A marble head of a Ptolemaic queen of Egypt
Marble head of a Ptolemaic queen, ca. 270–250 BCE
Marked The Pharos

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Alexandria and its library

Founded by Alexander, Alexandria became the greatest city of the Greek world, with a lighthouse that was one of the wonders of the world and a library that tried to collect every book. Its scholars measured the Earth and wrote geometry still taught today.

Place
The Pharos · The Museum · The SerapeumAfrica
Laid out as
A cityOne city, district by district, from its centre outwards.
Lessons
7 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IAlexander’s city
  2. IIThe Pharos lighthouse
  3. IIIThe Library and the Museum
  4. IVEuclid and Eratosthenes
  5. VCleopatra’s city
  6. VIHypatia
  7. VIIHow the library ended

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Ptolemy I
  • Euclid
  • Eratosthenes
  • Cleopatra VII
  • Hypatia

Objects

  • Statues raised from the harbour
  • Papyri of Euclid

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

331 BC to AD 642. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?