00:00 The Library of Alexandria was a renowned knowledge repository in the ancient world, but it may not have been the first of its kind.

02:15 The Library of Alexandria was part of a larger institution known as the Museum, which was established in the late 4th or early 3rd century BC as a center of learning in Alexandria.

04:05 The museum in Alexandria was a community of scholars and philosophers who studied various subjects, including science, and it was run by a priest appointed by the king, with scholars receiving benefits such as tax exemption, food, lodging, and payment from the Egyptian state, and the museum accomplished many notable things such as categorizing Egyptian history, translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek, calculating the circumference of the earth, developing the first heliocentric theory of the solar system, and conducting medical dissections.

05:57 The head librarian of the Library of Alexandria was a scholar who also tutored the king's son, and the library's collection of scrolls was organized alphabetically by author, with later librarians subdividing the scrolls into genres and categorizing them accordingly.

07:49 The Library of Alexandria had a rivalry with the Library of Pergamum, and at its peak, the Library of Alexandria had twice as many texts as Pergamum; the decline of the Library of Alexandria began before Julius Caesar's fire, and it is unclear how much of the library was actually burned.

09:42 The Library of Alexandria may not have been burned at all, but rather a storage facility near the harbor; the library and the museum continued to exist under Roman rule, but it suffered a long decay and never reached the same heights as it did under the early Ptolemaic rulers; the fate of the library and its texts after the year 415 is unknown.

11:35 The Caliph Omar ordered the destruction of all the books in Alexandria, and while there was a movement to create a new library in the 20th century, the original library was on the decline before the fire and subsequent rulers finished off whatever the fire didn't do due to a lack of concern with learning and knowledge.