Alexandria has two libraries. The first, of which essentially nothing survives, was built by Ptolemy I and his son Ptolemy II in the early third century BCE and contained, at its peak, an estimated four hundred thousand papyrus rolls — the largest concentration of written knowledge in the ancient world. The second, built between 1995 and 2002, is the deliberate intellectual descendant of the first. It is one of the largest single library buildings ever constructed, and the only major contemporary library that explicitly carries the name and the mission of a destroyed ancient predecessor.
The ancient library
The first library was the dream of Ptolemy I Soter, the Macedonian general who became the first Hellenistic king of Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great. It was housed in the Mouseion — a research institute attached to the royal palace complex — and was overseen by a series of distinguished chief librarians, beginning with Zenodotus and culminating with Aristarchus of Samothrace, whose editions of Homer remain foundational to the textual scholarship of the Iliad and Odyssey.
The library's destruction is one of the great open questions of ancient history. It was not destroyed in a single event. A fire in 48 BCE during Julius Caesar's siege of Alexandria certainly damaged a substantial part of the collection. Aurelian's reconquest of the city in 273 CE caused further losses. The Christian closure of the temples under Theodosius in the late fourth century probably consumed what remained of the daughter library at the Serapeum. By the time of the Arab conquest in 642 CE, the library as an institution had ceased to exist, although the seventh-century story of Caliph Umar ordering the surviving books to be burned to heat the public baths is now considered historiographically dubious.
Four hundred thousand papyrus rolls. The largest concentration of written knowledge in the ancient world. Almost none of it survives.
The new building
The decision to build a new Bibliotheca Alexandrina was made by the Egyptian government in 1986, supported from the outset by UNESCO. An international architectural competition was held in 1989; the winner was a small Norwegian-Austrian practice, Snøhetta, then almost unknown and led by the architects Craig Dykers and Kjetil Trædal Thorsen. Construction began in 1995 and the building opened to the public on 16 October 2002.
The building is a disc tilted toward the Mediterranean Sea, partially submerged into the ground. The roof is glass and aluminium, sloped at sixteen degrees, designed to admit even northern light without direct sun on the reading rooms. The principal exterior is grey granite — Aswan granite, in fact, transported north — and is engraved with characters from one hundred and twenty different writing systems, ancient and modern. The disc shape was chosen as a deliberate symbol of the sun; the tilt, as a gesture toward the sea.
The reading rooms
The principal reading hall is one of the largest single library rooms ever built: 38 000 square metres on eleven levels, all visually open to the central glazed roof. The total capacity is 8 million bound volumes, 50 000 maps and historical manuscripts, and 200 000 audio-visual recordings; the current collection holds about 1.8 million volumes, with active acquisition.
Visitor access to the main hall is by general ticket. The hall is in active use as a research library — students from the University of Alexandria and from across the Arab world work in the upper levels — and the visitor is expected to remain quiet. The lower visitor levels include exhibition galleries that change quarterly.
The sub-museums
Below the reading hall, three permanent museums are integrated into the library complex.
The Antiquities Museum
A small but exceptional sub-museum dedicated to objects recovered from the underwater excavations of Alexandria's submerged Royal Quarter, conducted between 1992 and 2010 by the IEASM expedition under Franck Goddio. Sphinxes, a colossal granite head of Ptolemy XII, statues of Ptolemaic dignitaries — all salt-encrusted, beautifully lit. Allow forty-five minutes. The collection is the best small museum dedicated to Hellenistic and Roman Alexandria.
The Manuscript Museum
Rare manuscripts from the medieval Islamic and Coptic traditions, including a number of important Quranic manuscripts and a sequence of illustrated medical and astronomical works. The presentation is intimate; the items rotate every three months.
The Sadat Museum
A focused biographical museum dedicated to President Anwar Sadat (1918–1981), including the uniform he wore at the time of his assassination, personal correspondence, and exhibits on the 1973 War and the Camp David Accords. The presentation is reverent; the museum is small and intense.
The Pharos
Of the Lighthouse of Alexandria — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World — essentially nothing remains above water. Built around 280 BCE on the small island of Pharos at the entrance to the harbour, it stood between 100 and 140 metres tall (estimates vary) and used a polished bronze mirror to project its fire signal over thirty kilometres out to sea. Earthquakes between 956 and 1323 CE destroyed it incrementally; the surviving stones were used by Sultan Qaitbay to build a coastal fortress on the same site in 1477.
The Qaitbay Citadel is now open to visitors. It sits on the foundations of the Pharos. Some of its lower courses use stones recycled from the lighthouse — large granite blocks visible in the seaward wall are identifiably pharaonic in their dimensions. Below the citadel, in the harbour shallows, underwater archaeologists have mapped the collapsed remains of the lighthouse since the 1990s; some of the recovered statues are now on display in the Bibliotheca's Antiquities Museum.
Almost nothing survives of the first library. The second was built to acknowledge the absence, not to fill it.
Practicalities
- Open 10:00 – 18:00 Sunday through Thursday; 14:00 – 18:00 Friday and Saturday.
- Three sub-museums (Antiquities, Manuscript, Sadat) each carry separate small admissions, bundled with the general ticket.
- Photography is permitted in the public reading levels and the museums; flash and tripod are not.
- Allow two to three hours for a thoughtful visit, longer if you intend to use the reading rooms.
- The on-site café is moderately priced. The corniche outside the library is one of the loveliest urban promenades in Egypt.
Last on-site visit · January 2026