Question

During the Hellenistic period in Greek history, a library was built in _____________ that held 500,000 scrolls, including works on science and the literary arts.

Answer 1

Alexandria... History remembers it as the Great Library of Alexandria. The tragedy is that it was destroyed by fire, destroying thousands of irreplaceable works.

Answer 2

Just adding one more thing to my answer for the curious, the reason all those scrolls couldn't be replaced back then was that there was no printing press, no internet, nothing like the kind of libraries we had today. Scrolls had to be copied BY HAND and there was usually only ONE copy of any work at any given time. If you lived in Athens and needed to research something that someone wrote about a hundred years before you were born, you might have to travel hundreds of miles to Alexandria by ship, foot, or horse in the hope that they had what you wanted.

Today, we can find stuff like that with a smart phone. Progress!