Alexandria

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Alexandria began as a line of barley meal on a bare shore. In 332/331 BCE Alexander, master of Egypt for a matter of months, chose the strip of ground pinched between the sea and Lake Mareotis, opposite the island of Pharos that a figure in his sleep had named, reciting Homer’s own lines, and set the architect Dinocrates of Rhodes to grid a Greek city beside the fishing village of Rhakotis, pharaonic Egypt’s one toehold on that coast. The surveyors traced the circuit in meal, in the shape of a Macedonian cloak, and birds came down in clouds and ate every line of it. The seers read what looked like ruin as the true omen: the city would “be a nursing mother for men of every nation,” as Plutarch records in the Life of Alexander. Alexander ordered the work to proceed, set out for the temple of Ammon, and never saw a wall of it raised. He returned as a corpse, hijacked from the Babylon road by Ptolemy son of Lagus and enthroned in the Soma — the founder become his city’s first relic.

What rose on the grid was the most deliberate city the Mediterranean had yet seen. Strabo, resident there in the 20s BCE, walked streets cut for horsemen and chariots, two of them immensely broad; he saw the Heptastadion, the seven-stade mole yoking Pharos island to the mainland and dividing the Great Harbor from the harbor of Eunostus, and along the Great Harbor the royal quarter, the Brucheion, by his reckoning a fourth or even a third of the whole circuit. At the harbor mouth stood the lighthouse, begun under Ptolemy I Soter and finished in 283 BCE: three diminishing stories rising some 135 meters, dedicated by Sostratus of Cnidus to the divine saviors on behalf of mariners — one of the Seven Wonders. The Ptolemies ruled here for nearly three centuries, down to Cleopatra VII, with whose death in 30 BCE Egypt passed to Rome and Alexandria became the empire’s second city.

The city’s intellectual engine was, formally, a temple. The Museion — the shrine of the Muses — stood inside the palace quarter as a religious foundation under a priest appointed first by the kings and later by Caesar; Strabo describes “a public walk, an Exedra with seats, and a large house, in which is the common mess-hall of the men of learning who share the Museum.” Scholarship was a cult community: the men of that table held property in common and served the goddesses of memory. Planned under Ptolemy I with the exiled Aristotelian Demetrius of Phalerum, and enlarged under Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the Museion sustained the Library whose head librarians — Zenodotus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Eratosthenes — defined Hellenistic learning, with Euclid working in its orbit. Ammianus held that 700,000 rolls burned when Caesar’s war fired the harbor in 48–47 BCE; Roger Bagnall’s sorting of the evidence shows such numbers impossible and the single-catastrophe stories legends grown over a long decline — Caesar’s fire, the waning of royal patronage, and above all Aurelian’s destruction of the Brucheion around 272 CE, which carried off the quarter that housed the Museum. The famous tale of the caliph Omar ordering the books burned first surfaces in twelfth- and thirteenth-century writers, and is fable.

Alexandria had no oracle like Delphi’s, no ancestral mystery like the rite kept at Eleusis; a city built from nothing had to enthrone its own gods, and it did. On the single natural height of the old Rhakotis quarter the Ptolemies raised the Serapeum, the temple of Serapis, the double-faced god the first Ptolemy enthroned so Greek and Egyptian could worship at one altar. The temenos built under Ptolemy III Euergetes was rebuilt on a grander scale in the Roman period, and Ammianus judged that next to Rome’s Capitolium “the whole world beholds nothing more magnificent.” Within it stood the “daughter library” that carried the Museion’s overflow; in its precinct Diocletian’s honorific column of about 298–302 — misnamed “Pompey’s Pillar” ever after — is still the city’s largest standing ancient monument.

The city’s singular gift, though, was its solvent power. Here Thoth spoke Greek as Hermes; Isis acquired mysteries in the Greek manner; Osiris-Apis became Serapis; the Torah became a Greek book. The Septuagint was made here under Ptolemy II Philadelphus — so the Letter of Aristeas tells it, legend wrapped around an accepted kernel — for the largest Jewish community of the diaspora, which by the testimony of Philo of Alexandria filled two of the city’s five lettered quarters. Philo is the fusion personified — his Logos reads Moses through Plato, his embassy to Caligula after the pogrom of 38 CE shows the synthesis under siege — and the contemplative Therapeutae he describes kept their quiet above Lake Mareotis outside the walls. That community perished in the diaspora revolt of 115–117 CE, recorded by Eusebius as spreading from Alexandria through Egypt and Cyrene into open war.

The same solvent worked on the invisible world. In the first three centuries CE, in the Greco-Egyptian milieu whose metropolis was Alexandria, the treatises of Hermes Trismegistus were set down: Greek philosophy in the mouth of an Egyptian god, written where priestly tradition, Platonic teaching, and Jewish scripture demonstrably cohabited. No treatise can be pinned to an Alexandrian address, but only this city held all the ingredients in one place at one time. The Stoic Chaeremon of Alexandria, sacred scribe and man of the Museum, embodies the type — an Egyptian priest writing Greek philosophy about Egyptian religion. In the second century the teachers of gnosis made the city their workshop: Basilides and Valentinus both taught here, and the great systems of Gnosticism are Alexandrian in their learning.

Christian Alexandria answered with a school of its own. Eusebius reports “a school of sacred learning, which continues to our day,” led from about 180 by the Stoic-trained Pantaenus, after him Clement of Alexandria until about 202, and then Origen — a school whose way of reading scripture carried Philo’s inheritance into the church. Pagan philosophy renewed itself in the same streets. Ammonius Saccas taught here — Ammianus lists him among the Brucheion’s famous men — and the young Plotinus, finding him at twenty-seven, stayed eleven years (c. 232–243) before leaving with Gordian’s eastern expedition, as Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus tells it: Neoplatonism has its taproot in this city. The line ran long. Hypatia, daughter of Theon — the last man attested in the Museum’s tradition — taught publicly in the line of Plato and Plotinus, and in the contemporary judgment of Socrates Scholasticus had “made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time”; her murder at the Caesareum in March 415, amid the feud between the prefect Orestes and the bishop Cyril, became the emblem of an intellectual world closing. Yet the school endured after her — from Hierocles down to John Philoponus and Stephanus — teaching philosophy into the early seventh century, longer than Athens itself, as Edward Watts has shown.

The endings came in series. In 391 — part of the scholarship argues 392 — the bishop Theophilus, armed with Theodosius’ laws and answering riots in which pagans had fortified the sanctuary, destroyed the Serapeum and paraded its cult objects in derision; the grammarians Helladius and Ammonius fled to Constantinople. The sea had already begun taking its share: the tsunami of 365 wrecked the harbor front, and earthquakes with slow subsidence would carry the royal quarter and the Pharos foreshore six to eight meters under. In November 641 the city capitulated by treaty to ‘Amr ibn al-‘As; in September 642 the imperial garrison sailed away, the conquerors set their capital at Fustat, and the ancient city’s near-millennium was over.

The harbor floor and the lecture halls

The modern city sits directly on the ancient one, so Alexandria is recovered in salvage lots, in cisterns, and under the sea; the base map is still Mahmoud Bey el-Falaki’s survey of 1865–66 (published 1872), which traced the buried grid beneath the modern blocks. Since 1992 Franck Goddio and his IEASM team, working with Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, have mapped some 400 hectares of the Eastern Harbor — the ancient Portus Magnus — locating the sunken royal quarter with the island of Antirhodos (on the opposite side of the harbor from where Strabo placed it), the Poseidium, a temple of Isis, and a granite head attributed to Caesarion; in 2025, the preserved timbers of a thirty-five-meter royal barge in Antirhodos’ port. The survey appeared as Alexandria: The Submerged Royal Quarters (Goddio, Bernand, et al., Periplus, 1998); the institute’s project record carries the continuing finds.

Off Qaitbay fort, on the drowned foreshore of the lighthouse itself, the Centre d’Études Alexandrines — founded in 1989 by Jean-Yves Empereur, whose Alexandria Rediscovered (British Museum Press, 1998) is the excavator’s own account — has dived every season since 1994 over thousands of architectural pieces — sphinxes, obelisk fragments, colossal royal statues — identified as ruins of the Pharos and its neighbors; a photogrammetric survey begun in 2012 counted 3,040 blocks by 2020, and twenty-two great blocks were raised for study in 2025. The campaign record is kept by the center, now under Isabelle Hairy. On land the Polish–Egyptian mission at Kom el-Dikka has opened the one great window in the city center — a Roman residential district turned late antique civic complex of baths and theater — where Grzegorz Majcherek announced in 2004 some twenty lecture halls of the fifth to seventh centuries — in the excavators’ words, “the only material remains of the ancient university known from the Mediterranean area” — presented in his “The Auditoria on Kom el-Dikka” (Proceedings of the 25th International Congress of Papyrology, Ann Arbor, 2010). The Serapeum, leveled to its foundations, was rebuilt on paper by Judith McKenzie, Sheila Gibson, and A. T. Reyes, whose “Reconstructing the Serapeum in Alexandria from the Archaeological Evidence” (Journal of Roman Studies 94, 2004) recovers both the Ptolemaic and the Roman buildings of “Alexandria’s most important sanctuary, and one of the most famous pagan sanctuaries of antiquity” and traces its conversion to Christian use after 391. The invisible city has its archaeology too: Garth Fowden’s The Egyptian Hermes (Cambridge, 1986) excavated the milieu rather than the ground, reading the technical and philosophical Hermetica together as one “way of Hermes” born of the Greco-Egyptian fusion this city governed.

The buildings went where buildings go. The Pharos, broken by fourteenth-century earthquakes, was quarried into the fort Sultan Qaitbay raised on its footprint in 1477; the Heptastadion silted into the isthmus that carries the later town; the Library is a question without a grave; in 2002 the Bibliotheca Alexandrina opened on the harbor curve as the Museion’s deliberate heir. But the city Alexander drew in barley meal was never chiefly its buildings. It was a wager that the wisdom of Egypt, the philosophy of Greece, and the scriptures of Israel could live on one grid and read one another — and everything that wager bred, from the Septuagint to the Hermetica to the last Platonic lectures at Kom el-Dikka, has outlived every stone of it. The birds took the barley on the first day, and the seers read them rightly: the city has gone on feeding the nations long after its walls went under the sea.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres · Porphyry — On the Life of Plotinus (MacKenna)

→ Related: Serapis · Hypatia · Philo Of Alexandria · Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism · Ancient Egypt