The encyclopaedic and multilinguistic embrace of the newly launched Biblioteca Alexandrina presents a radical contrast to its Greek-dominated predecessors in Hellenistic and Roman Period Alexandria. These in turn belong to a five thousand year history of book collections in Egypt. This paper addresses the potential for exploring translation choices in the longue durée offered by the history of writing on the Nile, from the invention of paper around 3000 BCE to the vibrant culture of the book in contemporary Egypt. Although archaeological and historical evidence is limited, research questions may be raised on the number of scripts and languages present in ancient and medieval libraries, and factors influencing the decisions by the keepers of cultural memory in each period, faced with the following choices: which writings to keep, and from which languages, and which of three options to pursue within the spectrum of communicating content from other languages – (1) direct, to retain the original, (2) indirect, to translate each single original, or (3) reductive, to produce a summary out of multiple original sources.