Los Angeles, May 9: A Polish-Egyptian team has unearthed the site of the fabled University of Alexandria, home of Archimedes, Euclid and a host of other scholars from the era when Alexandria dominated the Mediterranean.

The team has found 13 individual lecture halls, or auditoria, that could have accommodated as many as 5,000 students, according to archaeologist Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The classrooms are on the eastern edge of a large public square in the the Late Antique section of modern Alexandria and are adjacent to a previously discovered theatre that is now believed to be part of the university complex, Hawass said.

All 13 of the auditoria have similar dimensions and internal arrangements, he added. They feature rows of stepped benches running along the walls on three sides of the rooms, sometimes forming a joined “U” at one end.

The most conspicuous feature of the rooms, he added, is an elevated seat placed in the middle of the “U,” most likely designed for the lecturer.

“It is the first time ever that such a complex of lecture halls has been uncovered on any Greco-Roman site in the whole Mediterranean area,” Hawass said. This is “perhaps the oldest university in the world.”

The discovery is “incredibly impressive," said Willeke Wendrich, an archaeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We knew it existed and was an extremely famous centre for learning, but we knew it only from textual accounts. We never knew the site.”

Alexandria was a tiny fishing village on the northwestern delta of the Nile called Rhakotis when Alexander the Great of Macedon chose it as the site of the new capital of his burgeoning empire. But he never saw a single building rise there, dying before construction could begin.

The task of building the city fell to one of his lieutenants, Ptolemy, who succeeded Alexander as the king of Egypt and aspired to ruling the entire Mediterranean. It was here that Archimedes invented the screw-shaped fluid pump still in use today, Euclid invented rules of geometry, Hypsicles first divided the circle of the zodiac into 360 degrees, and astronomer Eratosthenes calculated the diameter of Earth.