Library of Alexandria

The ancient library of Alexandria — founded under Ptolemy I and expanded under Ptolemy II — which aimed to collect all the world's knowledge and which at its height housed hundreds of thousands of scrolls — whose gradual destruction became the symbol of civilization's fragility.

Represents the first institutional attempt to aggregate all human knowledge in one place — the ambition that all books could be collected, copied, and made available to scholars — making it the prototype for every universal library project since.