The Library of Alexandria

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Library at Alexandria. Founded by King Ptolemy in the 3rd century BC the library was the first attempt to collect all the knowledge of the ancient world in one place. Scholars including Archimedes and Euclid came to study its grand array of papyri. the legacy of the library is with us today, not just in the ideas it stored and the ideas it seeded but also in the way it organised knowledge and the tools developed for dealing with it. It still influences the things we know and the way we know them to this day.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Simon Goldhill 8 episodes
  Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge
• Matthew Nicholls 5 episodes
  Lecturer in Classics at the University of Reading
• Serafina Cuomo 6 episodes
  Reader in Roman History at Birkbeck College, University of London

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Programme ID: b00j0q53

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00j0q53

Auto-category: 020 (Library and information sciences)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. Had the famous and fabled Library of Alexandria, founded at the beginning of the third century BC, not existed, it might have been invented by one of the many stories housed within its walls.