However, at a time when literacy was the privilege of limited elites, the library was more of a museum than a library open to the ordinary layman. What it contained was seen as rare masterpieces rather than as repositories of knowledge accessible to the wide public. Nobody knows exactly when or how the Alexandria library disappeared, although it is commonly believed to have burnt down. But what is certain is that, with the disappearance of the library, the Hellenistic civilisation suffered a serious setback sometime before the advent of Islam.

Actually, civilisation as a whole witnessed a 'cultural discontinuity' because no other library at the time sheltered anything comparable to the Alexandria library. History lost its memory. A great effort was needed by Islamic scholars to restore it. But however admirable the efforts they furnished to preserve or reproduce the works of great thinkers of ancient civilisations -- while adding their own valuable contribution to humanity's common cultural legacy -- the Alexandria library remains a unique phenomenon that is impossible to recreate integrally.

The Alexandria library had a specific function, which was to collect, classify (its catalogues were among the earliest examples of bibliography) and preserve human knowledge, culture and civilisation in a variety of fields and guarantee their transmission to future generations. Painstakingly copied out on parchment, the library's collection of volumes was necessarily limited in number and vulnerable to fire and other natural --or man-made -- disasters. This is in fact what happened to the Alexandria library, which disappeared completely, its invaluable collection of volumes irretrievably lost. The situation changed radically with the invention in 1434 by Gutenberg in Germany of the printing press and the replacement of parchment by paper.

The printed book meant that knowledge was no longer limited to a privilege elite. The dissemination of knowledge and culture became possible. The printing press paved the way to the Renaissance, then to the age of Enlightenment. Libraries were no longer museums, but springboards for the propagation of the knowledge that stands at the heart of modern civilisation.....