Alexandria was a Greek city built on Egyptian soil, and from the beginning it was home to many peoples: Greeks and Macedonians, native Egyptians, a large Jewish community, and traders from across the Mediterranean and beyond. The library reflected this mix, and so did the city's conflicts.

Collecting beyond Greek

Ancient writers claimed that the Ptolemies wanted the books of every nation, translated into Greek. How far this went is uncertain. The collection was overwhelmingly Greek, and the scholars of the Museum showed limited interest in learning other languages. But some works by non-Greeks, written in Greek for Greek readers, did reach the library, and they are among its most important legacies.

Manetho and Egyptian history

Under Ptolemy II, an Egyptian priest named Manetho wrote a history of Egypt in Greek, the Aegyptiaca. He drew on temple records unavailable to Greek writers, and his division of Egypt's rulers into numbered dynasties is still used by historians today, from the First Dynasty to the Thirtieth. The work itself is lost and survives only in quotations by later writers, some of them garbled. Even so, Manetho shows a native Egyptian scholar explaining his own civilization to the new rulers, rather than leaving the story to foreigners.

A three-script stone

The Ptolemies governed in more than one language. In 196 BCE priests issued a decree honoring the young king Ptolemy V and had it carved on stone in three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs, the everyday Egyptian script called Demotic, and Greek. One copy, found in 1799 near the town of Rashid, is the Rosetta Stone. Because scholars could read the Greek, it became the key that allowed Jean-François Champollion to decipher hieroglyphs in 1822. A government announcement written for a mixed population ended up unlocking a whole lost writing system.

The Septuagint

Alexandria had one of the largest Jewish communities in the ancient world, and many of its members spoke Greek rather than Hebrew. In the third century BCE, the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, was translated into Greek there. The translation, later extended to other books, is called the Septuagint, from the Latin for seventy.

The name comes from a legend in the Letter of Aristeas, which says Ptolemy II invited seventy-two Jewish scholars from Jerusalem to translate the law for his library, and that they finished in seventy-two days. Later retellings added miracles. Most historians think the translation was made mainly for Alexandria's own Greek-speaking Jews, who needed their scriptures in the language they used, though royal interest may have played a part. The Septuagint became the Bible of early Christians, and the New Testament writers often quoted it.

Philo and the meeting of traditions

In the first century CE, the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria read the Hebrew scriptures in the light of Greek philosophy, especially Plato. His work showed how ideas from different traditions could be brought into conversation, and it influenced later Christian thinkers. Alexandria later produced the Christian scholar Origen and was where the philosopher Plotinus studied, making it a crossroads of Greek, Jewish, Egyptian and Christian thought.

Tension and violence

Diversity did not always mean harmony. Greeks held most privileges, Egyptians often resented foreign rule, and disputes over civic status simmered. In 38 CE, Greek mobs attacked the Jews of Alexandria, driving them into one quarter of the city, desecrating synagogues and killing many, while the Roman governor Flaccus did little to stop them. Philo traveled to Rome with a delegation to appeal to the emperor Caligula and wrote an account of the violence. Further conflicts followed, including a Jewish revolt in 115 to 117 CE that was crushed with great bloodshed.

The same city that gathered the world's knowledge could not always protect its own people. A library can hold the writings of many peoples without guaranteeing that those peoples are treated as equals. Equal dignity has to be secured by law and practice, not only by learning.

Worked example: what translation does

Consider what the Septuagint translators faced, and why it still matters.

• Words without equivalents. Hebrew terms with deep religious meaning had no exact Greek match. The translators had to choose, and each choice shaded the meaning for Greek readers.
• A famous example. In Isaiah 7:14, the Hebrew word almah means a young woman. The Septuagint rendered it with parthenos, a word usually meaning virgin. Early Christians read the verse as a prophecy of Jesus' birth, and Jewish and Christian interpreters have debated the translation ever since.
• Access. Without the translation, many Greek-speaking Jews would have lost direct access to their own scriptures. Translation kept a tradition alive in a new language.
• Reach. Once in Greek, the texts could be read by anyone in the Mediterranean world, which helped Judaism and later Christianity spread.

Translation is never neutral, but it is one of the great ways people share understanding across boundaries. Today's debates over translating laws, ballots and medical information for speakers of other languages are a modern version of the same choice: whether knowledge should be open only to those who already speak the language of power.