Alexandria: the city that was once capital of the world

Plutarch tells us that Alexander the Great traced the plan of his new city in flour. He had no chalk or lime to hand, so he used what the soldiers carried in their saddlebags. Birds descended and ate the flour, and Alexander, alarmed by the omen, consulted his augurs. They told him it meant prosperity: the city would feed multitudes. They were right, though in a sense none of them could have imagined.

A city designed to rule

Alexandria was founded in 331 BC on a strip of land between Lake Mareotis and the Mediterranean, and within less than a century it had become the largest city in the known world, surpassing Rome in certain periods. The choice of site was deliberate: Alexander wanted a port that faced the Mediterranean rather than the Nile, a port that connected Egypt to Greece rather than to the African interior. The result was a city unlike anything the ancient world had seen before — neither Egyptian nor Greek, but something new that absorbed and transformed both traditions.

The Ptolemies, the Macedonian dynasty that inherited Egypt after Alexander’s death, turned Alexandria into the intellectual capital of the ancient world. Their instrument was the Mouseion, history’s first institution of scientific research, and the Library attached to it, which in its prime held between 400,000 and 700,000 scrolls. The popular myth of a single catastrophic destruction is largely false. The Library declined gradually over centuries through lack of funding, through the drift of political gravity towards Rome, through partial fires and through the systematic neglect that follows any institutional decline. There was no single moment of destruction — only a slow erosion that took centuries to complete.

What happened at the Mouseion

Euclid wrote the Elements in Alexandria around 300 BC. Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth with an error of less than 2%: he placed a gnomon in Alexandria and compared its shadow with the absence of shadow in Syene (present-day Aswan) on the summer solstice, and from that angular difference he deduced that the Earth measured approximately 40,000 kilometres. He did this without computers, without satellites and without leaving Egypt. Herophilus dissected human cadavers here for the first time in history, founding anatomy as a discipline. Aristarchus of Samos proposed that the Earth orbited the Sun, seventeen centuries before Copernicus.

All of this happened in a building on the shores of the Mediterranean that today lies underwater, because the coastal strip of ancient Alexandria gradually sank through tectonic movement, and today underwater archaeologists work among its remains.

Cleopatra, who was not Egyptian

The last great representative of the Ptolemies was a woman whom school textbooks tend to reduce to her relationships with Caesar and Mark Antony. Cleopatra VII was in fact the first of her dynasty — the first in 275 years of Ptolemaic rule — to bother learning Egyptian. She was a remarkable polyglot: she spoke nine languages, including Ethiopian, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, in addition to Greek, which was her mother tongue. Her political intelligence was demonstrated by the fact that she held the throne under circumstances that would have crushed any less capable ruler.

The Alexandria she knew had a million inhabitants, the tallest lighthouse in the ancient world (between 120 and 140 metres, one of the Seven Wonders) and a court that attracted the finest intellects of the Mediterranean. When Rome absorbed it, the world lost something it would not have again until the European Enlightenment.

Alexandria today

The modern city has five million inhabitants and a character radically different from Cairo’s. It is Mediterranean at its core: the corniche, the seafront promenade, has that mixture of melancholy and openness that all coastal cities share when they were once great and are no longer quite so. The Greek-Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy lived here until his death in 1933, in an apartment above a brothel on Lepsius Street. His poetry is saturated with an Alexandria that survived only in the margins of its own memory.

The modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina was inaugurated in 2002. The design by the Danish-Norwegian firm Snøhetta is a large tilted circular structure evoking a solar disc rising from the Mediterranean. It is worth visiting not only as symbol but as building: the main reading room has capacity for eight million books and a scale that allows you, for the first time, to understand what the original might have meant.

The Citadel of Qaitbay, from the fifteenth century, was built on the foundations of the ancient Lighthouse using its own stones. The red granite bases visible inside are almost certainly blocks from the original structure. Pompey’s Pillar — which has nothing to do with Pompey but with the emperor Diocletian, fourth century AD — is the largest granite monolith in Egypt outside the pharaonic temples. The Catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa, from the first and second centuries AD, are perhaps the clearest example of the Alexandrian synthesis: reliefs of Egyptian gods rendered with Roman dress and proportions.

Getting there

The train from Ramses Station in Cairo takes between two and a half and three hours and costs under five euros in standard class. Fast services (Turbo and Spanish trains) run regularly from six in the morning. Alexandria deserves at least two days, although the usual circuit reduces it to a day trip from Cairo — which does it a disservice.

The complete Far Guides Egypt guide includes detailed Nile Valley routes, interactive maps and all the practical information you need to plan your independent trip.