Alexandria once housed one of the greatest and most important libraries of the ancient world. She was the property of a research institute in Egypt called the Alexandrian Museion. Most of the other libraries were regional, while the Egyptian one strove to be universal, with knowledge from all over the world.

Various sources estimate the number of books in the library differently: the number ranges from 200-700 thousand. But we will probably never know how large the collection was, what treasures and knowledge it contained, since the collection was destroyed and we know about it only from written sources, no archaeological remains have been preserved.

Historians suggest that the library contained books on rhetoric, law, epic, history, medicine, mathematics, natural history, as well as lyric poetry, tragedies and comedies, which could tell us a lot about how people then saw the world. But all this died so long ago that now one can only dream of restoring at least a small part of the collection.