Presentation of the department

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina Excavations collection is among the most important collections in the Antiquities Museum as it reflects the remarkable artistic style and reveals the nature of the daily life during the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods. It is also regarded as the core of the Museum collections, as it was discovered during the construction of the New Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
The BA Antiquities section comprises 111 artifacts, the most important of which are the marvelous mosaics which are believed to have paved the floors of the royal palaces that once stood in this region.

The New Library of Alexandria

In the center of the ancient royal district of Alexandria and somewhere in front of the site of the head of "Lochias", where is called now Al-Silsilah, a piece of land belonging to the Alexandria University having the area of 85.000m², has been chosen to revive the ancient Library which was the beacon of knowledge and culture, a research institute and the substructure of the ancient university.

The site surveillance started in the year 1993 and unfolded some demolished architectural elements which were not in their original site within the debris, where the excavational pits bore hundreds of antiquities which most of them date back to the Hellenistic era.

These founds acted as the nuclei of the current Antiquities Museum which contains 1276 srtifacts fetched from other museums all over Egypt, to make the display within the museum complete, giving an idea about all civilizations which passed alternatively on Egypt, starting by the Pharaonic era and passing through the Graeco-Roman, Hellenistic, then the Byzantine and finally the Islamic. The museum also includes a collection of sunken antiquities which were found in the Eastern Harbor and in the district of Abo-kir.

The Antiquities Museum inside the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is solely unique that it is built within the sancta of a library, which embodies the luster of the world's most famous library, also it holds on display the first collection of sunken antiquities worldwide.
 

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 The Hellenistic Period click here

 The Ancient City of Alexandria  click here