Bibliotheca Alexandrina et Mouseion
About
Founded under the early Ptolemies as the research wing of Alexandria's royal Mouseion, once the ancient world's greatest center of scholarship. A purge of scholars in 145 BCE and a fire during Caesar's siege in 48 BCE had each cost it dearly, but writers of the 2nd century CE still describe active scholarship in the city. Alexandria itself was rocked by the Kitos War in 115–117 CE, suppressed by Trajan's general Marcius Turbo the same month Trajan died — the Mouseion's exact condition at that moment isn't recorded, but the institution itself endured.
What happened here
Books are scrolls, kept in labelled pigeonholes around the walls, and you read them standing at a desk or sitting in the courtyard with a slave to hold the roll. Greek and Latin collections are kept separately, often in facing rooms. Nothing is borrowed. A staff of copyists keeps the collection alive, because a scroll handled regularly lasts a couple of generations at best, and a library that stops copying is a library that is dying. Readers are respectable men and their secretaries; access is a favour that can be withdrawn. Libraries attach themselves to baths, temples and fora rather than standing alone, so a visit is folded into a day of other business. Lamps are forbidden inside for obvious reasons.
Sources
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →