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Hello. Had the famous and fabled Library of Alexandria founded the beginning of the 3rd century BC, not existed, it might have been invented by one of the many stories housed within its walls.

It's a building of legendary status, a library set up to contain all the knowledge of all the world on shelf upon shelf of Egyptian papyri.

The legacy of the library is still with us, not just in the ideas it's stored and the ideas it's seeded, but also in the way it organized knowledge and the tools developed for dealing with that knowledge.

So this day, it influences the things we know and the way we know them. With me to discuss the Library of Alexandria, a Seraphina Cuomo, reader in Roman history, Birkbeck College London, Matthew Nichols lecture in classics at the University of Reading, and Simon Goldhill professor of Greek at Cambridge University.

Simon Goldhill, perhaps the best place to start this program, is not in Alexandria itself, but with the death of its founder Alexander the Great who died in 323 BC.

What kind of world did he leave behind him, the world's as yes I'm conquered, but then can you tell us why he made for Alexander?

Alexander changed the world for all time by spreading Greek culture across all of the east. He conquered the barbarian empire as the Greeks called it of Persia, he got as far as Afghanistan and India, and across through Egypt as well.

And what he spread throughout that world was Greek culture. It meant Greek language and Greek institutions. He founded cities across all of that area.

And what that meant was that for the next 800 years, the language of the elite was Greek, and the language indeed of a lot of the people became Greek.

It's extraordinary to think that the language of a place like Jerusalem for 800 years was Greek, the Gospels written in Greek, all of this because of the spread of his world.

Now when he died, three generals took control over the massive empire, and the one we're most concerned with was Ptolemy who took control of Egypt, and so we're left with a new Greek ruling elite over this area of Egypt.

His body was taken to Alexandria by General Ptolemy, his favorite general, and became Ptolemy I of Sotar, wasn't it? And anyway, why did he want to go to Alexandria? Was it more or less an empty plane?

Alexandria was founded by Alexandria. It was his favorite Alexandria. He founded several of them, but it was the biggest, and it rapidly became the biggest city in the world, and within 50 years it had become this massive metropolis, and partly because of the influence of Alexander's body being there and partly because of its unique position in terms of trade and in terms of possibility.

And it brought in this extraordinary polyglot community, so we have a lot of Egyptians going in there, they're being ruled by this small Greek elite, Macedonian elite, which was in charge of the city and spoke Greek, you have other nationalities flooding in, and you have this extraordinary explosion of polyglot, lots of languages, lots of cultures, lots of myths.

What other, it's nice to know, it's in Egypt, we've got the Egyptian, we've got the Greek who else? Well, you all have had Jews in there, there was a very famous Jewish community in there, speaking Aramaic in all probability, you would have had Syrians coming in from the north, you would have had people coming up from Africa, from further south in Africa, so you would have seen different skin colors, different races, and above it all, this small elite of Greeks, led by the Ptolemy's, focused on the palace and on Greek culture.

And what's so hard for the Greeks at this point, living in this place, is they're derasinated, they're separated from the central mainland, where all the national cults are, and whether it's worth a homeland, so they have to invent a culture, a little bit like the British in India, you have to invent your own Britishness, your own Greekness here, in Alexandria, you have to invent cults, you have to do something to make your culture survive in this world, and the library was part of that.

So we don't know about a city built from scratch here, are we? Yes, extraordinary thought, that he came, he founded it, he marked it out, so rather sweet, it had five quarters that were labeled Alpha Beta Gamma Delta Epsilon, ABCDE, which we said to be for Alexander the King descendant of God founded this city.

Now, that's a nice story to tell about how it's put together, but these quarters were laid out, it had a proper structure, and it was part of the way in which Greeks did invent a world, going back to Plato, going back all the way into the Sepistic movement of the fifth century, this idea that you could create a new world for yourself, and that's very much part of that Greek colonizing spirit.

Matthew Nichols, can you take us into the library itself? Could you place the library in the city? We totally grew to be the largest city by Simon, in 50 years, it was built on a very grand scale, perhaps you could elaborate a little, and that a little, and then tell us about the library.

Certainly, the city rapidly growing in the period at which the library was founded contains in its northeast corner a palace district called the Bracayon district. Sadly, that's now beneath the sea, it subsided into the sea, and we don't know very much about it archaeologically, they're increasingly, we're finding out details.

So the library was located within that palace district associated with, in some senses, inside the royal palace. It's something that the kings keep absolutely close to themselves and their court.

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