science · 12 May 2004 · 20 years ago
In 2004, the discovery of what was believed to be the world's oldest seat of learning, the Library of Alexandria, was announced by Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities during a conference at the University of California. A Polish-Egyptian team had uncovered 13 lecture halls featuring an elevated podium for the lecturer. Such a complex of lecture halls had never before been found on any Mediterranean Greco-Roman site. Alexandria may be regarded as the birthplace of western science, where Euclid discovered the rules of geometry, Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth and Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, the most influential scientific book about the nature of the Universe for 1,500 years.
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