The following is an encore presentation of everything everywhere daily.

Sometime during the rain of Ptolemy the first or Ptolemy the second,

the Egyptian state decided to build an institution dedicated to

accumulating all human knowledge in the city of Alexandria. As the city grew

this institution grew along with it to become the greatest knowledge repository

in the ancient world.

And then Julius Caesar burned it down.

Maybe.

Learn more about the Library of Alexandria,

how it was created, and how it ended,

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. The Library of Alexandria was the best known Library in the Ancient world, but it certainly wasn't the first.

We know of at least one large collection of cuneiform Hittite tablets that was found in the

modern day Turkish city of Bois Kale.

There was also a large library located at the Academy of Gandhi Shopper in Western Iran.

It was an enormous collection of Persian, Indian, and Chinese text which may have numbered as

high as 400,000.

In fact, the Academy of Gandhi Shopper is so important

that I might do a future episode on it.

That being said, there weren't a lot of libraries.

The written word was still rare at this time. Everything had to be written or copied by hand.

Literacy was relatively rare and limited to only a few people.

Despite how long its civilization was around and its many great monuments, Egypt really wasn't a great

...