Aswan Declaration on the Bibliotheca Alexandrina

At the begining of the third century before our era, a great enterprise was conceived in ancient Alexandria, meeting-place of peoples and cultures: the edification of a Library in the lineage of Aristotle's Lyceum, transposing Alexander's dreams of empire into a quest for universal knowledge.

On the eve of the third millennium and under the patronage of President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak, the Government of the Arab Republic of Egypt is seeking, in co-operation with UNESCO and with the financial support of UNDP and other public and private sources, to revive the Ancient Library of Alexandria by restating its universal legacy in modern terms.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina will stand as a testimony to a decisive moment in the history of human thought - the attempt to constitute a summum of knowledge, to assemble the writings of all the peoples. It will bear witness to an original undertaking that, in embracing the totality and diversity of human experience, became the matrix for a new spirit of critical inquiry, for a heightened perception of knowledge as a collaborative process.

  The Ancient Library of Alexandria and its associated Museum gave birth to a new intellectual dynamic. By gathering together all the known sources of knowledge and organizing them for the purposes of scholarly study and investigation, they marked the foundation of the modern notion of the research institute and, therefore, of the university.

Within this haven of learning, the arts and sciences flourished for some six centuries alongside scholarship. The classification and exegesis of the classical literary canon nourished the poetic wit of Callimachus and the pastoral muse of Theocritus.  Study of the theories of the masters of Greek thought, informed by the new Alexandrian spirit of critical and empirical inquiry, yielded major insights and advances in those branches of science associated with the names of Euclid, Herophilus, Erastosthenes, Aristarchus, Ptolemy, Strabo, Archimedes and Heron.

The achievements of Alexandrian science, lost to the West for over a millennium before their partial recovery via Constantinople and classical Arabic and Islamic cultures, were to be instrumental in launching the European Renaissance on its quest for new worlds. In this and as the transmitter of Greek civilization in general, the Ancient Library of Alexandria survives as a vital link in a living tradition.

On the site of the palace of the Ptolemies, the new Alexandrina will give modern expression to an ancient endeavour. A splendid contemporary design for the Library has already been adopted through an international archtectural competition. Detailed plans exist for a facility embodying the latest computer technology and serving as a public research library.  Conceived in the framework of the World Decade for Cultural Development, this institution will be open to researchers not only from the Mediterranean countries but from all over the world.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina - a link with the past and an opening onto the future - will be a unique in being the first library on such a scale to designed and constructed with the assistance of the international community acting through the United Nations system.

We, the members of the International Commission for the revival of the Ancient Library of Alexandria, meeting at its inaugural session in Aswan in February 1990 under the chairmanship of Mrs. Susan Mubarak, pledge our wholehearted support and commitment to this end the appeal made by the Director-General of UNESCO in 1987.

 We call upon all governments, international governmental and non-governmental organizations, public and private institutions, funding agencies, librarians and archivists, and the peoples of all countries to participate, by means of voluntary contributions of all kinds, in the efforts initiated by the Egyptian Government to revive the Library of Alexandria, to assemble and preserve its collections, to train the necessary staff and to ensure the Library’s functioning.

We call on scholars, writers and artists and all those whose tasks is to inform through the written and spoken word to help generate awareness of the international project for the revival of the Library of Alexandria and support for this historic venture.

Finally, we urge all governments to donate to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina such works in their possessions as will help to constitute and enhance the Library's collection, in recognition of the unique gift made by the Ancient Library of Alexandria to our common heritage.