The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  Alexander’s motives certainly included his own glorification.3 He had recently been crowned as Pharoah in the ancient capital of Lower Egypt, Memphis, and after visiting the site of Alexandria he held an interview with the god Zeus Ammon; thereafter he liked to think that he was the son of this god rather than of the remarkable Philip II of Macedon whose own conquests in Greece had laid the basis for Alexander’s empire. He was obsessed with Homer’s works, and (according to Plutarch) Homer appeared in his dreams and reminded him of a passage in the Odyssey that described an island off the coast of Egypt called Pharos, possessed of a fine harbour. He understood the potential importance of Alexandria as a centre of trade, and his biographer Arrian insisted that he was closely involved with its planning: unfortunately there was not enough chalk to hand with which to draw on the soil an outline of the city walls, so one of Alexander’s architects suggested using barley meal instead, even though it had to be taken from the supplies the Macedonian soldiers were carrying with them. In the end it was flocks of birds attracted by the flour that marked out the boundaries of the city.4 As in other new cities of the Mediterranean world the streets were laid out in a grid pattern that still to a significant extent survives, even though the broad avenues of early Alexandria have narrowed greatly, and little survives of the ancient city above the water line – nothing at all of the city as it was in the late fourth century BC. What was exceptional was its sheer scale: three miles (five kilometres) from west to east, and about half that from north to south: a long, narrow city, said to have resembled in shape a Greek cloak, or chlamys.5 Its harbours featured prominently in the plans, separated from one another by a long mole that linked the new city to the island of Pharos of which Homer had spoken.

  Alexander soon left Egypt behind, marching triumphantly through Persia towards India, and dying in Babylon eight years after the foundation of Alexandria, aged only thirty-two.6 His dream of a Hellenic-Persian empire, bringing together the high cultures of two great nations, also died, and his empire was divided up among three competing generals, in Macedonia and Greece, Syria and the East, and Egypt. It was the dynasty of generals who took charge of Egypt that brought to fruition his dream of founding a great city on the edge of Egypt. Ptolemy I Soter (‘the Saviour’) assumed power as Pharaoh in his own right, fusing Hellenic and Egyptian ideas of rulership and government; statues of the Ptolemies represented them in a highly traditional style as Pharaohs (with an occasional concession to Greek hairstyles), and they built temples to Egyptian gods in archaic Egyptian styles.7 It became customary for the Ptolemies to marry their sisters, as the Pharaohs had long done, a practice that did not appeal to the Greeks. But Alexandria also became one of the liveliest centres of a reinvigorated Greek culture that spread across the Mediterranean. What is distinctive about ‘Hellenistic’ culture is that it was not the preserve of Greeks; Hellenistic styles of art reached Carthage and Etruria, and Hellenistic ideas captivated Jews, Syrians and Egyptians. Hellenistic culture has often been treated as a demotic debasement of the classical culture of ancient Athens, characterized by florid styles of art and architecture – a sort of ancient Greek baroque. Yet it was the Hellenistic world, and Alexandria in particular (rather than Hellas itself), that produced some of the most famous names in Greek science and culture: the mathematician Euclid, the inventor Archimedes, the comedian Menander, followed in the early Roman period by the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo and the physician Galen. Alexandria was of fundamental importance in the spreading of this new, open, version of Greek culture across the Mediterranean; it became the lighthouse of Mediterranean culture.

  Particularly striking was the mixture of innovation and tradition in the religious policy of the Ptolemies. The early Ptolemies were men of extraordinary ambition, energy and inquisitiveness, open to many cultures and far-sighted in their management of the Egyptian economy. It was they, rather than Alexander the Great, who made Alexandria into the vibrant city it became. Ptolemy I Soter (d. 283/2) and Ptolemy II Philadelphos (d. 246) drew to Alexandria a mixed population of Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians and Jews. Many of the Jews arrived as loyal soldiers, greatly enamoured of Alexander the Great; ‘Alexander’ remained ever after a favourite name among Jews. They, of course, possessed their own distinctive cult, and the Ptolemies had no wish to interfere with it; a significant area of eastern Alexandria, known as Delta, became the focus of Jewish activity, and the first large Jewish settlement on the shores of the Mediterranean came into being. The ancient Israelites had mainly been a landlocked rural people, hemmed in by the Philistines and other peoples who lived along the coast. For this reason they have not featured prominently in the history of the Mediterranean up to this point. But with the founding of Alexandria, Jewish beliefs and culture began to spread slowly across the Mediterranean. Philo emphasized the role of Moses as lawgiver, and stressed the ethical value of the divine commandments handed down by Moses. The combination of a powerful ethical message with a structured system of law, as well as the intellectual appeal of monotheism, brought Judaism increasing numbers of converts and sympathizers over the next few centuries. Later Jewish tradition would characterize this era as one of opposition, often violent, between Hellenism and Judaism, culminating in the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid rulers of Syria and Palestine in the second century BC. Yet these rulers signally failed to uphold the tradition of respect for Judaism that their Ptolemaic rivals in Egypt understood so well: the Seleucids tried to suppress Jewish practices such as circumcision and to offer pagan sacrifices in the Temple. The festival of Hanukkah, which commemorates the Jewish revolt, came to be treated as a celebration of the decisive rejection of Hellenic ways. The revolt certainly gave expression to anti-Hellenic sentiments, but these sentiments themselves reveal how Hellenized most Jews had become – criticized for attending games and learning Greek philosophy. Greek, rather than Aramaic (the patois of the Jews of Palestine), was so widely spoken among the Alexandrian Jews that, as will be seen, a Greek version of the Bible was prepared. Moreover, in the first two centuries of`Alexandria, Greeks and Jews lived side by side in harmony. The Jews commemorated the Ptolemies in the dedicatory inscriptions of their many synagogues, loudly praising the dynasty without conceding the claim made in pagan temples that the Ptolemies were ‘divine’.8

  To the rest of the population, and especially the Greeks, Ptolemy I offered a new cult, that of the god Sarapis. Sarapis was partly of Egyptian origin, a fusion of the bull god Apis and the resurrected god Osiris (hence, indeed, the name, [O]sir-apis). But Sarapis acquired many of the characteristics of Greek gods as well: elements of Dionysos, of Zeus and – in parallel to the attributes of Osiris – even of Hades, the god of the Underworld. He was also linked to the Greek god of healing, Asklepios. He was often portrayed carrying on his head a grain measure, which signified his link to the fertility of Egypt and its growing trade in grain. This thoroughly eclectic figure could thus be represented in Greek or Egyptian styles.9 When the Ptolemies erected a great temple to Sarapis, the Sarapeion or Serapaeum, at the god’s supposed birthplace of Memphis, it was decorated with what have been described as ‘purely Greek’ sculptures, though the Serapaeum in Alexandria was surrounded by sphinxes in full Egyptian style, of which several still survive. Sarapis proved popular in Alexandria: ‘the operation of creating a new deity, bizarre though it may seem to us, probably did not appear so at the time’.10 For the Greeks did not regard their own gods as exclusively Hellenic, and could accept that they manifested themselves in different guises to different peoples. Thus the invention of Sarapis formed part of a process by which the Egyptian gods were accommodated to Greek observers. The Greek question was not ‘How are your gods different from ours?’ but ‘How are your gods the same as ours?’ The eclectic nature of Sarapis also reflected the sense that there were no sharp boundaries between the twelve Olympian gods, and that their personification (for example in Homer’s works) was a way of making sense of a great jumble of divine attributes, an attitude that was also som
etimes expressed by making Sarapis into the senior among a trinity of Greek or Egyptian gods. This culminated in much later attempts to portray Sarapis as the one true God of the Universe, in outright competition with the Christians of Alexandria.11

  II

  The second important innovation under Ptolemy I and II was the building of their great lighthouse on Pharos island; the word ‘Pharos’ survived in Greek, Latin and the romance languages with the simple meaning of lighthouse. It was immediately classed as one of the great wonders of the world, along with the Colossus of Rhodes, of which more shortly: both these monuments proclaimed the glory of the cities where they stood, but also emphasized how that glory was founded in significant measure upon trade. The lighthouse formed part of the early plans for Alexandria; work on the structure began in 297 BC and building lasted until 283. In part it was built out of necessity: shoals lay close to shore, invisible at night and hard to track by day. It was essential to make approaches to Alexandria safer if the city were to achieve its potential as a centre for trade across the Mediterranean. The massive structure the Ptolemies commissioned stood 135 metres (440 feet) above the waves; the building was constructed on three levels, the lowest part square tapering upwards to a platform on which stood an octagonal tower crowned by a circular colonnade, with a massive statue of Zeus at the very top. Great mirrors cast a light many miles out to sea – forty miles, at a reasonable guess. How the lighthouse was illuminated is a mystery. For, even though parts of the structure were re-used in the much smaller but impressive Mamluk fortress that was constructed on the site in the late fifteenth century, and even though sizeable fragments of the lighthouse have now been exposed by underwater excavations, the exact appearance and manner of operation of the Pharos remain elusive.

  The building of the lighthouse and indeed of Alexandria was possible only because the Ptolemies had gained control of massive resources. Their achievement lay not just in capitalizing on those resources, but in magnifying them as Alexandria developed its trade. In fact some observers insisted that the wealth of Alexandria was derived at least as much from the Egyptian hinterland as from the Mediterranean: the geographer Strabo opined that ‘the imports to the city by way of the canals greatly exceed those by sea, so that the lake harbour was far richer than that on the sea’, though he was writing several centuries after the golden age of Ptolemy I and II, at the start of the first century AD.12 The city looked two ways, linking Egypt to the Mediterranean as never before; and links beyond the Mediterranean – through the Red Sea to India – ensured Alexandria’s role as the prime entrepôt between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, which it would maintain with only occasional interruptions for two millennia. The Ptolemies possessed an acute sense of how to sustain the vigour of the Alexandrian, and Egyptian, economy. They knew that command of the sea routes did not simply depend on Alexandria. They worked hard to bring the cities of Phoenicia under their control, at the price of conflict with their rivals the Seleucids. If they were to maintain an effective fleet they would need to extend their political control far from Egypt, into lands rich in timber: Cyprus, Lebanon and southern Anatolia; equally, without such a fleet they would not be able to hold these lands.13 A naval race began, and not just the size of the Egyptian and Syrian fleets grew, but the size of their ships. In the fourth century both sides could sometimes mobilize over 300 ships, and the Phoenician shipyards transformed the cedars of Lebanon into a substantial fleet for the Seleucid kings; under Ptolemy II a fleet of 336 warships included 224 quadriremes, triremes and smaller vessels, but it also included many monster ships – 17 quinquiremes and still larger ships identified by the supposed number of oarsmen on each bank: 5 ‘sixes’, 37 ‘sevens’, 30 ‘nines’, 14 ‘elevens’, and so on up to 2 great ‘thirties’. Later, Ptolemy IV Philopator (d. 204) would build a ‘forty’, which may have been a massive catamaran.14 Whether these names really reflect the number of rowers, or were simply a way of indicating ‘even larger than the last large ship’, is a moot point. The ‘forty’ of Ptolemy IV never entered battle, and was probably not fit to do so; on the other hand, it amply displayed the wealth and magnificence of the Greek Pharaohs of Egypt. Its length was over 130 metres, its width over 16 metres, and it is said to have been crewed by 4,000 oarsmen and over 3,000 marines and auxiliary crewmen. Simply providing food and water for such a ship would have necessitated a small fleet of supply boats.15 Yet massive size was not all about display. A ship’s ram of the second century BC found underwater near Atlit in Israel is 2¼ metres long and weighs 465 kilograms.16

  In addition to timber for the fleet, the Ptolemies needed to find sources of gold, silver, tin and iron, the last of which had been strangely neglected in Egypt during the long centuries when Hittites, Philistines, Greeks and Carthaginians enthusiastically made weapons and implements out of iron. Maybe this was because the soil of Egypt was so tractable after the Nile floods that there was little call for heavy ploughs shod with iron. On the other hand, there did exist a flourishing metal industry, and exports of gold, silver and bronze plate became one of the strengths of Alexandria, along with the export of textiles, pottery and – a particular speciality – glass.17 Papyrus was another Egyptian speciality that had been in demand in neighbouring lands since the era of Wenamun, in the eleventh century BC; now, Egyptian papyrus was ever more widely diffused across the Mediterranean. One of the most enthusiastic markets for these goods was Carthage, which used the Ptolemaic weight standard for its coins; Carthage was valuable to the Ptolemies because Spanish and Sardinian silver was funnelled through the city.18 There were also close relations with Rhodes, which in the third century BC was as important a hub of trade as Alexandria. Alexandria thus established itself as one of the major business centres of the entire Mediterranean; its strength rested not just on the extraordinary achievements of the early Ptolemies, but also in the way it rapidly became integrated into the Hellenistic trade network.

  One of King Ptolemy II’s administrators, named Apollonios, appears in a series of papyri from the Egyptian desert. Among them is a ship’s manifest of the middle of the third century BC, recording a cargo sent to Apollonios’ household from Syria to Alexandria, and it provides rich evidence of the variety of goods that were being traded: nuts from the Black Sea, always a favourite on Mediterranean trade routes; cheese from Chios; olive oil, figs, honey, sponges and wool. There was also wild boar meat, venison and goat’s meat aboard. But what filled most of the hull was wine – 138 amphorae and 6 half-amphorae of ordinary wine, and 5 amphorae plus 15 half-amphorae of sweet dessert wine.19 This commerce was carefully and accurately taxed. The Ptolemies inherited from the Pharaohs a tight system of control of trade that they had no intention of relaxing. Ships arrived at designated ports and their cargoes were closely examined. It was an ancient system of commercial taxation that continued under the Romans, Byzantines and Arabs: ad valorem taxes, representing a percentage of the estimated value of the cargo, sometimes as much as 50 per cent (on wine and oil), sometimes merely a third or a quarter; taxes were levied not just at the ports but at internal customs stations along the Nile, as goods moved up to Alexandria.20 Although this forced up the price of goods by the time they reached the quayside at Alexandria, demand for Egyptian grain and other products was generally so strong that these goods could still find purchasers in the eastern Mediterranean. In addition, the Alexandrians profited handsomely from their role as middlemen in the trade linking the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. Although in the past, at Naukratis and elsewhere, Greek merchants had been able to tap into this trade, the scale of contact was now vastly enlarged. Gold, frankincense and myrrh were three of the prized items carried up the Red Sea. In 270/269 Ptolemy II Philadelphos reopened a canal that linked the Nile Delta with the lakes to the west of Sinai (now traversed by the Suez Canal), and created a maritime route into the Red Sea. Indian goods became familiar in Alexandria, while the Ptolemies profited from access to African and Indian elephants for their army.21 An Egyptian papyrus list
s the cargo of a vessel named the Hermapollo, which had arrived from India carrying 60 cases of spikenard, 5 tons of general spices, and 235 tons of ivory and ebony.22 The great Mediterranean spice trade had been founded, and Alexandria would remain its most important centre even beyond the opening of the Cape route to the Indies by the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth century.

  The product that came to dominate the business of Alexandria was, however, grain. This was partly so that the city itself could be fed. Channels had been constructed linking Lake Mareotis, behind Alexandria, to the Nile Delta, so access to grain was unproblematic. But the Ptolemies were well aware that there was always room on the international markets for grain; Athens might look to the Bosphorus for supplies, but Rhodes was keen to buy Egyptian wheat for itself and for its many trading partners.23 The Ptolemies found themselves in an exceptionally strong position because they inherited a regime according to which most of the land in Egypt was the possession of Pharaoh. They were thus able to charge the peasants a steep rent and to demand as much as half of what was produced, for the fertility of the soil after the Nile floods did not make such demands entirely unreasonable. New opportunities arose on the export market: a series of invasions of the Black Sea region, by Celtic and Scythian tribes, was endangering the sources and supply route on which Athens and other Greek cities had been relying for food. Seeing a chance of enriching themselves from the grain trade, the Ptolemies worked hard to increase the quality and quantity of grain production. They also extended the areas under cultivation and encouraged the use of iron implements as a way of improving efficiency and yields: ‘so extensive a use of iron in Egyptian agriculture almost amounted to a revolution’.24 Irrigation was improved, and among the contraptions used to water the land appeared the Archimedes screw, still favoured by Egyptian fellahin, and known in those days as the kochlias, or ‘snail’.25 The Persians had introduced a new type of wheat, superior to traditional Egyptian varieties, and the advantages of this were seized upon while Alexander was still alive. The cultivation of vines was greatly extended on the shores opposite Alexandria, and some good wines were apparently produced; more important, perhaps, was the development of an oil industry, since before the Ptolemies olive trees had not been widespread in Egypt. In doing all this, the Ptolemies laid the foundations of a new prosperity that would last until the Byzantine period.