The Living Isis: Cleopatra VII Philopator Queen of Egypt Alexandria 48 BCE (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798198376861)

You are the end point of an unbroken chain of survival. Every person who came before you - through plague, war, famine, and flood - lived long enough to pass forward what was necessary for you to exist. You did not begin when you were born. You began when humanity began. Everything that happened between that beginning and this moment is not the past in any abstract sense. It is the story of the making of you.

This book takes you to one of the most extraordinary moments in that story.

Alexandria, Egypt. 48 BCE. The greatest library ever built. Half a million people. Five languages before breakfast. A queen of twenty-one, exiled from her own palace, building her case against Rome - not with armies. With twelve scrolls on a cedar shelf. The calendar you are reading this on was reformed by an astronomer working in this city, in this year. The arguments about what she was - queen, scholar, goddess, weapon - have never stopped.

The Living Isis asks what it would have meant to be inside that moment. Not as Caesar. Not as a king. But as the ordinary young man - the copyist - who carried twelve scrolls through dark streets past a eunuch's soldiers, and stood in a burning warehouse and asked about the work before he asked about the wound.

• What did the scholars of the Mouseion know that Rome did not?
• What does it feel like to carry a thought that will outlast an empire?
• What is the difference between a library and a weapon - when the woman who used it saw no difference at all?

The facts are extraordinary enough.

• The Library held up to 700,000 scrolls. Ships entering the harbour were searched; books were copied and the originals kept.
• Cleopatra VII was the first Ptolemy in three centuries to learn Egyptian. She spoke nine languages.
• The astronomer Sosigenes, working in Alexandria in 48 BCE, gave Caesar the calendar reform that - adjusted by eleven minutes in 1582 - you are living by today.
• Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth from this city using a pole, a shadow, and geometry. He was correct to within the margin of his instruments.
• When Caesar burned his ships in the Great Harbour, scrolls caught the wind and flew in arcs of fire over the water before they fell as ash.

The name of the last librarian is not recorded.

The lamp lit before the others arrived. The reed pen above the page. The cedar oil and sea wind in a hall two hundred and fifty years old. They were curious about the same things we are curious about. They wrote something that is still asking us questions.

For homeschooling families: You are already doing the most important thing - putting the story of humanity into your children's hands. The Beyond His Story We Stand series was written for you. Not a textbook. Not a syllabus. A story your child will not want to put down - that leaves them asking the questions no curriculum can generate. The questions that only wonder produces.

The Living Isis - the Beyond His Story We Stand series - a chronological journey through human history, told through the people official history forgot to record.

The scrolls survived. Carried by an unnamed hand through a burning city. So did everything they were carrying.