THE SEPTUAGINT AND THE ANCIENT LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA are mentioned in a Travel piece in the Chicago Tribune, along with the new Library and the Alexandria National Museum. And you can get a glimpse of the Library (the new one!) in the video.

The new old Alexandria
Rolling back the centuries in Egypt's second city

By Stephen Franklin | Tribune staff reporter
October 28, 2007

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I am not talking about the remnants of the ancient city left behind by the Greeks and Romans, the city that young Alexander the Great had envisioned as a great port for his empire and the city of Cleopatra.

Today, much of that Alexandria sleeps on out in the bay, waiting to be rediscovered, or lies buried under the modern city's bustling streets, where 5 million wander daily.

Instead, I am drawn by the nearly 5-year-old Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which was inspired by the ancient library in Alexandria, and which feels as new as anything anywhere. It is an imaginative $200-million high-tech tribute to the library that vanished here more than 1,600 years ago.

The largest library of its time, it was where the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew to Greek, and scholars gathered to study astronomy, physics and anatomy. While its destruction is a mystery buried in time, its disappearance became a symbol of the price societies pay for the loss of their written soul and memory.

A parallel universe

The new library, designed by Norwegian architects, looks from the distance like a silvery sun rising. And because it is located on the edge of the 11-mile-long Corniche, the seaside promenade that curls along much of the waterfront in Alexandria, the visual impact is quite dramatic.

Imagine. The bottom of the building's circular face sits slightly below street level with the building tilting upward to 11 stories at the top.

Inside, you feel as if you have entered a parallel universe, especially if you have been meandering about amid the dust and decay of old Alexandria.

The library is a vast atrium with one wall looking out at the sea and sky. Standing on the street level, you look down at several levels of floors with row after row of desks and people busily glued to computers. For the moment, I am struck by the hope offered by such a building in a country where so many cannot read, and where so few who can actually read books.

More of Alexandria's past

Not far away is another innovative use of the city's past.

The Alexandria National Museum is an elaborate, gleaming white Italian-style, three-story building that was built for a wealthy businessman in the late 1920s, then became an American consulate before it was bought by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture.

Opened about four years ago, the museum sits in an older upscale neighborhood that is greener than most. Its collection runs from pre-historic and pharaonic to Greco-Roman to Coptic and Islamic, and finally to items from Egypt's last royal family.

Wandering through the tasteful and innovatively designed rooms for the first time, I decide that after dozens of trips over 40 years to Egypt as a reporter or meandering tourist, this is my second favorite museum in the country (next to the Coptic Museum in Cairo).

This year while living in Cairo and training Egyptian journalists there, I also came down with a serious case of crypt overload, the result of having visited countless ancient burial sites in Cairo and elsewhere. And so I consider this to be a life-saving antidote to crawling underground in breathlessly hot tombs with a zillion other tourists.

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