Lost Knowledge 2002

I M A G I N I N G   T H E   B O O K, Alexandria Library, Alexandria, Egypt, 2002

Director of the Cultural Activities: Sherif Mohieeldin General Commissioner: Mohammad Fathy Abou El Naga

Consultant to the project: Kristina Nelson General Program Coordinator: Mohammad Hassan Youssef “

“Lost Knowledge” in hieroglyphs

glass, lead, compact disk

Somewhere beneath the modern city of Alexandria lie the ruins of its Great Library, the vast and fabled repository of classical knowledge.  Founded by Alexander the Great at the mouth of the River Nile in 331 B.C., the city of Alexandria was seized and held for three centuries by the Macedonian Ptolemies, and lost to the Emperor Augustus by Cleopatra, lover of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.

The Great Library was established during the 305-283 B.C., reign of Ptolemy Soter, one of Alexander’s generals and his self-appointed heir in Egypt, most likely as part of the Museion, an archive, art gallery, and academy attached to the waterfront royal compound. For over a half a millennium, Ptolemy’s descendents and their Roman successors hosted a remarkable assembly of thinkers there, from the geometer Euclid, a contemporary of the first Ptolemy, to the last great philosopher of antiquity, Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, who died in 270 A.D. The library holdings were eventually numbered as high as 900,000 scrolls.  The Great Library of Alexandria was a beacon of knowledge in the ancient world.  Its collection was the first archive of human knowledge, experience and wisdom, a tribute to human will and imagination.

The artwork for the exhibition Imagining the Book at the new Alexandria library consists of two glass plates framed in lead like a book.  Sandblasted symbols on one glass plate spell the words “lost knowledge,” in hieroglyphs, a written text form that became mysterious symbols in Egypt after approximately 400 A.D. The hieroglyphs is juxtaposed with a compact disc framed in glass, exhibiting a contemporary invention for preserving knowledge.