rebuild buildings, but you cannot restore a great scholarly endeavor simply by declaring you will do so. It’s especially difficult when your site, once considered the center of the civilized world, is located in a nation that, far from reaching out to collect as much as possible of the world’s knowledge, has been steadily flirting with book and press censorship, Islamic fundamentalism, and outright cultural repression.