Library of Alexandria
The Great Library of Alexandria was part of a larger research institution (the Museum, from Mouseion, “shrine of the Muses”), dedicated to the nine goddesses of the arts. The Ptolemaic kings' sponsorship saw the Library rapidly acquire somewhere between 40,000 and 400,000 papyrus scrolls. Numerous influential scholars, including Zenodotus of Ephesus, Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace, worked in the combined facility.
While the Library is widely assumed to have been destroyed in a cataclysmic event, it declined gradually between 145 BCE, when Ptolemy VIII Physcon purged Alexandria's intellectuals and the Palmyrene invasion of Egypt (270-5 CE). A daughter library established during Ptolemy III Euergetes's reign in the Serapeum, a temple to the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis, was vandalised and demolished in 391 CE.
Links to add:
Apollonius of Rhodes
Aristophanes of Byzantium
Aristarchus of Samothrace
Ptolemy VIII Physcon
Palmyrene invasion of Egypt
Ptolemy III Euergetes
Serapeum
Serapis
