Alexandria

Alexandria was the capital of Egypt and its founded by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE until its surrender to the Arab forces led by ʿAmr ibn al-ʿaṣ in 642 CE. One of Egypt’s largest cities, Alexandria is also its principal seaport and a major industrial center. The city lies on the Mediterranean Sea at the western edge of the Nile River delta, about 114 miles (183 km) northwest of Cairo in Lower Egypt. Area city, 116 square miles (300 square km). Pop. (2006) city, 4,110,015. Known in Arabic as Al-Iskandariyyah, major city and urban governorate in Egypt. Once among the greatest cities of the Mediterranean world and a center of Hellenic scholarship and science. Alexandria has long occupied a special place in the popular imagination by virtue of its association with Alexander and Cleopatra. Alexandria played an important role in preserving and transmitting Hellenic culture to the wider Mediterranean world and was a crucible of scholarship, piety, and ecclesiastical politics in early Christian history. Although it has been asserted that Alexandria declined as a result of its conquest by Muslim Arabs in the 7th century CE, such a statement is misleading. While the city’s political primacy was lost when the capital was moved to the interior, Alexandria remained an important center of naval operations, maritime commerce, and craft production. As late as the 15th century, the city prospered as a transit point in the trade conducted between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean basin. Beginning in the 16th century, however, the city suffered a period of protracted decline owing to epidemic disease and administrative neglect; by the end of the 18th century, traces of Alexandria’s former splendor had largely vanished. By the time French troops invaded Egypt in 1798, Alexandria had been reduced to a town of some 10,000 inhabitants, significant mainly for its role in Ottoman maritime networks. Flourishing in the 19th century as a major center of the booming cotton industry, the modern city had come to bear little in common with the ancient metropolis. Alexandria has generally been characterized by a cultural ambivalence inherent in the city’s location extending along a spit of land with its back to Egypt and its face to the Mediterranean. Throughout most of its history, Alexandria has thus remained a cosmopolitan town, belonging as much or perhaps more to the wider Mediterranean world as to its hinterland. The revival of the town in the 19th century, however, brought about a profound change in the city’s identity. With the significant increase in agricultural exports, the influx of native Egyptians to the city, and the formation and integration of the Egyptian state, Alexandria became tied to the Nile valley more closely than ever before. As a result, it also became the locus of an emergent Egyptian national consciousness. Beginning in the mid-18th century, these underlying changes would be overshadowed for roughly a century by the rise to power of a Levantine business community. Foreign dominance was reinforced by the overlay of British colonialism beginning in 1882 and by the formation of a foreign-dominated municipality in 1890. The arts flourished during this century-long interlude, and the city still boasts fine Neoclassical and Art Nouveau architecture dating from this period. The literary side of the city’s flowering is reflected in the works of the Alexandria-born Greek writer Constantine Cavafy, who drew on Alexandria’s fabled past in his poetry. Likewise, the decadent cosmopolitanism of the foreign community in Alexandria was depicted by the English writer Lawrence Durrell in his famous series of novels, The Alexandria Quartet (1957–60). A contrasting portrayal of the modern city is given in Naguib Mahfouz’s Miramar (1967); set in postcolonial Alexandria, Mahfouz’s novella offers a view of the city as an integral part of Egyptian history and society. This process of integration was accelerated after the 1952 revolution, when most of the remaining foreign residents departed. At the beginning of the 21st century, Alexandria remained Egypt’s “second capital.� It continued to contribute substantially to the national economy and was popular as a summer holiday destination. The modern city extends 25 miles (40 km) east to west along a limestone ridge, 1–2 miles (1.6–3.2 km) wide, that separates the salt lake of Maryuṭ, or Mareotis�now partly drained and cultivated�from the Egyptian mainland. An hourglass-shaped promontory formed by the silting up of a mole (the Hepta stadion), which was built soon after Alexandria’s founding, links the island of Pharos with the city centre on the mainland. Its two steeply curving bays form the basins for the Eastern Harbour and the Western Harbour. The prevailing north wind, blowing across the Mediterranean, gives Alexandria a markedly different climate from that of the desert hinterland. The summers are relatively temperate, although humidity can build up in July and in August, the hottest month, when the average temperature reaches 87 °F (31 °C). Winters are cool and invariably marked by a series of violent storms that can bring torrential rain and even hail. The mean daily temperature in January, which is the coldest month, is 64 °F (18 °C). The city was designed by Alexander’s personal architect, Dinocrates, the city incorporated the best in Hellenic planning and architecture. Within a century of its founding, its splendours rivaled anything known in the ancient world. The pride of ancient Alexandria was the great lighthouse, the Pharos of Alexandria, which stood on the eastern tip of the island of Pharos. One of the Seven Wonders of the World, the lighthouse is reputed to have been more than 350 feet (110 meters) high and was still standing in the 12th century. In 1477, however, Sultan Qaʾit Bey used stones from the dilapidated structure to build a fort (named for him), which stands near or on the original site of the Pharos. In 1994 archaeologist Jean-Yves Empereur of the Centre for Alexandrian Studies (Centre d’Études Alexandrines) found many of the stones and some statuary that had belonged to the lighthouse in the waters off Pharos Island. The Egyptian government discussed turning the area into an “underwater museum� to allow tourists to see the archaeological remains of the lighthouse, and various studies examining the project’s feasibility continued into the early 21st century. The Canopic Way (now Ṭariq al-Ḥurriyyah) was the principal thoroughfare of the Greek city, running east and west through its center. Most Ptolemaic and Roman monuments stood nearby. The Canopic Way was intersected at its western end by the Street of the Soma (now Shariʿ al-Nabi Danyal), along which is the legendary site of Alexander’s tomb, thought by some to lie under the mosque of al-Nabi Danyal. Close to this intersection was the Mouseion (museum), an academy of arts and sciences, which included the great Library of Alexandria. At the seaward end of the Street of the Soma were the two obelisks known as Cleopatra’s Needles. These obelisks were given in the 19th century to the cities of London and New York. One obelisk can be viewed on the banks of the River Thames in London, and the other stands in Central Park in New York City. Between Ṭariq al-Ḥurriyyah and the railway station is the Roman Theatre, which was uncovered in 1959 at the Kawm al-Dikkah archaeological site. At the southwestern extremity of the ancient city are the Kawm al-Shuqafah burial grounds, with their remarkable Hadrianic catacombs dating from the 2nd century CE. Nearby, on the site of the ancient fort of Rhakotis, is one of the few Classical monuments still standing: the 88-foot- (27-metre-) high marble column known as Pompey’s Pillar (actually dedicated to Diocletian soon after 297). Parts of the Arab wall, encompassing a much smaller area than the Greco-Roman city, survive on Ṭariq al-Ḥurriyyah, but in Ottoman times the city contracted to the stem of the promontory, now the Turkish Quarter. It is the oldest surviving section of the city and houses its finest mosques and worst slums. In the 19th century the renascent city’s commercial hub was a long rectangular piazza, once called Al-Manshiyyah Square and now called Al-Taḥrir Square (“Liberation Square�). An equestrian statue of Egypt’s most famous viceroy, Muḥammad ʿAli Pasha, still adorns the square. The commercial center later moved eastward to Saʿd Zaghlul Square, where the Cecil and Metropole hotels are located, and inland toward the railway station. Blocked to the west by the port and the industrial area, urban development moved eastward, both inland and along the Corniche, a seaside promenade. Today the Corniche is a ribbon of beach huts, bathing clubs, and restaurants faced across the road by a continuous wall of hotels and apartment blocks. Culture & Artifacts: Alexandria’s most important museum, the Greco-Roman Museum, situated behind the Municipality Building on Ṭariq al-Ḥurriyyah, is noted for its fine collection of antiquities, most of which come from finds in or near the city. Renewed interest in the Classical period has revived archaeological exploration, which is focusing on Kawm al-Dikkah and the underwater site of the Pharos lighthouse. The Museum of Fine Art, located across the railway line from the city’s stadium, presents exhibitions of modern and local art. In addition, the royal palace at Al-Muntazah has spacious public gardens and access to the Mediterranean. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has also been an important addition to the city’s cultural menu. The idea of reviving the ancient library was first proposed in 1972 by Mostafa El-Abbadi, a professor at Alexandria University. The Egyptian government decided to sponsor the project, and it received international publicity and support through UNESCO. Opened in 2002, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina located adjacent to Alexandria University and near the site of the ancient structure contains a working library, a repository for manuscripts, a planetarium, museums, art galleries, and conference facilities.