What you actually need to know.
- Building opened October 2002. Snøhetta architects (Norway/USA), in collaboration with Hamza Associates (Egypt).
- Houses one main library plus four museums and several specialist research institutes.
- Located in Shatby, central Alexandria, on the corniche, on the historical site of the ancient royal quarter (the Brucheion).
- Most visitors do the library tour and miss the museums entirely. The museums are part of the standard entry.
- Allow three hours for the four museums together; six hours for museums plus the library and the planetarium.
The building, in two sentences
A circular reading room tilted toward the sea, sixteen storeys deep including substantial below-grade levels, clad in a granite wall inscribed with characters from every known writing system. The building was conceived by the late Mostafa El-Abbadi, the Alexandrian classicist who lobbied UNESCO and the Mubarak government for two decades to build a successor to the ancient Library of Alexandria, on or near the original site.
The four museums, briefly
Museum 01 — The Antiquities Museum
Located on the lower (B1) level of the main building, accessed from the library's central concourse. The collection is small — about 1,300 objects on display from a holding of about 1,800 — but unusually distributed: pharaonic, Hellenistic, Roman, Coptic and Islamic objects together in a single chronological sequence. Many of the pieces were excavated during the construction of the Bibliotheca itself, on the historical site of the Ptolemaic royal quarter, and were never previously displayed.
Highlights: a Hellenistic mosaic floor recovered from the Bibliotheca's excavations and reinstalled in situ; a small but excellent collection of Roman bronzes from the harbour bed at Anfoushi; a Hellenistic limestone head identified as a Ptolemy and acquired from the Greco-Roman Museum in 2010 during that institution's closure; pages from the early-twentieth-century Alexandrian library catalogues, displayed as documents of the city's modern history.
Time required: 50-60 minutes.
Museum 02 — The Manuscript Museum
Located on the same lower level, adjacent to the Antiquities Museum but with its own entrance. The collection holds approximately 6,000 manuscripts and 50,000 rare books, with a permanent rotating display of about 100 manuscripts at a time. The strength is in the Quranic manuscripts — fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Cairene and Alexandrian Qurans — and in the Coptic and Greek manuscript holdings.
Highlights: a thirteenth-century Quranic manuscript in muhaqqaq; the original handwritten manuscript of the Alexandrian poet Ahmad Shawqi's Diwan; a small group of Greek papyri from the Fayoum; an early-printed Arabic edition of Ibn al-Nafis on the pulmonary circulation.
Time required: 30-40 minutes.
Museum 03 — The Anwar Sadat Museum
The personal museum of President Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated in October 1981. The collection was assembled by his widow Jehan Sadat and includes his personal library, his Nobel Peace Prize medal (1978), his uniform, the bloodstained shirt he was wearing on the day of the assassination at Nasr City, and a substantial photographic archive covering the 1973 War, the Camp David accords, and the 1979 peace treaty with Israel.
The museum is small — three rooms — and is, in tone, a memorial rather than a critical historical exhibit. Visitors interested in the politics of the 1970s and 1980s in Egypt will find it useful as primary-source material; visitors interested in a critical account will need to read elsewhere.
Time required: 25-35 minutes.
Museum 04 — The History of Science Museum
On the upper levels of the planetarium building, immediately south of the main library. The museum traces scientific developments associated with Alexandria from the Hellenistic period to the present: Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference; Euclid's geometry; Aristarchus' heliocentric proposal; Hero of Alexandria's mechanical experiments; the Arabic translations of the late antique scientific corpus that took place in Alexandrian and Cairene workshops in the eighth and ninth centuries; the modern observatory at Helwan.
The museum is, in effect, a series of large-scale models and reproductions — there are few "original" objects — and works as a kind of three-dimensional textbook. It is excellent for visitors with children, less essential for adult specialists.
Time required: 40-60 minutes.
What is also inside the building, in one paragraph
The main reading room (a single tilted disc with seating for about 2,000 readers); the planetarium (a separate spherical structure to the south); seven specialist research institutes, including the Alexandria and Mediterranean Studies Centre and the Calligraphy Centre; the rare-books reading room; a children's library; and several rotating temporary exhibition spaces. The "library" of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is, in any practical sense, a campus rather than a single room.
The recommended walking order
| Step | Where | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Enter through the main concourse from the corniche side. Get the orientation map. | 10 min |
| 2 | Take the central stair down to the lower level for the Antiquities Museum. | 50 min |
| 3 | Cross to the Manuscript Museum on the same level. | 35 min |
| 4 | Up to the central concourse for a slow walk through the main reading room. | 20 min |
| 5 | South to the planetarium building for the History of Science Museum. | 50 min |
| 6 | Sadat Museum (in the same complex, smaller annex). | 30 min |
| 7 | Coffee at the corniche side café. | 30 min |
The neighbourhood, briefly
The Bibliotheca is in Shatby, on the corniche, between the Catholic cemetery to the north-west and the Silsila promontory to the south-east. The Shatby necropolis — the earliest Hellenistic cemetery of Alexandria, dating to the late fourth century BCE — is a five-minute walk inland; it is a public archaeological site, fenced but accessible, and worth twenty minutes if open. The Greco-Roman Museum on Sharia el-Mathaf is fifteen minutes' walk south-west and pairs naturally with a Bibliotheca visit on the same day if you have the energy for both.
One paragraph of opinion
The Bibliotheca's museums are an underused resource. Most foreign visitors come for the building itself; most Egyptian visitors come for the library; almost nobody plans for the museums. They reward the planning.
The Antiquities Museum, in particular, is the only place in Egypt where pharaonic, Hellenistic, Coptic and Islamic objects sit in a single chronological sequence on the same floor — an organising principle that the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo also tries, but that the Bibliotheca did first, with smaller numbers and arguably better lighting. If you have a free afternoon in Alexandria, the four museums together are a stronger half-day than any single museum elsewhere in the city.
Practical context, in two notes
Where it is: Shatby, Alexandria, on the corniche. Walking distance from the Misr railway station (twenty minutes) or from Saad Zaghloul Square (thirty minutes). Trams 25 and 36 stop at the Shatby station immediately south of the building.
How long to allow: three hours for the four museums alone; five to six hours for museums plus the library tour. A full day if you intend to use the rare-books reading room (which requires advance application).
Briefing 03 of 5. Last revised 20 April 2026.