Modern day Alexandria is a city that bustles with commerce and tourism, but the industry in no way detracts from its wondrous past. The city’s East Harbor is where much of ancient Alexandria was located, and to take a walk around the water’s edge is to walk back along thousands of years of history.

northern Egypt

The city fell to the Arabs in AD 641, and a new capital of Egypt, Fustat, was founded on the Nile. After Alexandria’s status as the country’s capital ended, it fell into a long decline, which by the late Ottoman period, had seen it reduced to little more than a small fishing village.

As shown in the given Alexandria location map that Egypt is located at the south-east Mediterranean coast in the north-central region of Egypt. Alexandria is the largest city lying along the south-east Mediterranean coast. It is the largest sea-port of Egypt.

The ancient underwater ruins of Cleopatra sunk into the sea more than 1500 years ago. Historians believe that things like earthquakes and tidal waves caused the downfall of Cleopatra’s palace.

Julius Caesar himself

Historians believe that eventually around 700,000 books and scrolls were accrued under the roof of the Library of Alexandria. This was by no means the first library to ever exist, but it was the first to take a fully comprehensive approach to gathering knowledge.

Ammianus Marcellinus thought that it happened when the city was sacked under Caesar, and Caesar himself reported the burning of Alexandria as an accidental consequence of his war against his great rival Pompey, in 48–47 BCE.

8) The ancient library of Alexandria was destroyed on two different occasions. The original library branch was located at the royal palace at Alexandria, near the harbor. When Julius Caesar intervened in the civil war between Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIII, Caesar set fire to the ships in the harbor.

Julius Caesar

It would be a catastrophic loss in cultural terms, and purely economic terms; but only a minority of material would be lost for good. A lot of material would be irreplaceable, to be sure, but that’s mainly antiquarian material, not treatises on cutting-edge technology.

Few first class works survived, like Euclid, Apollonius and Archimedes, but there is a lot of evidence that this is just the tip of the iceberg. For example, almost all writings of Hipparchus, “the father of astronomy” are lost. We know about them from the account of C. Ptolemy who lived 3 centuries later.

around 2000 years

Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries. The daughter library of the Serapeum may have survived after the main Library’s destruction.

Harvard Library technically holds the world’s largest private library with about 18 million different registered items. It is the largest private and largest university library in the world.