The second library was called the Library of Cleopatra and was built around a couple of hundred thousand manuscripts that were given to her by Marc Antony in what was either a magnificent gesture of romantic love or a shrewd political maneuver. Marc Antony suffered from what we would today call "poor impulse control," so the former explanation is more likely. This library was wiped out by Christians in AD 391. Depending on which version of events you read, its life span may have overlapped with that of the first library for a few years, a few decades, or not at all.
Whether or not the two libraries ever existed at the same time,
the fact remains that between about 300 BC and AD 400, Alexandria was by far the world capital of high-quality information. It must have had much in common with the MIT campus or Stanford in Palo Alto of more recent times: lots of hairy smart guys converging from all over the world to tinker with the lighthouse or to engage in pursuits that must have been totally incomprehensible to the locals, such as staring down wells at high noon and raving about the diameter of the earth.
The main reason that writers of tourist guidebooks are so cheesed off at Alexandria is that no vestige of the first library remains - not even a plaque stating "The Library of Alexandria was here." If you want to visit the site, you have to do a bit of straightforward detective work. Ancient Alexandria was laid out on a neat, regular grid pattern - just the kind of thing you would expect of a place populated by people like Euclid. The main east-west street was called the Canopic Way, and the main north-south street, running from the waterfront toward the Sahara Desert, was called the Street of the Soma. The library is thought to have stood just south of their intersection.
Though no buildings of that era remain, the streets still do, and so does their intersection. Currently, the Canopic Way is called El Horreya Avenue, and the Soma is called El Nabi Daniel Street, though if you don't hurry, they may be called something else when you arrive.
We stayed at the Cecil Hotel, where Nabi Daniel hits the waterfront. The Cecil is one of those British imperial-era hotels fraught with romance and history, sort of like the entire J. Peterman catalog rolled into one building. British Intelligence was headquartered there during the war, and there the Battle of El Alamein was planned.
Living as they do, however, in a country choked with old stuff, the Egyptians have adopted a philosophy toward architecture that is best summed up by the phrase: "What have you done for me lately?'' From this point of view, the Cecil is just another old building, and it's not even particularly old. As if to emphasize this, the side of the hotel where we stayed was covered with a rude scaffolding (sticks lashed together with hemp) aswarm with workers armed with sledgehammers, crowbars, chisels, and the like, who spent all day, every day, bellowing cheerfully at each other (demolition workers are the jolliest men in every country), bashing huge chunks of masonry off the top floor and simply dropping them - occasionally crushing an air conditioner on some guest's balcony. It was a useful reminder that Egyptians feel no great compulsion to tailor their cities to the specifications of guidebook writers.
This fact can be further driven home by walking south on Nabi Daniel and looking for the site of the Library of Alexandria. It is now occupied by office buildings probably not more than 100, nor less than 50, years old. Their openings are covered with roll-up steel doors, and their walls decorated with faded signs. One of them advertises courses in DOS, Lotus, dBase, COBOL, and others. Not far away is a movie theater showing Forbidden Arsenal: In the Line of Duty 6, starring Cynthia Khan.
The largest and nicest building in the area is used by an insurance company and surrounded by an iron fence. The narrow sidewalk out front is blocked by a few street vendors who have set up their wares in such a way as to force pedestrians out into the street. One of them is selling pictures of adorable kittens tangled up in yarn, and another is peddling used books. This is the closest thing to a library that remains here, so I spent a while examining his wares: a promising volume called Bit by Bit turned out to be an English primer. There were quite a few medical textbooks, as if a doctor had just passed away, and Agatha Christie and Mickey Mouse books presumably left behind by tourists. The closest thing I saw to a classic was a worn-out copy of Oliver Twist.
31° 10.916' N29° 53.784' EPompey's Pillar
The site of Cleopatra's library, precisely 1 mile away by my GPS, is viewed with cautious approval by guidebook writers because it is an actual ruin with a wall around it, a ticket booth, old stuff, and guides. It is right next to an active Muslim cemetery, so it is difficult to reach the place without excusing your way past crowds of women in voluminous black garments, wailing and sobbing heartrendingly, which all goes to make the Western tourist feel like even more of a penis than usual.
The site used to be the city's acropolis. It is a rounded hill of extremely modest altitude with a huge granite pillar on the top. To quote Shelley's "Ozymandias": "Nothing beside remains." A few sphinxes are scattered around the place, but they were obviously dragged in to give tourists something to look at. Several brutally impoverished gray concrete apartment buildings loom up on the other side of the wall, festooned with washing, crammed with children who entertain themselves by raining catcalls down upon the few tourists who straggle out this far. The granite pillar honors the Roman emperor Diocletian, who was a very bad emperor, a major Christian-killer, but who gave Alexandria a big tax break. The citizenry, apparently just as dimwitted as modern day Americans, decided that he was a great guy and erected this pillar. Originally there was a statue of Diocletian himself on the top, riding a horse, which is why the Egyptians call it, in Arabic, The man on horseback. The statue is gone now, which makes this a completely mystifying name. Westerners call it Pompey's Pillar because that's the moniker the clueless Crusaders slapped on it; of course, it has absolutely nothing to do with Pompey.
The hacker tourist does not bother with the pillar but rather with what is underneath it: a network of artificial caves, carved into the sandstone, resembling nothing so much as a D & D player's first dungeon. Because it's a hill and this is Egypt, the caverns are nice and dry and (with a little baksheesh in the right hands) can be well lit too - electrical conduit has been run in and light fixtures bolted to the ceiling. The walls of these caves have niches that are just the right size and shape to contain piles of scrolls, so this is thought to be the site of the Library of Cleopatra. This complex was called the Sarapeum, or Temple of Sarapis, who was a conflation of Osiris and Apis admired by the locals and loathed by monotheists, which explains why the whole complex was sacked and burned by Christians in 391.
It is all rather discouraging, when you use your imagination (which you must do constantly in Alexandria) and think of the brilliance that was here for a while. As convenient as it is for information to come to us, libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart people to come together in one place where they can interact with one another. When the information goes up in flames, those people go their separate ways. The synergy that joined them - that created the lighthouse, for example - dies. The world loses something.
So the second library is some holes in a wall, and the first is an intersection. Holes and intersections are both absences, empty places, disappointing to tourists of both the regular and the hacker variety. But one can argue that the intersection's continued presence is arguably more interesting than some old pile that has been walled off and embalmed by a historical society. How can an intersection remain in one place for 2,500 years? Simply, both the roads that run through it must remain open and active. The intersection will cease to exist if sand drifts across it because it's never used, or if someone puts up a building there. In Egypt, where yesterday's wonders of the world are today's building materials, nothing is more obvious than that people have been avidly putting up buildings everywhere they possibly can for 5,000 years, so it is remarkable that no such thing has happened here. It means that every time some opportunist has gone out and tried to dig up the street or to start putting up a wall, he has been flattened by traffic, arrested by cops, chased away by outraged donkey-cart drivers, or otherwise put out of action. The existence of this intersection is proof that a certain pattern of human activity has endured in this exact place for 2,500 years.