The library of Alexandria (3): The Library of Alexandria acquired books in a curious way

The claim of the Ptolemies was to collect “all books of all peoples of the earth” , perhaps following the advice of Demetrios of Falera . Certainly some of the stories that were told in antiquity reveal the passion of the Ptolemies to equip its library of Alexandria with the books which were in the known world. Sources also foreshadow the rivalry between the two great libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum.

The library is a Greek creation

Alexandria was the spiritual and cultural capital of the world from the third century BC to the fifth or sixth century AD. Under the largest library of Antiquity, which sought to retain all the knowledge stored in books systematically with exemplary sense of intellectual freedom, lived and worked a college or community of wise and educated persons and scholars who developed the physics, astronomy, mathematics, geometry, geography, engineering, medicine, philosophy, literature, grammar, rhetoric … They were the basis of Western knowledge.

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