Egyptian University
Scribes writing (New Kingdom Egypt)
If not very many kids in ancient Egypt went to school, even fewer kids got to go to college when they grew up. In the time of the Pharaohs, there wasn't any university in Egypt (or anywhere else in the world), and advanced students worked with professional scribes, learning their business as apprentices.
But after Alexander conquered Egypt, during the Hellenistic period (about 300 BC), the Greek rulers of Egypt built the world's first university. Still only a few very lucky men and women got to go there, but it was a big step forward to invent the idea of a university.
To get books for the library of the University of Alexandria, according to one story, the Greek ruler Ptolemy made a law that his guards should search every ship that came to Alexandria, and if there were any books they should take them and copy them (in those days the only way to get a copy of a book was to copy it by hand). Scholars came from Italy, Greece, West Asia, North Africa and East Africa to use the famous library.
A classroom at the University of Alexandria (al-Ahram 2004)
The great University of Alexandria had at least thirteen lecture halls, and could have held as many as 5000 students at one time. All of the classrooms have rows of benches running around three sides of the room, stepping up higher towards the back so everybody could see. In the middle of the room there is a high seat, probably for the teacher. These classrooms were near a big theater and an open square that were probably also part of the university; maybe the theater was used for bigger classes.
Among the scholars who worked at the University of Alexandria while the Greeks ruled Egypt were Euclid, who wrote a book about geometry, Archimedes, Aristarchus, who figured out that the earth went around the sun, and Eratosthenes, who calculated the diameter of the earth.
After the Romans conquered Egypt from the Greek queen Cleopatra in 30 BC, the University of Alexandria kept right on going. The geographer Ptolemy worked there on his map of the world. In the 400s AD, the University of Alexandria was still open. The mathematician Hypatia was working there then; she developed formulas for describing what happens when a cone intersects a plane.
Nobody knows exactly what happened to the University of Alexandria and its library. Probably it gradually got less important and less well taken care of all through the Roman period, and even more so once people converted to Christianity about 400 AD and lost interest in reading the old Greek and Roman books. Some, or all, of the library may have been burned up in a fire, or maybe several different fires.
When the Umayyads conquered Egypt in 642 AD, they soon established a new university in their new city of Cairo, near Alexandria. Islamic scholars like Ibn al-Haytham al Basri continued the Greek and Roman work on astronomy there with some investigations into the reflection and refraction of light. Jewish scholars like Maimonides also studied in Cairo.
To find out more about the University of Alexandria, check out these books from Amazon or from your local library:
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