История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 68 стр.

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69
UNIT 10
ALL THE BOOKS IN THE WORLD
How the great library At Alexandria was created
A former personal bodyguard and general of Alexander the Great, Ptolemy
has seized power in Egypt after Alexander’s death in 323 BC. Although he was
one of the world’s great military leaders, and ran a mighty kingdom, he also sought
a different kind of power: to conquer the world of knowledge.
He set out to build the library containing everything that had ever been
written. The city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, was
the major political and commercial centre of Alexander’s vast empire, which
stretched from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. Ptolemy was
determined that it should also be the world’s cultural capital.
Books taken from visiting ships
Ptolemy made a Greek scholar, Demetrius Phalereus, responsible for
creating a great place of learning centre on the royal palace. Together the two men
started to build a storehouse of knowledge. While Ptolemy wrote to emperors,
kings and princes asking them to send their nations’ books, Demetrius dispatched
agents to buy books abroad. All ships sailing into the port of Alexandria were
searched for books, and any found were copied by a team of scribes. The copies
were returned, and the originals stayed on the shelves.
The great enterprise continued for many years. During the reign of Ptolemy 11
(284-246 BC) the poet Callimachus catalogued the library and recorded 90 000
original manuscripts and 400 000 copies; a further 42 800 rolls were stored in a
smaller library elsewhere in the city. But the library’s vast collection was lost to
the later generations.

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