About MouseION

The Mouseion at Alexandria was a center of learning built by Ptolemy I, a general under Alexander the Great who went on to rule Egypt from 323-285 BC. Mouseion means “shrine of the muses” and is the origin of the modern-day museum. The most famous part of Ptolemy I’s Mouseion was the Library at Alexandria, which was the epicenter of knowledge and study in the ancient world.

Okay, fast forward to present day. In case you haven’t connected the dots, I chose the name mouseion (or mouse-ion since I’m too cheap to buy the unhyphenated domain) in order to claim the most pretentious possible name for my blog. Associating this blog, a collection of random scraps of obscure knowledge, with the Library at Alexandria seemed so ridiculously far-fetched that I felt compelled to go for it.

Credits

The banner image on the home page is from a rendering of the Library at Alexandria by German artist O von Corven, and was appropriated from wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Brittannica.

The mouse logo (the plus sign is meant to convey “ion” … but I’m not a scientist so this may be nonsense) was created using logomakr.com.