The Mouseion revisited

[pappagooch]

The grand new Bibliotheca Alexandrina reminds us of the glory of the famous ancient Library of Alexandria, which was much more than a repository for books but a university and teaching hospital.

The late American astrophysicist Carl Sagan reconstructed the ancient Library of Alexandria, the Mouseion, for his TV series Cosmos. He strolled through this replica of the ancient building, depicting some of the events that took place there. "This legendary library was the mind and glory of the greatest city on earth, and was the first centre for scientific research in the history of the world," he told the audience. "In this Mouseion lived a community of scientists who discovered the sciences of physics, linguistics, medicine, astronomy, geography, philosophy, mathematics, biology and geology. Here scientific studies reached adulthood. Here genius flourished. Here in the Library of Alexandria were the first serious trials to understand the world."

Sagan was right. The torch of science that sparkled at the Library of Alexandria between the fourth century BC and the fourth century AD was its greatest and most enduring achievement.

When the Mouseion was commissioned by Ptolemy I Soter, successor to Alexander the Great, in around 300 BC, it was to be divided into schools similar to modern university faculties. After some time the books it held grew so great in number that a second, or "daughter", library was built some distance away below the Temple of Serapis. However, the main collection of books was still held at the Great Library in the Mouseion, which was most probably situated well inside the Brucheum, the royal quarters near the shore which are now at least partly submerged. Appropriately enough, this would have been quite near the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

The Great Library contained several hundred thousand papyrus and vellum scrolls, including 123 plays by Sophocles and others by Aeschylus and Eurepides. It contained a history of the world from the time of the Biblical Flood written by Prossos, a Babylonian monk. Prossos dated the Flood to 433,000 years before his time, which is about ten times the calculation made in the Old Testament.

In its later years, the Mouseion had an important faculty of philosophy. Early on it adopted the philosophy of the Peripatetics, and later that of the Stoics. Platonius started the school of Neoplatonism, later presided over by Hypatia, the daughter of Theon, the last director of the Mouseion and a brilliant mathematician. Hypatia was cruelly lynched by a rabble of monks in 415 AD. With her murder the torch of philosophical knowledge was extinguished until it was rekindled by Muslim scientists and translators between the ninth and 12th centuries.

Names like Al-Hazen and Henein Ibn Ishaq should be emphasised in this context. Without their contributions to science, Europe would have lived in darkness for a very long time.

In the fields of mathematics and geometry, Euclid (300 BC), in his book The Elements, laid the foundations of mathematics, geometry and mathematical logic. His teachings were still taught up until the 20th century. In time, The Elements was translated into many languages and it is said that after reading the book, the great thinker Isaac Newton was changed forever. In the 20th century another form of geometry was innovated. We now have Euclidian and non- Euclidian geometry.

View: Full Article | Source: Al-Ahram Weekly