Alexandria: The Library
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
BBC
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 29 July 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Natalie is joined by Professors Islam Issa and Edith Hall to tell the story of the great library of Alexandria. It was included in Alexander the Great's original design for his city, located in the Nile Delta. Alexandria was to be a city of knowledge.
The founders of the library were ambitious: they wanted nothing less than to collect all the books in the world. They were willing to pay huge sums, but they were also ruthless and unscrupulous. The Ptolemies would write to fellow rulers and wealthy friends and ask to borrow their priceless texts. Then the library would copy the scrolls, and return the copies. Or alternatively they'd just steal them.
Handily, papyrus, the principal reading material of the era, grew in great abundance around Alexandria. So there was plenty of it for those copies. Less fortunately, it's extremely flammable. So in 48 BCE, when Julius Caesar's besieged army set fire to ships in the harbour in order to block the invading fleet, the fire spread and destroyed a significant part of the library.
'Rockstar mythologist' Natalie Haynes is the best-selling author of 'Divine Might', 'Stone Blind', and 'A Thousand Ships' as well as a reformed comedian who is a little bit obsessive about Ancient Greek and Rome.
Islam Issa is Professor of Literature and History at Birmingham City University. His book 'Alexandria, the City that Changed the World' is the Winner of the Runciman Award and The Times, Sunday Times, TLS, Booklist, Epoch Times and Waterstones Book of the Year.
Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at Durham University, specialising in ancient Greek literature. She has written over thirty books and is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:06.0 | Ladies and gentlemen, today I am standing up for the Great Library of Alexandria. |
| 0:29.9 | Thank you. Now, if there is one thing we love on this show, it's a book. |
| 0:35.8 | And if there is one place we love on this show, it's one with a lot of books in it. |
| 0:39.6 | So it gives me enormous pleasure to say that I'm standing up for the Great Library of Alexandria. It's surely one of the most tragic losses for |
| 0:44.7 | book nerds in all of antiquity. The library was part of the design of Alexandria from the outset. |
| 0:52.6 | So when Alexander the Great sketched out his design for the perfect city, |
| 0:57.2 | he wanted his city to have a library, sacred to the muses, |
| 1:02.4 | the Greek goddesses of the arts and astronomy. |
| 1:05.2 | Let's not forget Urania. |
| 1:06.8 | And Alexander was an extremely cultured man. |
| 1:10.0 | His tutor Aristotle had taught him to prize poetry and especially Homer. He was a massive Homer nut. He didn't build the library himself. He had left the city by the time they got to that stage of building. So much like the Ferris Lighthouse, the library was begun by Alexander's successor, Ptolemy |
| 1:28.2 | 1, developed further by Ptolemy 2, enhanced by Ptolemy 3, and so on. If you're wondering why |
| 1:35.0 | Alexander might have thought Egypt was a particularly good place for a library, the answer is |
| 1:41.9 | that papyrus plants grew in huge quantities in Egypt and had done for millennia. |
| 1:48.5 | These are gigantic plants. The stalks can be five metres high. |
| 1:53.9 | And it's an incredibly versatile material. So you can use, if you weave it, you can use the fibers to make boxes, baskets. |
| 2:00.5 | If you platt it, you can make |
| 2:01.8 | ropes. People used to stuff it into mattresses. Occasionally, you see it as a packaging around a mummy |
| 2:07.9 | called cartonage. And of course, you could use it to make a writing surface. Our word paper comes from |
| 2:13.8 | papyrus. So the glut of papyrus plants near Alexandria was a vital ingredient for its |
| 2:20.7 | success as a centre of knowledge. Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome to the stage, |
... |
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