First Glance

For a thousand years, until its destruction in 642 A.D., the Alexandria Library was the western world’s largest “university.” Scholars such as Euclid, Archimedes and Origen lived, worked and taught there—among books, new and old, gathered from Mesopotamia, the Levant, Anatolia, Greece, Rome and North Africa. Scholars quartered at the library wrote scientific treatises; produced recensions of the major texts of classical authors, such as Homer and Aristophanes; and translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek. In “The Ancient Library of Alexandria: The West’s most important repository of learning,” J. Harold Ellens traces the profound, and sometimes perilous, history of this glittering institution—which helped shape the doctrines of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

Classicist J. Harold Ellens is a research scholar at the University of Michigan and an occasional lecturer at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at the Claremont Graduate School, in California. He is the author of hundreds of articles and numerous books, including The Ancient Library of Alexandria and Early Christian Theological Development (Claremont Graduate School, 1993).