Site of ancient university found in Egypt

By Thomas H. Maugh II
Los Angeles Times

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The team has found 13 individual lecture halls, or auditoria, that could have accommodated as many as 5,000 students, according to archaeologist Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The classrooms are on the eastern edge of a large public square in the Late Antique section of modern Alexandria and are adjacent to a previously discovered theater that is now believed to be part of the university complex, Hawass said.

The most conspicuous feature of the rooms, he said, is an elevated seat placed in the middle of the "U," most likely designed for the lecturer.

The discovery is "incredibly impressive," said Willeke Wendrich, an archaeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We knew it existed and was an extremely famous center for learning, but we knew it only from textual accounts. ... We never knew the site."

It was in Alexandria that Archimedes invented the screw-shaped fluid pump still in use today, that Euclid invented the rules of geometry, that Hypsicles first divided the circle of the zodiac into 360 degrees, and the astronomer Eratosthenes calculated the diameter of Earth.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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