Alexandria was the greatest mental crucible the world has ever known, the place where ideas originating in obscure antiquity were forged into intellectual constructs that far outlasted the city itself. If the Renaissance was the “rebirth” of learning that led to our modern world, then Alexandria was its original birthplace. Our politics may be modeled on Greek prototypes, our public architecture on Roman antecedents, but in our minds we are all the children of Alexandria.
CHAPTER ONE
FLOUR AND SAND
History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world.
Heraclitus, Herakleitos and Diogenes
From atop the walls of the castle of Qaitbey in Egypt you can look across the rocky coast on which the castle stands to where fishing boats still ride at anchor in the bay and local children fling themselves from the rocks into the warm, clear sea that laps the shore. It is a sight familiar to perhaps thousands of shorelines around the Mediterranean, a timeless scene that, with only a few modifications, could come from just about any century. But few shores have seen as much history wash across them as this one has. The very stones of the castle you look out from once belonged to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and the shoreline beyond, boats, children, and all, was a scene that once reached the ears of the Greek poet Homer.
According to Plutarch of Chaeronea, it was through Homer that this place came to the attention of perhaps the greatest general in all history, who, over 2,300 years before you, stood on this same shore, his precious copy of Homer locked in a golden casket in his hands. But when he turned from the sea and looked south he saw only a narrow strip of water separating this island from the mainland, and beyond that an empty coast to which only the smallest of villages clung. When you turn, you will no longer find that scene, for in its place has risen the city founded there by that man, that dreamer—the huge, heaving metropolis of Alexandria.
At the time Homer wrote, there had been some sort of Bronze Age trading post here, almost certainly more impressive than the settlement Alexander found; but Homer’s words echoed through the centuries to Alexander, and the mention of this place changed his mind about a great project he was planning. Plutarch tells us that he had it in mind to build a great Greek city on this Egyptian coast, one which would receive the ultimate honor of bearing his name. His architects and surveyors had thus been dispatched and had selected a suitable site where work was just about to begin. Then, he had a dream:
. . . as he was sleeping, he saw a remarkable vision. He thought he could see a man with very white hair and of venerable appearance standing beside him and speaking these lines:
“Then there is an island in the stormy sea,
In front of Egypt; they call it Pharos.”
He rose at once and went to Pharos. . . .
Plutarch, Life of Alexander, in Parallel Lives, 26, 3-10
What he found here was a strip of land running east-west, with a large lake to the south and the Mediterranean Sea to the north. Just off that coast stood the island Homer had mentioned—Pharos—and it soon became clear to Alexander, or his architects at least, that by joining this island to the mainland with a causeway, two great harbors would be created, making the safest and largest anchorage on the whole of the north coast of Egypt. Alexander was delighted and “exclaimed that Homer was admirable in other respects and was also an excellent architect, and ordered the plan of the city to be drawn in conformity with the terrain” (Plutarch, Life of Alexander, in Parallel Lives, 26, 3-10).
And so, on this coast in early 331 BC, a strange sight could be seen. On what had once been the quietest of shores the cries of thousands of birds could now be heard. Anyone sailing down this coast might have seen the great flock wheeling in the blinding Egyptian sun and beneath them, on the beach, a small encampment. But these were not desperate, lost desert travelers, patiently circled by the ever watchful vultures; they were Alexander’s men, and the birds that dived again and again on them were not harbingers of a death, but of a birth.
Closer inspection might have shown the reason for the birds’ interest.
Crisscrossing the sandy shore were lines of barley flour, carefully poured out by workmen walking behind teams of surveyors who calculated angles and distances using tools unchanged since the days of the pyramid builders. The entire area now lay under a net of these white lines, attended to by countless small birds that did their best to eat them as fast as they were laid. Had we been able to see this work from on high, as the birds did when they flew up, we might have seen their purpose—to lay out a new harbor. And around this harbor they were to describe an entire city. It seemed like madness—but an inspired, perhaps even divine lunacy.
The idea to use flour had come from one who now stood among them. It was a practical solution to the lack of chalk in Egypt but, typically, an impulsive and perhaps not wholly thought-out one. As fast as the lines were laid, the birds descended and ate them. Some of the workmen muttered that it was an omen, and a bad one at that. What good could come from a city that the gods tried to eradicate the very moment it was first laid out? However, Alexander’s personal soothsayer, Aristander, countered that it simply showed that Alexandria would one day feed the whole world, and according to an ancient source known today as “the pseudo-Callisthenes” in the Alexander Romance, when the great man consulted the Egyptian gods himself on the matter, he was told: “The city you are building will be the food-giver and nurse of the whole world” (Arrian, Anabasis, book 3a, chapter 2).
So the work on the shore opposite the little island of Pharos progressed, painfully slowly. Alexander, however, could not wait. Within a few days he had gone, perhaps a little bored by the daily drudgery of deciding where palaces and temples should go, but also tempted away by a new idea that had seized him while designing his city. It had been suggested to him by some Egyptians that he might not be a man at all, but a god, for surely only a god could achieve what he had done. It was flattery of course, but in a heroic age and on the lips of an ancient people perhaps it was more. Either way he set off with all speed to the desert shrine of Ammon to discover if it was indeed true.
Thus Plutarch describes the foundation of the city of Alexandria by its first and greatest son, Alexander the Great. As with so much about Alexander’s life, it can be difficult to separate fact from myth in a story filled with omens and peopled by gods. The ancient sources do not even agree on whether Alexander founded his city before or after he spoke to the oracle at the shrine of Ammon in Siwa, but what all do agree on is that he alone chose the place, and the choice was a spectacularly good one.
Lying on the Mediterranean coast west of the Nile, this was an area that had not been well integrated into the ancient Egyptian states of the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. This is not to suggest that the area was completely empty, however. Excavations have shown that a small fishing village called Rhakotis had existed here since the thirteenth century BC, and the value of the anchorage was indeed known to Homer, whether or not he appeared to Alexander in a dream to remind him, as he wrote in the Odyssey:
Now off Egypt,
About as far as a ship can sail in a day
With a good stiff breeze behind her
There is an island called Pharos
It has a good harbour
From which vessels can get out into open sea
When they have taken in water
Homer, Odyssey, book 4
Some evidence of the prehistoric harbor that Homer knew of has even been found off the shores of the island of Pharos. In the early years of the twentieth century Gaston Jondet, the chief engineer of ports and lights in Egypt, noted an extensive series of breakwaters beneath the present sea level which were unmentioned in classical texts. These had formed a Bronze Age harbor at a time when the Egypt of Rameses the Great and Tutankhamen traded extensively with the Minoan world, providing a port free from the choking silt of the delta. But they had already fallen into disus
e and disappeared beneath the waves by the time Alexander arrived here. It is apposite, perhaps, that it should be Homer, a Greek source, who first makes mention of this place, for it was a Greek who was about to transform it.
Alexander was born in late July of 356 BC into the royal family of an ascendant Macedonian state. Under his father, King Philip II, the nation of Macedon, to the north of classical Greece, had extended its influence south and east across the Mediterranean, becoming a key player in Greek international politics. Greek culture mattered to Philip, and he ensured that his son received the very best Greek education available; indeed, Alexander’s personal tutor was Aristotle, one of the most influential philosophers in all of Western thought. The tales of Alexander’s promising childhood are legion, from his taming of the supposedly uncontrollable horse Bucephalus to his father’s exhortation that he should conquer a land suitable for his ambition, as Macedon was too small for him. Most of these legends grew up after the events, of course, to help explain the extraordinary rise of the young Macedonian. After the assassination of Philip by his bodyguard Pausanias at a wedding banquet (possibly at the instigation of the new king of Persia, Darius III), Alexander was quickly proclaimed king by the Macedonian army. He was clearly already held in high regard. And so, at just twenty years of age, began the most remarkable military career in history.
If Alexander’s father had been assassinated on Persian orders, Darius III would come to regret the decision. With an army of over forty thousand men Alexander first marched south to consolidate his hold over the city-states of mainland Greece and then crossed over the Hellespont into Asia to confront Darius in person. After defeating a Persian force at the battle of Granicus he stormed down the Ionian seaboard like an avenging angel, “liberating” the wealthy Greek trading ports that lined the coast on the way. He besieged Halicarnassus, then turned inland to the ancient Phrygian capital of Gordium, where, so legend has it, he chose to tackle the problem of “the Gordian Knot.”
The legend goes that at a time when Phrygia found itself without a king, an ancient oracle prophesied that the first man to enter the capital in an oxcart should be their next king. That man was the peasant Gordias, who, in return for his sudden change in fortune, dedicated his cart to the gods, tying its shafts to a post in an elaborate knot. The oracle then further prophesied that whoever could undo the knot would be king of all Asia. It had been a problem that had bothered would-be rulers of the world from that moment on. The knot was allegedly fiendishly complicated, without protruding ends and hence impossible to unpick. But Alexander found a simple solution. He drew his sword and sliced the knot in half, and as the oracle predicted, he did indeed go on to become master of all Asia. That at least is how Alexander’s friends and propagandists told it.
From Gordium he then passed through the Cilician gates—the high pass in the Tarsus Mountains of modern-day Turkey—and into central Anatolia to face the Persian Empire head on. At the battle of Issus in 333 BC, Darius III was defeated and fled the field, leaving his mother, wife, and children to be captured by Alexander. Also among the spoils was the golden casket, belonging to the Persian king, in which he placed his beloved copy of Homer.
Alexander chose not to pursue the fleeing Persian across the Euphrates, but instead continued south, besieging coastal cities as he went. Where he was heading became clear in 332 BC, when he was welcomed into Egypt as the nation’s liberator. Possibly with the connivance of the Persian governor of Egypt and certainly with the active support of the native Egyptian bureaucracy, the country was ceded to him without so much as a skirmish, and Alexander was king of Egypt at the age of twenty-three.
By the time Alexander first set foot on Egyptian soil, that civilization was already some three thousand years old. But this was not the Egypt of Khufu and Rameses. The pyramids of the Old Kingdom were already over two thousand years old, while the magnificence of the New Kingdom courts of Amenhotep III and Tutankhamen had faded and passed a millennium before.
Egypt’s recent history had been crueler. Since 525 BC it had been a subject nation of the Persian Empire and its nominal pharaoh (the Twenty-seventh Dynasty) was in fact the Achaemenid shah, currently Darius III. The proud and ancient nation of Egypt had not taken kindly to Persian rule, and throughout the period links between native Egyptians and Greek merchants had been growing, fostered by their mutual antipathy toward the occupying superpower. Some Egyptian cults had even taken root back in Greece. In 333 BC the Athenians had allowed Egyptian merchants to buy land for a temple to their goddess Isis, wife of the god of the underworld, Osiris. There were also Greek merchants living in Egypt and adopting elements of its religion, particularly the worship of Isis, which in the following centuries would spread across the Mediterranean and, under Roman rule, reach as far as Britain. There were even Greeks in the civil administration, and so, though Alexander was a foreigner, the Egyptians welcomed him with open arms, as a Greek and their nation’s liberator.
That Alexander wanted Egypt as part of his expanding empire was obvious. Despite the fact that so many of her glories were centuries if not millennia in the past, Egypt still retained a highly complex, literate culture with a wealth of esoteric knowledge, especially in astronomy, mathematics, and alchemy—knowledge which Greeks such as Pythagoras and Herodotus had sought out in the recent past. But more important for Alexander, Egypt was still a very wealthy nation with access to gold, slaves and exotic African imports from the south, and rich in grain. The irrigated fields around the Nile were a huge source of food that not only kept Egypt itself fed but also provided a surplus that could be exported for profit or used in military adventures. Then there was Egypt’s position, directly across the Mediterranean from Greece, with a major river navigable far into the south. A pharaonic canal cut between that river and the Red Sea would provide access to the Indian Ocean for a ruler with the ambition to attempt a conquest of India—a ruler with the ambition of an Alexander.
And so it was with these thoughts in mind that Alexander first came to the tiny village of Rhakotis. In the heyday of the Egyptian pharaohs, life had been concentrated on the Nile Valley, and while some New Kingdom rulers had ventured beyond her borders to carve out empires, Egypt was traditionally insular and inward looking. It focused on the Nile Valley, not the Mediterranean, and thus little effort had been spent on developing the northern coast outside the delta. But for Alexander things were different. The Mediterranean, not the Nile, bound his world together, and a port on this coast would provide the quickest way of supplying his army and controlling his empire.
Here then he found a unique location on a dangerous coast. To the south of the site lay Mareotis, a 100-square-mile lake; to the east was the mouth of the Canopic branch of the Nile and the rest of the delta, offering access to Egypt’s wealth and connections on to the Red Sea. To the north, just offshore, stood the island known as Pharos. Aside from the two harbors created by a causeway from Pharos to the mainland, canals could connect the Canopic Nile to the lake and the lake to the sea. In terms of trade it was simply a perfect location. The geographer Strabo, who visited the city some three hundred years after its foundation, also noted another great benefit:
. . . and in addition to the great value of the things brought down from both directions, both into the harbour on the sea and into that on the lake, the salubrity of the air is also worthy of remark. And this likewise results from the fact that the land is washed by water on both sides and because of the timeliness of the Nile’s risings; for the other cities that are situated on lakes have heavy and stifling air in the heats of summer, because the lakes then become marshy along their edges because of the evaporation caused by the sun’s rays, and, accordingly, when so much filth-laden moisture rises, the air inhaled is noisome and starts pestilential diseases, whereas at Alexandria, at the beginning of summer, the Nile, being full, fills the lake also, and leaves no marshy matter to corrupt the rising vapours. At that time, also, the Etesian winds blow from the north and from a vast sea, Alexan
drians pass their time most pleasantly in summer.
Strabo, Geography, book 17, chapter 1
This might seem like little more than a pleasant conceit, but finding a healthy location away from the slow-moving and polluted waters of the delta, where disease was rife in the summer, was a masterstroke. The site was cool, clean, and accessible from abroad, and that in Egypt was rare. It must have seemed to be the perfect location for a provincial capital, and so, with the decision made, Alexander moved off again.
There was one further place the Macedonian king had to visit while in Egypt, and this visit would have profound implications both for Alexander and for the dynasty of Greek pharaohs that would soon be established in his city of Alexandria. As he rode through the Western desert toward the shrine of Ammon at Siwa, he could hardly have imagined that he would never return alive to the city he had just founded. He had left behind a capital of sand and flour—just a preliminary sketch—before dashing off once more in his endless, restless pursuit of yet greater achievements.
But what he did next would help secure the future of that sketch and ensure that this city would be his home in death if not in life.
Even today the oasis of Siwa is an extraordinary site. Standing lost between the Qattara Depression and the Great Sand Sea, it lies in one of the most remote and inhospitable parts of the country. Legend has it that when King Cambyses II of Persia first conquered Egypt his entire army of fifty thousand men vanished somewhere in the emptiness of the surrounding desert as they marched in search of the oasis. Under Roman rule its very remoteness made it famous as a place of banishment.
The Rise and Fall of Alexandria Page 2
