La bibliothèque d’Alexandrie, Claudine Le Tourneur d’Ison

The Library of Alexandria Alexandria. More than a city: an idea. The place where humanity, for the first time, imagined bringing together all its knowledge to turn it into a tool of power as well as emancipation: the world's first intelligence, which Claudine Le Tourneur d'Ison brings back to life here in all its splendour. From the birth of writing in Mesopotamia to today's Bibliotheca Alexandrina, she traces the entire adventure of a place that was in turn a capital of knowledge, a political laboratory and then an ideological battlefield. Alexander the Great, Ptolemy, Aristotle, Cleopatra, as well as Mohsen Zahran, the builder of the new Library, become voices that question what it means to transmit, preserve or control knowledge. With a chiseled, erudite pen, Claudine Le Tourneur d'Ison reveals a truth overshadowed by the myth of the fire: the Library of Alexandria survived, traveling as far as Baghdad, Toledo, modern Europe and even our current information systems. It sheds light on the present, where artificial intelligence and data centralization are reviving the same essential questions as in Ptolemy times: who owns knowledge? Who classifies it? And who decides what should be forgotten? A powerful fresco on human memory, its fragility and its rebirth. Claudine Le Tourneur d'ison Journalist, documentary filmmaker and author of numerous books, including thirteen on Egypt, Claudine Le Tourneur d'Ison received the Prix Diane Potier-Boès from the Académie Française for Mariette Pacha ou le rêve égyptien. She has also published Champollion. Le dernier voyage and Les Immortels. L'épopée de Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt pour sauver les temples de Nubie.