Original subtitles

(MYSTICAL MUSIC)

Just imagine a city that housed

all the knowledge of the world.

All the mathematical and scientific treaties.

All the works of literature,

and the sonnets of philosophical fancy.

A place where writers, and artists, and scientists met

to debate and to pioneer thought.

Just think of what ideas

and inventions that city would produce.

What power knowledge would bring to its rulers.

Just think of what would happen if that wealth of knowledge

was destroyed, burnt to the ground,

or scattered to the wind.

A terrible moment, when civilization itself

stops in its tracks.

This sounds like some kind of science fiction fantasy.

But this is a reality, and this was the

real place that it happened.

A city where its secrets are hidden beneath the sea.

And beneath its streets.

This is the city of Alexandria.

And this is its extraordinary story.

(MYSTICAL MUSIC)

Although you might think that Athens and Rome

were the greatest cities in antiquity.

For my money that claim, could well go to Alexandria

for over 2,300 years the city has occupied a key junction

between the eastern and western worlds.

Lying in Egypt at the top of the Nile belt on the

coast of the Mediterranean, today it's a sprawling place.

And every inch is jammed packed with activity.

But curiously, the ancient city

is conspicuous by absence.

(UPBEAT MUSIC)

A modern city here, it's really buzzing with life.

But it can be a bit hard to get a handle

on ancient Alexandria, you could spend weeks here

without realizing that this is one

this is a really a roll call

of the great of antiquity.

Because it was here that Alexander the Great

was buried, it was here that Cleopatra seduced

Mark Anthony, Cesar, and this is the home

of one of the seven wonders in ancient worlds.

Piecing together the scattered jig saw puzzle,

I'm going to explore the incredible

stories of this extraordinary city.

Pharos Lighthouse shone it's beacon out over

spectacular stages, temples and colonnades.

Monuments as grand as anywhere in the ancient world.

This is a human scale it's more than 30 meters high.

[BETTANY] Which combines the best of

Greek, Roman, and Egyptian design

to create a dynamic hybrid culture.

We're mixing and matching, we're being

purely Alexandrian, we're taking what we want.

Sticking it together.

We're open to everything.

And most importantly where intellectual advances,

new philosophies, new sciences, were a driving

force of the city.

And that's what makes this place so special.

Although Alexandria was amazingly wealthy,

it didn't just sponsor grand monuments,

they put an absolute value on wisdom.

Because wisdom meant power, and it was Alexandria's

ultimate ambition to become the most powerful city on earth.

By capturing all the world's knowledge within its walls.

An ambition which stemmed from its very beginnings,

and a vision of its founder.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

By ancient Egyptian standards Alexandria

was a relative new build.

It was founded only 2,300 years ago.

Halfway in time between the pyramids, and us.

The fourth century BC was a kind of in between

time in history.

Still remained Athens, there's them.

But then Rome was still a provincial back water.

But a very unlikely corner of northern Greece

was about to have a huge impact.

From there was gonna come a man

who would be a real player on the world stage.

In fact he was somebody, who was gonna change

the world order.

That man was Alexander the Great.

Great because Alexander's achievements

were truly outstanding.

From provincial Macedonian beginnings,

he united the Greeks of the nation.

Defeated the Persians, and set about creating

the largest empire the world had ever seen.

From northern Greece his territory stretched out

across the Mediterranean, deep into the Middle East.

And towards North Africa.

Alexander was prodigiously ambitious.

By the age of 24 he was already cutting his way

through territories of the known world.

But, he could not rest easy until

he'd laid his hands on the really big prize.

Egypt.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

Because this was one of the most admired and envied

countries in the whole of antiquity.

The Nile River which watered the land gave

it vast agricultural wealth.

Creating a manpower and resources to cover the land

in glorious artworks and engineering triumphs.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

Even the Greeks, who thought they were culturally

superior to everyone else, and describe anyone

who wasn't Greek as barbary, barbarians,

respected Egyptian achievements.

The Greeks saw their history said that,

nowhere else in the world were there more marvelous things.

More works of unspeakable greatness.

Such a rich prize was irresistible to Alexander.

In 332 BC he invaded Egypt, and overcame the Persians,

who dominated the Egyptian people

for the past two centuries.

But to seal his victory he now had to win over

the hearts and minds of the Egyptian people.

Who's unique religion and culture had been

rooted in the land for over 3000 years.

By the time Alexander arrived in Egypt,

this pyramid was over 2,300 years old.

The didn't think of it as some kind of antique curiosity,

because this is where a God king had been buried.

The Egyptians believed that it pulsated

with a sort of sacred power.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

Confronted with a culture so alien to his own,

Alexander didn't underestimate the challenge that faced him.

He realized he had to come up with an ingenious approach

to get the Egyptians on his side and accept

his new Greek rule.

Typically when it comes to making sense of the

story of Alexandria, the clues to how he did this

are buried deep beneath the desert sand.

So, had I been walking down here in Alexander's day

what would we have seen?

You would have seen something quite different.

It would have been far grander.

You would of had these limestone beautifully cut blocks.

You would have an inscription, and there would've

been a big procession way, lined with sphinxes.

So it would have been quite glamorous.

Not quite what it is now.

Was it typical to have things underground like this?

For the ancient Egyptians, yes underground stuff

was the place of rebirth and resurrection,

and anything secret, so they used it a great deal.

[BETTANY] Thanking a spirit.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

And that's what Alexander had to get to grips with.

A culture that not only believed in life on earth.

But which was obsessed with life after death.

Wow, I knew there was a sarcophagus down here,

I had no idea it was this size.

[SALIMA] It is absolutely enormous.

It's sort of really by size 'cause it weighs more

than 60 tons and it's made of absolutely solid granite.

[BETTANY] Oh it's got glitter on it.

Yeah, yeah, here see.

This is in fact the name of who it belongs to.

It's Hapi in glyphs and it's

actually been turned into Apis by the Greeks.

And so it's Hapi the Great Bowl God, the Apis bowl.

And this is his sarcophagus.

[BETTANY] So it's a bowl buried in here.

Yeah, it's a bowl.

[BETTANY] I just presumed, that it's

so kind of glorious that it would be a human.

No it actually is a bowl burial because this

was a sacred incarnation of one of the Egyptian Gods.

And so he was buried here after his death.

And here it says Apis, son of, beloved son of Osiris

may he be given life eternity and prosperity,

and so on, and it says his name more and more times,

so you really knew to whom it belonged.

I mean the Egyptians do do that in their religion,

don't they, mix up animals and men very happily?

Very much so, for the Egyptians each God

had it's automic animals, so they're always

closely aligned, which is very different from the Greeks.

And so how did Alexander deal with that

very alien landscape when he arrived here?

Alexander was brilliant, I mean he instead of

coming in and saying, oh, you all are fools,

he instead said, ah, I am part of this whole thing.

And he came and he made offerings to the Apis.

He gave money and lands to the temples.

The Egyptians thought, wow, one of us, we love him.

And then, in this brilliant move,

he also visited a temple where he was hailed

as the son of a chief Egyptian God.

So he was supposed to be the divine ruler on earth.

Which fits into the Egyptian belief system

that their pharaoh is divinely born, and a God on earth.

And so there was Alexander as a pharaoh really,

and the Egyptians loved him.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

Alexander was cunning by choosing to embrace

Egyptian customs, rather than just dump on them.

He managed to effect the very sympathetic

kind or regime change the Egyptian people

didn't think of him as one of them, but one of us.

Here he had done remarkably well, he realized

his grand Egyptian dream and now he was being

celebrated here, not just as a conqueror or a king,

but as a true living God.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

But even that wasn't enough for Alexander,

he didn't just want to be another in a long line

of pharaoh's he really wanted to dominate the country

and that meant creating a new city that

would bare his name for all time.

But first he had to find a suitable location.

The ancient Egyptians had always looked inwards.

Their key cities centering on the Nile.

But in this Alexander differed.

He also wanted his new city to look back

towards his Greek homeland and outwards

towards his new empire.

And it was said that he had a very illustrious figure

to guide him on his way.

The ancient author Plutarch

tells us that Alexander was drawn

to this very spot, a place called Pharos

like a prophetic dream.

Then in the night as Alexander lay asleep

he saw a wonderful vision.

A venerable man with shaggy hair and a beard appeared

to stand by his side and recite these verses,

now, there is an island in the much dashing sea

in front of Egypt, Pharos is what men call it.

Alexander believed that the mysterious

visitor was none other than Homer himself

the great epic bard, and as well as being

a hard nosed politician, he was an incurable romantic.

And so he took his advice and this is where he

came to plan this city.

But the barren stretch of coastline Alexander encountered

couldn't be more different from today's hectic metropolis.

When Alexander got here Pharos was still just an island,

and there's a tiny little settlement here.

And the coastline of Egypt was very jagged.

Which meant it was very difficult for boats to land.

But Alexander had a grand plan that linked

Pharos to the mainland.

And so he built a causeway running all the way across.

Almost a mile long.

And he extended this straight

here to create a man made harbor.

This would become the busiest port in the world.

The gateway to one of the richest

and most multicultural cities on earth.

And that was only part of the dream.

Alexander and his successors the Ptolemy's

rampant for knowledge, knowledge that would

give them the power to trade, to build, to conquer.

Their ambition was that Alexandria was to become

the intellectual engine room of the ancient world.

(MYSTICAL MUSIC)

Ancient Egypt, land of the mighty Pharaoh's.

Living God kings who's people built fantastic

monuments in their honor.

A civilization which had been a key player in the region,

for over 4,000 years.

In the fourth century BC, the Greek Alexander the Great,

conquered this land, winning over

the Egyptian people, and making it his own.

Creating a new city in his name, Alexandria.

Starting from scratch, Alexander envisioned

a unique model city, strictly laid out

among innovative grid systems.

Where Greek and Egyptian culture came together

to create one of the richest places on earth.

Today so little is left above ground

to get a sense of the ancient city you have to descend

deep beneath the modern metropolis into a city of the dead.

Wow! I mean they're fantastic, aren't they?

Well this is typically Alexandrian,

where you've got this mish mash of different styles.

Look at the Medusa are purely Greek.

The Apep demon were Greek.

But then Egyptian elements,

the frees up there of

copperheads and little silver discs on top,

all of the Egyptian tradition.

And this was just the tomb for one family.

Well one family we presume, we're not sure.

There's three sarcophagi in there,

no bodies were ever found.

The tomb robbers got here long before the archeologists did.

[BETTANY] They might not have left any bodies,

but they've got some pretty life like guardians,

I'll assume.

Well archeologists over the years have presumed that

the statues on either side of the entrance

represent the owners of the tomb.

But what's interesting about them is that if you look

at the head of this over here.

The face is detailed, the hairstyle is pure Roman Greco,

Greco Roman tradition, and yet the body,

stiff, one leg forward, arms to the side,

typical of Egyptian statue.

It's quite ugly in a way, the way the two of them

are stuck together, though.

It's not particularly well done, no,

but that's part of the charm of this place.

Is we're picking, we're mixing and matching.

We're being purely Alexandrian, we're taking

what we want sticking it together.

We're not melding, creating a new art form.

We're just, we're open to everything.

We're very receptive and there's a great example,

just inside the doorways here.

To the left you get another really good

example of this as well.

Oh yes.

'Cause this is the Anubis figure.

Anubis was the Egyptian Gods of embalming,

the dog headed figure.

But look how he's dressed, he's dressed as a Roman soldier,

but with his Egyptian head, guarding whoever's

buried within this tomb.

It's fantastic, just like top and tails, isn't it?

He's got a very Egyptian head, and this kind of Roman body.

[COLIN] Roman coat.

[BETTANY] This little Roman skirt.

[COLIN] Just mix and match.

The only thing I think though is that throughout

the ancient world you do get this exchange of cultures

in Catalans you've got eastern cults, and the Romans

are very good at taking on the east as well.

So why is Alexandria particularly good at that?

I think because Alexandria was a new town,

and it had to create its own legitimacy.

It was a new town on an very, very ancient land.

Which had a certain weight

within the ancient world, as well.

I mean Egypt, the Greeks were in awe of Egypt.

So there was all this sort of cultural baggage here already.

But they also brought with them their notions

of Hellenic culture, Greek culture, and by doing that,

it drapes itself in the mantle of Egypt,

but at the same time brought with it its Greek notions.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

It was also an extremely wealthy town.

And it's a port town.

And they were always open to influences.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

What you have to remember,

is that this was no ordinary city.

And it hadn't grown up organically,

as the Bronze Age, or the Classical Age.

Like so many of the great cities of antiquity.

This was if you like, a kind of high minded new town,

the brain child of a visionary,

and highly educated man.

From the age of 13 Alexander had been taught

day in, day out by the great philosopher Aristotle.

And a spirit of inquiry was infused

in every cell of his body.

And when he founded Alexandria he passed that

spirit on into the very DNA of the city.

This was a place where knowledge was

as valuable a currency as grain or gold.

(UPBEAT MUSIC)

And in a precious archaeological oasis

in the heart of the city Kom el-Dikka,

archeologists have begun to find the evidence to prove it.

A Polish team had been working on a discovery

which revealed exactly where

Alexandria's ideas were played out.

Here we are, in one of the lecture halls.

Probably it was one lecturer from

the campus from the university.

It's really interesting, so you've got the lecture room

right on the main street.

Yes it was at the center of the social life

in the late Alexandria.

And now we are here, various inventors in the classrooms.

And where the branch was developed for the students.

And here we have the main chair,

that must seat for the, probably for the teacher.

You can just imagine how intimate this

lecture hall would've been.

Fitting just 30 students, studying law,

rhetoric, and science.

And here we have a single block of stone.

Probably was kind of platform, or kind of

podium for the student reclamation.

Okay, so the students have to do a kind of,

Demonstration.

I'm going to be a teacher.

So if I'm sitting here, so I'm a teacher,

sorry, comfortably on your steps, and then

the student would be there

giving their paper or presentation.

[EMANUELA] Yes, exactly.

[BETTANY] Did it get hot here?

The little house were covered probably

by the flat roof, we don't have any indication.

But probably, they are going

to be high as up to five, come up to five meters.

At the level of the columns.

[BETTANY] How many teacher rooms like this are there?

[EMANUELA] So far we found 20 lecture halls.

Probably it was a lot bigger.

These teaching rooms were a hot house of knowledge

in the very heart of Alexandria.

This was in no way a city of ivory towers,

it was stuffing with provocative, and cutting edge ideas.

It's rumored that if you wanted to acquire the intellectual

tools to unlock the mysteries of the universe,

to allow them to rule the world.

It was where the mathematician Eratosthenes proved that

the earth was round, and accurately measured

its circumference.

For a 1,000 years ahead of his time, Aristarchus suggested

that the earth moved around the sun.

And where the greatest minds, and most

extraordinary thinkers attempt to map their

way through the stars.

Now I've got to confess Alexandria has got

a particular allure for me.

For one reason.

And it's a rather wonderful and sincerious woman called

Hypatia, now Hypatia ran her own philosophy school here,

and by all accounts, she was quite extraordinary.

Hypatia was born at around 350 AD.

The very fact she was a woman in a world

dominated by men, makes her achievements doubly exceptional.

For over 40 years she made ground breaking advances

in algebra, and revolutionized astronomy.

And correspondence from a fellow philosopher

really sums up just how much she was valued.

It's a collection of letters written to her

by one of her former students called Synesius.

And the language he used is very, very intimate.

So you get a real sense of her character.

And just how respected she was.

And Synesius says that nothing in the world

is more wonderful than her, and that even in Hades,

she is the only thing that he'll remember.

Actually she's been remembered by some others too.

A crater on the moon's surface bares here name.

A journal of philosophy is called Hypatia.

And she's just been immortalized in a new film, Agora.

(MYSTICAL MUSIC)

Imagine Hypatia working late into the night,

the same as Alexandrian street lamps burning outside.

Her staring up into the night sky for inspiration.

She was philosopher in the true sense of the word,

in that she was a philo sophia, a lover of wisdom.

What's really interesting about Hypatia though,

as with so many of her Alexandrian colleagues,

is that she didn't just feel an abstract thought,

but she had a very practical application for her ideas.

And for instance she used her mathematics,

and her geometry to redesign this amazing gizmo.

And it was really kind of a multi functional

kind of instrument, a sort of Ipod of her day if you like.

Only in her day it had a much more romantic name,

'cause this was called a astrolabe,

and literally that means, a catcher of the stars.

(MYSTICAL MUSIC)

One of the things that was worked on here in Alexandria,

and perfected was this amazing instrument the astrolabe.

You're clutching one.

What did it allow people to do?

The astrolabe has many functions.

Telling the time of the day, telling you latitude,

to altitude, it can measure height of mountains.

It can measure the width of rivers.

But I'll tell you how to measure the time of the day.

Okay, now here is the astrolabe, and here is the pointer.

This is what we call the pointer.

We align these two holes pointing to a star.

When we align these two holes like it's pointing

we get a reading, with the pointer right here.

We take this reading here, which is a letter

in Arabic letters, but for them it's a number.

We take this number, we turn the astrolabe,

and we have this finder here, we point,

the pointer here, to the number

that we have taken from the back.

And when I point it to here, we get the reading.

You see that pointer here?

It will point to the degrees, the degrees of the sun

has risen, or the star has risen from the horizon.

360 degrees, is equal to 24 hours,

so each, one hour is 15 degrees, so if we have here

number of degrees, I can know the time of day.

It's a very powerful instrument,

because it allows you to do all kinds of things.

But if you know the night sky.

If you know your latitude, if you know the

height of a mountain, you can explore, you can trade.

[HODA] It has actually changed the way they function.

Alexandria did sponsor pure reason, pure thought,

ideas just for ideas sake.

But it also an immensely busy, and practical place.

The astrolabe for example was very beautiful,

but when it was applied it allowed men to trade,

and travel and to conquer.

The whole city was very enterprising and outward looking.

And that ethos was directly in line with

the vision of its founder.

Alexander had created a unique city.

A central point between east and west,

where the greatest thinkers not only explored pure thought,

but applied their ideas to become

real players on the world stage.

The scale of Alexandria's intellectual ambition was immense.

To house within its walls, all knowledge.

And with that knowledge make its rulers

the most powerful people on earth.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

Although ancient Alexandria is virtually invisible,

the ghosts of its presence are there

in the layout of the modern city.

I'll tell you what is very exciting,

and because the modern city is laid out

on the ancient grid plan, when you walk down

these streets you are typically walking

in the footsteps of Hypatia and all those

other fantastic philosophers.

And that seems like a very good place to be.

(STREET CHATTER)

As a cultural melting pot with intellectual ambition,

ancient Alexandria became

a unique environment for scholarship.

A place where the extraordinary thinker Hypatia,

schooled in Greek thought could also draw

on Egyptian wisdom and Babylonian science

to help her map the stars.

Where a wealth of traditions from around the world

combined enabling the greatest thinkers

to make scientific advances achievable nowhere else.

Creating a new Egypt and a model for society in the future.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

One of the great characters of medical history

came from Alexandria, he was a man called Galen.

And even though he traveled right across

the eastern Mediterranean, it was the cosmopolitan

conditions of this city that allowed him

to make quite extraordinary advances.

And in fact is was here he made scientific breakthroughs

that wouldn't be vetted for another 1600 years.

So what's all these treasures, that you are removing

from the tubs here.

[DAVID] They are a variety of things,

there's a brain of a horse.

And this one with,

the spinal cord attached, is a dog.

Oh it's lovely.

Now I'll have you know I am a very strict vegetarian

this is way beyond my life experiences.

It's alright, I'm not expecting you to eat them.

It's alright.

Explain to me so you're a veterinary anatomist,

so why have you got a particular interest in Galen?

It's really because of the brain,

because I think Galen was the central mover

in the history of studying the brain.

He was the first person to realize what it was.

And what it did.

And why was Alexandria such a key city for him?

In the European part of the Mediterranean world,

there were taboos, and then eventually laws,

against chopping up dead people.

Dissecting dead people, which made

life very difficult of him, so he had to use

animals, like these, where really what he wanted to know,

he wanted to know about what was

going on in humans, and this was much easier in Egypt.

'Cause the Egyptians have much more of a tradition.

And partly because of mummification, they have much

more of a tradition of dealing

with parts of dead human people.

And perhaps not worrying about it so much.

But the brain wasn't particularly very important

to the Egyptians, there are stories of them,

when they're doing the mummification and then

pulling the brain out through the nose, for instance.

We don't know whether that, it was Herodotus

who said that, we don't know whether that's actually true.

You'd need an enormous nose to get a brain out through.

But it's certainly true the thing with Egyptian's

and the Greeks have in common neither of them thought

the brain was very important.

Until Galen came along, then Aristotle said

it's probably just the radiator for the heart.

The heart creates all this heat, and the brain

is just a way of radiating it away out of the body.

And so why was Galen different?

How did he come to realize that there

was something else going on?

Because he looked at the brain.

You look at the human brain,

look at animal brains,

and he said well if you look at them,

they're incredibly complicated.

He said for example, here's the cerebrum at the front

with all its folds, and here's the cerebellum

at the back where you can find the folds.

You look on the inside and you see

you've got the brain stem down there,

it's even more complicated.

So it's got all these different bits

so it doesn't look like something that's

just there to radiate heat away.

So it must be doing something, more complicated than that.

The other thing he noticed about it was,

first of all if you look at the brain,

it has the sensors attached to it,

if you,

dissect a brain,

I'll get this out, this is a sheep brain.

With the eyes, still attached.

Yeah, it's lovely, thank you.

And that then got him thinking,

he said well the brain is connected

to the special sensors by these large thick nerves,

he said that must mean something.

And he had this wonderful phrase he used,

where he said, the brain is surrounded by the

special sense organs as if they are the servants of gods,

of the great king.

So he'd already elevated the brains, being in position

of a king, in control of the special senses.

I'm glad he added a little bit of poetry

to something instead of just being clever.

(LAUGHING)

So he demonstrated not only is the brain

where all the sensory information comes in,

but also where all the nerves radiate

out to the body, to move the body.

So, what he's really saying, the brain,

takes the information in, processes it,

puts it out, and really the brain

is where you think, it's where you are.

Really he was the first person to show that.

That is immensely important.

If you prove just how powerful the brain is

that's gonna revolutionize what people

think about the human body, and I mean

all sorts of things, the human soul as well.

[DAVID] He completely changed the way we think

about the body, and especially the brain.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

Alexandria created a buzzing environment

where men like Galen and women like Hypatia

could meet like minds and begin

to feel the workings of the universe.

Because these thinkers weren't working in isolation.

And that's possibly Alexander's greatest achievement.

It has created an environment where great minds

could gather, discuss, and develop their ideas.

The largest store of knowledge the world had ever known.

Like so much of ancient Alexandria its libraries

have long since disappeared, but modern

Alexandrians have begun to acknowledge

their amazing heritage with a new state of the art

library, capturing its predecessors spirit.

There have been collections of texts and books

in other ancient cities, but the ambition

of the library here, was quite extraordinary.

Alexandria wanted to be the depository of all knowledge

on earth, and so a copy of every single book

in the world was to be stored here.

(SOFT MUSIC)

Every word of literature, tragedy, comedy,

and poetry, every history, every scientific treaty,

from math to medicine, physics, to astronomy.

And not just Greek texts but works from around the world.

In Hebrew, Latin, Babylonian, and later Arabic.

Even today putting together such a selection

would be quite a feat,

but this was the age before mass publishing.

Each work existed as a hand written papyrus.

And that scroll might be the only copy of that

papyrus in the whole world.

Today the majority of the teeny fragments that remain

now survive not in Alexandria,

but another bastion of learning,

Oxford University.

(UPBEAT MUSIC)

How many of these texts would

there have been in the library?

Oh, I reckon half a million.

Everything from Homer, some of the earliest,

Greek papyri were texts of the Homeric poems,

the Iliad, and the Odyssey.

To Plato philosophy written in Greek on papyrus.

To in the later period, Arabic, and even earlier, Hebrew.

But the scale of ambition is extraordinary.

So how physically, how did they get the work into the city?

They were sending people out to all parts

of the Mediterranean, they had a list of the nine

conautical lyric poets that they wanted their works of.

And they sent people to the festivals

where their works had been composed.

Olympia and Delphi, and they borrowed

the official copy of the Athenian Tragedies,

form the Athenians, so that they could

make a copy of it, then they refused to give it back.

So they were in some ways acting like

bathcorian book collectors, in other ways acting like

an institution building up a fundamental collection

for scholars to work on.

But if you've got this massive volume of work,

how were they keeping track of it all?

How are they organizing it?

They developed a system, which was really

the invention of the modern book catalog.

The Alexandrian Scholar Colenicus,

invented the very first book catalog

which simply had an entry for author,

title, genre, type of work, in this case, comedy.

And also the total for the number of lines at the end.

Scribes were paid by the number of lines they copied

so here you can see the name of the comic poet

Aristophanes.

You can just about make it out.

Stoph, oh yeah, stophonof.

In Alexandria are they mainly copying material,

or are they actually adding material or are they

are you getting new scholarship there as well?

Absolutely, they're constantly commenting

on them, this is a copy of Plato's Republic,

in which there's a tiny hand that's been

writing a marginal commentary, into the margin.

Explaining and correcting the text.

So you get the feeling of kind of buzzing hive

of readers and scholars working and operating on the text.

Very impressive, isn't it?

So you've got this genius Plato,

and you've got somebody else centuries later

adding their own ideas.

Access to information enabled the

Alexandrians to revolutionize scientific thought.

But they also studied theology.

It was in Alexandria that the Hebrew bible

was first translated into Greek.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

By understanding a wealth of cultures and beliefs,

they had the power to master and control.

They were so intent on obtaining all of the knowledge

in the world, that laws were passed

so that no book could leave the city.

And even ships entering its harbor were

searched to see if new texts could be found

to be added to its famous library.

The modern library of Alexandria has got

500,000 books, which is actually almost

the same number they had in the ancient library.

But what they've also got here is this mega computer,

which every few days saves all the information

on the world wide web.

In the 21st century we're just so use to that ease

of access to information where everything

is stored electronically.

But in the ancient library they often held

the single existing copy of a book.

So just imagine if that was lost.

We'd lose those ideas forever.

And tragically that's exactly what happened in Alexandria.

Knowledge had made the city an intellectual

powerhouse of antiquity it had made thinkers

like Hypatia powerful forces within the city.

It was an environment where new thoughts

could flourish and evolve where anyone from anywhere

could voice their ideas.

So perhaps it was inevitable that at some point,

some ideas would come into conflict,

and for the ancient world, Alexandria its libraries,

and for Hypatia herself, the result would be catastrophic.

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(MYSTICAL MUSIC)

By the end of the fourth century AD,

Alexandria had been flourishing for nearly 700 years.

Producing extraordinary thinkers like the philosopher,

and mathematician Hypatia.

It was an immensely powerful city.

Second only to Rome in might.

Yet its power wasn't built from military force,

but on the strength of ideas.

And the ambition to house all the knowledge in the world.

And that included beliefs

from the latest school of thinking.

The fledgling religion, Christianity.

Alexandria was always attracted in cutting edge thought,

and men who were at the top of their game.

So it should be no surprise that from the first century AD

the key leaders of a new religion should want to come here

and play out their ideas.

Only a few years after Christ's ascension

the gospel writer Mark came to Alexandria

to spread the news, bringing Christianity into Africa.

As one of the most forward thinking places on earth,

with its tradition fusing eastern and western cultures

Alexandria was an ideal place

for Christianity to gain a foothold.

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(YELLING)

But reconciling a multi faith environment

with a religion who's followers believed

exclusively in one God, proved a testing

challenge for the city.

St. Mark himself died at the hands of pagans

for preaching his faith.

It was a forte of the violence to come.

Yet, for centuries, Christians and pagans

did manage to live alongside one another,

happily, productively.

The very early Christians spent a great deal of time

and energy trying to square pagan and Christian thought.

For instance one of the most prolific early church fathers

who lived in Alexandria said that the works of Plato,

and Aristotle, and the stoics were science tinged with

piety as long as they were righteous.

Now in a world like that, where Christianity

is just another stream of thought, then Hypatia

has a very secure place.

But the problem came when the Christians

wanted not just spiritual, but temporal power,

and then all that tolerance and piety

becomes muddied with power politicking.

And unfortunately for Hypatia, she'd come into conflict

with one of the greatest political operators of the day.

(CHATTER)

Hypatia herself wasn't anti Christianity,

many of her students were in fact Christians.

But the problem came when a new bishop Cyril

was ordained in the city.

Cyril not only wanted spiritual authority

but power on earth, and he didn't want to share

it with pagans, his arrival would change

the face of Alexandria forever.

You walk into somewhere like the Cesareum

and you see what originally we built as

a Egyptian and Greek temple,

with all the heads removed from the statues.

And the cult statue has gone and in its place

you have a huge cross looking down.

And you see how people like Cyril could change a world.

He is a man seeking power,

and he wishes to gain control not just

the religious state he really wants to run

a theocracy, be in charge of everything.

Hypatia is a wealthy educated pagan.

To him, that means witch.

He puts around rumors about all of the

objects she makes for astronomy,

her instruments, clearly they're used for divination.

They're for finding out what will

happen in the future, it is black magic.

And as such, she has to die.

And in one contemporary account,

we learn that it was Hypatia's work

with the astrolabe in particular,

that sparked hatred against her.

Spurred on by one of their leaders,

the blood of the Christian mob was up.

They started to seek Hypatia out through the city,

and found her driving through these streets on her way home.

(YELLING)

They dragged her out of her

carriage and ripped off her clothes.

For a high born woman like her,

this would have been a terrible public disgrace,

but then things got even uglier.

They pulled her into the cesareum, which had been a temple

and recently converted to a church,

and there picking up anything they could find,

we're told they were abstrocka which are

probably broken pots, or broken roof tiles.

They started to flay her alive.

Once she was dead they pulled her body limb from limb.

And then they took her dismembered body parts

to the edge of the city and they burned them on a pyre.

In effect this was a witches death.

(YELLING)

Hypatia's tragedy, was the tragedy of Alexandria.

(YELLING)

The destruction of its spectacular monuments.

The desecration of its extraordinary libraries.

And with that the heartbreaking demise

of the wealth of knowledge which

had made it great for over 700 years.

There are a few lines, desperately sad,

written by a pagan who was wandering

through the streets of Alexandria,

watching the world he knew crumble around him.

(YELLING)

Is it true that we Greeks are really dead,

and only seem alive?

And in our fallen state we imagine

that a dream is life, or are we truly alive,

and is life itself dead?

For some Alexander's dream was becoming a living nightmare.

After centuries of onslaught only one percent

of Alexandria's vast book collection

has survived into the modern world.

Rather bizarrely one of the survivors

of Alexandria's destruction ended up here.

It's that massive lump of red granite.

The obulus that we very affectionately now,

call Cleopatra's needle.

And it was brought here from Egypt in 1878.

But in its hay day it stood just

at the edge of the cesareum,

so it was only a stones throw away from

where Hypatia was killed.

(CHATTER)

I think that in many ways Hypatia was an incarnation

of Alexander's dream.

She was living proof that knowledge is power.

She was immensely knowledgeable,

and therefore the extraordinary city

that she lived in allowed her a huge amount of influence.

But the key word here is extraordinary,

because Alexandria was a city less ordinary.

(MYSTICAL MUSIC)

And perhaps its ambition that dream to acquire

and to partake all the knowledge of the world

was just too perfect to last.

We should bare that in mind, because it is

of course a very modern dream, I mean after all

that is what the world wide web does.

And so when we know that Alexandria failed

and as a result a whole epot failed, we should

take a very careful note.

For that reason we mustn't bury the memory of Alexandria,

but celebrate it.

(MYSTICAL MUSIC)

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