In "The Shores of Wisdom", Derek Adie Flower gives a delightful story of the rise and fall of the Ancient Library of Alexandria - the world's power of knowledge and culture twenty-three centuries ago. Flower tells the story with a unique style, giving us glimpses of the forces which made the place prosper with great philosophers and scientists (Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes...) and the causes of decline when politics and religion became in conflict with rationality. Flower displays his enthusiasm for the city by the hope for the future in the new project of building modern Bibliotheca Alexandria. As a graduate of the University of Alexandria in modern time, I, too, hope that the future will reach the greatness of the past, but with a renaissance in modern science and knowledge. The book is indeed an enjoyable piece to read.

Prof. Ahmed H. Zewail
1998 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Egypt

 

CORRIERE DELLA SERA: Culture. An interview with Derek Flower, author of a book on the famous Library that has just been revived in Alexandria.

ARCHEOLOGIA: Based on historical and exegetical research, Oxfordian Derek Flower gives a flowing description of the Library and its history through fascinating sketches and biographies of the Alexandrian scholars who influenced knowledge and culture throughout the ages.

AVVENIRE: In a fascinating book, Derek Adie Flower tells of events in ancient Alexandria which influenced the Western world even more than either Plato's Academy or Aristotle's Lyceum in Athens.

AUDREY: A delightful history of the Library of Alexandria through a captivating ensemble of facts and anecdotes.

DIPLOMATIC NEWS: Derek Flower's lifelong interest in Egyptology prompted him to write the story of the Ancient Library of Alexandria in a book that reads more like a turn-page historical novel than the well documented academic treatise it is.
 

The author presented his book to a large audience and answered their questions which included the international efforts to establish the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The event was a great opportunity for people with different disciplines to discuss issues about the first great library.

Professor Mohammed El Sharkawi, Cultural Counsellor and Director of the Egyptian Embassy Education and Culture Bureau in London.

 

The Story of The
Ancient Library of Alexandria
(Michael Borrie
Literary Review-UK)

 

THE SHORES OF WISDOM

THERE IS tantalisingly little known about the great library of Alexandria. The writers, philosophers and historians who used it, and whose works filled its shelves, were the founding fathers of Western civilisation. But the library itself and its contents, the centre of the intellectual universe for a thousand years, have vanished as though they had never been ...

Derek Flower was moved to write this book by the romantic project of recreating the library of Alexandria, a scheme as grandiose as The Dome, but less expensive and considerably more appealing ... "He tells the tale in rollicking style, with many entertaining anecdotes"
 
 

The Story of The
Ancient Library of Alexandria
(Russell Chamberlin's
Bookshelf Monacle-UK)

    
 

 

Over the past few months there have been exciting reports of how underwater archaeology is uncovering "lost" Alexandria, the great port in Egypt founded by Alexander the Great. Parts of Cleopatra's palace: the base of the Pharos, the lighthouse adjudged to be one of the Seven Wonders of the World, statues which have lain under the Mediterranean for nearly two millennia, have been brought to the surface. No trace, however, has been found of the great library which, according to tradition, was burnt down by Julius Caesar.

We have no idea of what it looked like but Derek Flower refutes the idea that Caesar, himself a considerable scholar, would have deliberately done such an act of vandalism as to destroy the greatest centre of scholarship in the ancient world. What actually happened was that Caesar, besieged in Alexandria and cut off from the sea, ordered the burning of the Egyptian fleet and the fire spread to a part of the library. Estimates of the loss range from 40,000 works to a scarcely credible 700,000. Whatever the figure, the loss to scholarship was incalculable.

... "Much of Flower's book consists of brief biographies of the brilliant men attracted to Alexandria by the library, a roll call of those who laid the foundation of our civilisation: Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Strabo and Galen and, in due course, the philosophers who shaped the dogma of the Christian religion ...
 

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