deepstash
Beta
Centers of Progress: Alexandria (Information)
Deepstash brings you key ideas from the most inspiring articles like this one:
Read more efficiently
Save what inspires you
Remember anything
5
Key Ideas
Save all ideas
Alexandria, with its Great Library, was marked as the intellectual capital of the world.
During the third century BCE, the Musaeum, an educational and research institution, was built in Alexandria. The Great Library was one part of the Musaeum and may have held around 700,000 scrolls (equivalent to over 100,000 printed books.)
75 SAVES
645 READS
Alexandria was founded in 331BCE by the Macedonian leader Alexander the Great. Alexander left Egypt a few months later, leaving his viceroy Cleomenes in charge.
Alexander passed away in 323 BCE, and one of his deputies, Macedonian general Ptolemy Lagides, took control of Egypt. Ptolemy executed Cleomenes and declared himself pharaoh. He started the Ptolemaic dynasty and made Alexandria his capital in 305 BCE.
72 SAVES
396 READS
The city's population grew to around 300,000 people. It remained the capital of Ptolemaic Egypt, as well as Roman and Byzantine Egypt, for almost a thousand years.
Alexandria was designed by the architect Dinocrates of Rhodes, using a Hippodamian gridiron street plan. The city was cosmopolitan and diverse. It consisted of Greeks, Jew, and Egyptian Arabs.
69 SAVES
344 READS
The Musaeum, or "shrine of the Muses," from where we get the word museum, included a lengthy roofed walkway and a large communal dining hall, where scholars dined and shared ideas. The scholars were salaried employees, received free room and board, and paid no taxes.
The Musaeum contained exhibit halls, private study rooms, lecture halls, residential quarters for scholars, and theatres. The Great Library held shelves upon shelves of papyrus scrolls and was envisioned as a universal library that would contain all the world's written knowledge.
73 SAVES
287 READS
The idea of a universal library proved to be a game-changer. Alexandria inspired other cities to create rival "universal libraries," such as the Library of Pergamum in today's Turkey.
The Great Library's main structure was likely burned in 48BCE when Ptolemy XIII laid a siege against his wife and co-ruler Cleopatra and her lover, the Roman dictator Julius Caesar. The smaller library building in the Serapeum temple, which was added when the first library ran out of space, may have survived until the 4th century when the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius I ordered all pagan temples to be destroyed.
70 SAVES
301 READS
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
The Acropolis is a distinctive feature of today's Athens that was built in the 5th century BCE. It is a cluster of buildings on a rocky outcrop. The famous Parthenon temple on the Acropolis was built to honor Athena and to serve the city's treasury.
Athens during the 5th century BCE was lively. The heart of Athens was its marketplace, or Agora (a place where people gather.) The structures surrounding the Agora's market stalls included stone benches, various altars, and temples, a building named the Aiakeion where laws and legal decisions were displayed, and various stoas or covered porticos.
Athens was an unusually open society. It was open to foreign goods, foreigners that were able to attain high-status roles, and the exchange of strange ideas.
Athens borrowed many ideas, such as the Phoenician alphabet, Egyptian medicine and sculpture techniques, Babylonia mathematics, and Sumerian literature, and then improved upon it.
The Mesoamerican city of Chichen Itza is home to the best-preserved, and largest playing court for the first ball sports played in a team.
The popular sport is known as the...
The earliest athletic competitions seem to be simple wrestling contests that are represented in cave paintings.
Other popular sports included foot-races, chariot-races, boxing, swimming, and archery. The Ball Game was probably the first sport that resembled modern team ball sports.
Chichen Itza was founded by the Itza, a Mayan tribe, and was once one of the greatest Mayan centers of the Yucatan peninsula. The Mayan civilization created the most highly developed writing system in the Americas before Columbus landed. The Mayans are also known for a sophisticated calendar and huge architecture.
Today Chichen Itza is a sprawling ruined city in the northern part of the Yucatan Peninsula in modern Mexico. Several prominent stone structures of the city are well-preserved, such as the Warrior's Temple, the Temple of Kukulcan, and the El Caracol - a circular observatory.