Tailer Toledo and  Alexandria Beacons of Humanity
Channel: FarosdelaHumanidad
Date: 2011-06-29

"Toledo and Alexandria, beacons of humanity", is the story of the spread of knowledge through a 
historical path.
The first part explains how  Arabic culture, that had collected and widened the classical legacy, was passed on to the Christian western world as a result of the translations that were done in the border territories between both civilizations and in particular in Toledo during 12th and 13th centuries.
This would not have taken place without the spirit of tolerance that allowed joint   work between scholars of the three cultures Arabic, Jewish and Christian.
The arrival of classical and Arabic knowledge in medieval Christian Europe had a profound influence and was the precursor of the Renaissance.
In the second part of this documentary, a jump backwards takes us to the times of the forebears of the knowledge collected and translated in Toledo.
This is how we reach The Alexandrian Library, founded by the successors of Alexander the Great. Thanks to the patronage of the Ptolomaic kings, this used to be a place where scholars could dedicated themselves wholly to study, surrounded by an extraordinary collection of all the books that were available in those times.
The library functioned for six centuries, beyond the Ptolomaic period, reaching levels of knowledge that in some cases would take 1500 years again to be reached.