Mostafa El-Abbadi was a historian, Egyptologist, researcher, professor and played a central role in the construction of the library of Alexandria, which has always been of particular interest to him.
Today, October 10, 2022, he would have celebrated his 94th birthday.
The Google Doodle has Mostafa El-Abbadi flipping through a book. Fitting behind him is a bookcase and to the right is the Alexandria Lighthouse. The Google logo is hard to see because the letters are quite transparent – but if you look closely you can see it.
The researcher was born in Cairo in 1928. Soon his thirst for science was almost unquenchable – his father probably piqued his interest in it. Mostafa El-Abbadi’s father was the founder of the College of Letters and Arts at the University of Alexandria. He graduated from the same university at the age of 22 and received a scholarship to Cambridge University. He then returned to his homeland and worked as a teacher and later as a professor in his specialty Romano-Greek studies.
He was particularly interested in the ancient library of Alexandria, which housed about half a million books from different countries and in different languages - also in the form of papyrus scrolls. According to myths, the largest library of antiquity was destroyed by fire about 1800 years ago – many historians doubt that today. It is not clear when and what exactly happened.
Mostafa El-Abbadi dealt intensively with the old library, lectured about it worldwide and campaigned for the construction of a new universal library based on the old one. With his knowledge, he wrote a book about the old library, which was translated into five languages. He finally managed to get the Egyptian government and UNESCO enthusiastic about the construction project – the new library opened in 2002 after 15 years of planning and construction. The “Bibliotheca Alexandrina” contains eight million books, 2000 reading places, a planetarium and numerous research institutes.
Mostafa El-Abbadi died of a heart attack in Alexandria at the age of 88.
Source: Blick
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