Mostafa El-Abbadi

Mostafa El-Abbadi (born October 10, 1928, Cairo, Egypt—died February 13, 2017, Alexandria) Egyptian historian who was regarded as the leading Egyptian scholar of the Greco-Roman world and was the visionary who conceived of and successfully pushed for a revival of the Library of Alexandria in the form of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Abbadi graduated (1951) from the University of Alexandria and earned (1960) a doctorate in ancient history from the University of Cambridge. He returned to the University of Alexandria as a lecturer and later became a professor of Greco-Roman studies. He particularly focused on the Library of Alexandria of Classical times and made himself an authority on the institution, which had been the first that was intended to be a repository of all the world’s knowledge.

In a 1972 lecture at the University of Alexandria, Abbadi declared that the creation of a modern version of the great universal library should be undertaken. He then began developing plans for such an institution. Over time he was able to persuade the governor of Al-Iskandariyyah and the government of Egypt to support the project. In 1986 UNESCO agreed to help, and the cornerstone for the new library was laid in 1988.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a cylindrical building designed by the Norwegian architecture company Snøhetta, opened in 2002 with space for some eight million books on seven cascading levels, four museums, a planetarium, several galleries, and an enormous reading room. Abbadi donated a 16th-century copy of the Codex Justinianus (Code of Justinian) to the Bibliotheca. Abbadi wrote Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria (1990) and the Encyclopædia Britannica’s entry on the Library of Alexandria. In 1996 he was elected president of the Archaeological Society of Alexandria, and he was later made honorary president.