Mostafa El-Abbadi

Mostafa El-Abbadi was a prominent Egyptian historian, public intellectual and professor specialized in Greco-Roman studies. He was educated in Egypt and the United Kingdom, and obtained his PhD in ancient history from the University of Cambridge. He returned to the University of Alexandria as a lecturer and later a professor of Greco-Roman studies. He was particularly interested in the ancient Library of Alexandria, and authored several books and articles on its history and fate. He was also the visionary who proposed the revival of the ancient library in the form of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a modern cultural and research center that opened in 2002. He was a member of several cultural and academic institutions, and received many honors and awards for his contributions to the field of history. He was married to the literary critic and scholar Azza Kararah, who died in 2015. He had two children, a son who is a computer scientist and a daughter who is a doctor. He died on 13 February 2017, at the age of 88, in Alexandria.