Alexandria

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Alexandria sits at the western edge of the Nile River Delta, stretching about 40 km along Egypt's northern coast. In April 331 BC, Alexander the Great chose this spot and gave it his name. He had just seized Egypt from the Persians, and he wanted a great Greek city on the coast that would link Greece to the riches of the Nile valley. He envisioned a causeway reaching out to a nearby island called Pharos, creating two natural harbours. Then, a few months after laying the foundations, he left Egypt and never came back.

  What grew in his absence was extraordinary. Within a single generation, the city outgrew Carthage. Within a century, it had become the largest city in the world. It housed the greatest library ever assembled. It raised a lighthouse that sailors could spot from the sea for centuries. It became a battleground of religions, a crossroads of trade routes, a centre of science and poetry, and eventually a place shaped as much by tsunamis and political upheaval as by any plan its founder imagined.

  How did a city planted by a conqueror who never saw its completion grow into all of this? And what does Alexandria look like today, when the sea itself may be its most pressing threat?

• 2. A City Before the City

  ›

  Radiocarbon dating of seashell fragments and lead contamination confirm that people lived at this location during the Old Kingdom, which spanned roughly the 27th to 21st centuries BC. A trading post linked to the reign of Rameses the Great once existed here, connected to Crete, though it had long since vanished by the time Alexander arrived. A small fishing village called Rhakotis had stood nearby since the 13th century BC. That settlement did not disappear when the Greek city was built around it. It became the Egyptian quarter of the new Alexandria.

  Just east of the city, where Abu Qir Bay now sits, there were marshlands and islands in antiquity. Port cities of Canopus and Heracleion existed as far back as the 7th century BC. Heracleion, notably, was recently rediscovered underwater.

  The site Alexander chose was not empty land. It carried layers of human habitation stretching back more than two millennia before his arrival. The name itself reflects that layering. The Greek version was Alexándreia, but the older Egyptian settlement was called Rhacotis, a Hellenised form of an Egyptian word meaning roughly "that which is built up". The Coptic language kept calling the city Rakoti for centuries. After the Arab conquest in AD 641, the name underwent further transformation: the initial syllable was reanalysed as the Arabic definite article, sounds shifted through metathesis, and the suffix changed, producing the Arabic name al-Iskandariyya, which is still used today.

• 3. The Ptolemaic World Capital

  ›

  After Alexander departed, his viceroy Cleomenes continued the construction work. The city's grid was designed by Dinocrates of Rhodes using the Hippodamian plan, a rational system of streets crossing at right angles. When Alexander died in 323 BC, his general Ptolemy Lagides took control of Egypt and brought Alexander's body back with him. Ptolemy initially governed from Memphis, the old Egyptian capital. In 322 or 321 BC he had Cleomenes executed. By 305 BC, he had declared himself Pharaoh as Ptolemy I Soter and moved his seat of power to Alexandria.

  The city inherited the trade of ruined Tyre and positioned itself as the connector between Europe and the markets of Arabia and India. By the time of Augustus, the city grid covered an area of 10 square kilometres. During the Roman principate, the total population stood somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000. In the 1st century, a census dated from 32 AD counted over 180,000 adult male citizens alone; estimates of the full population, including women, children, freedmen, and slaves, range from 216,000 to 500,000. That made it one of the largest cities built before the Industrial Revolution and the largest pre-industrial city that was not itself an imperial capital.

  The early Ptolemaic rulers worked to keep Alexandria's three main ethnic groups, Greek, Egyptian, and Jewish, in distinct but coexisting quarters. Brucheum was the Royal or Greek quarter, the most opulent section of the city. The Jewish quarter occupied the northeast. Rhakotis remained the Egyptian quarter. Two main streets, each said to be about 60 metres wide and lined with colonnades, intersected near the centre of the city close to Alexander's Mausoleum. The Coptic Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria both trace their heritage to the Patriarchate of Alexandria that rose in this city during the early centuries of Christianity, when Alexandria was considered the third-most important city in Christendom, after Rome and Constantinople.

• 4. The Lighthouse and the Library

  ›

  Ptolemy I began the Pharos lighthouse and Ptolemy II Philadelphus completed it, at a total cost of 800 talents. The project took 12 years. The finished tower stood about 138 metres high, built mostly of solid limestone blocks, with a furnace at the top to produce its light. It served as the model for every lighthouse built afterward. It survived for well over a thousand years before an earthquake in the 14th century finally brought it down, making it the second-longest surviving ancient wonder after the Great Pyramid of Giza.

  The Great Library is generally thought to have been founded at the beginning of the 3rd century BC during the reign of Ptolemy II. It grew from a temple to the Muses, the Mouseion, which gives the modern English word museum its root. The library faced destruction during Julius Caesar's siege of Alexandria in 47 BC, though the full story of its losses remains contested to this day. Caesar himself used the Great Theater of Alexandria as a fortress during that siege, holding off the city mob after he took Egypt following the battle of Pharsalus.

  The Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Tanakh, was produced in Alexandria. The poets who worked at the court of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, including Philiscus of Corcyra, Lycophron, Alexander Aetolus, and Sositheus, are known together as the Alexandrian Pleiad. The modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina was inaugurated in 2002, near the site of the original library. It now hosts the annual Alexandria International Film Festival.

• 5. Conquest, Commerce, and Crisis

  ›

  In the year 38 AD, according to Philo of Alexandria, violence erupted between Jewish and Greek residents during a visit by King Agrippa I. The conflict, which began over the respect shown to the Roman emperor, escalated into open fighting and the desecration of Alexandrian synagogues. This episode is known as the Alexandrian pogroms. It ended only after Emperor Caligula intervened and removed the Roman governor, Flaccus.

  In 115 AD, large parts of Alexandria were destroyed in the Diaspora revolt. Emperor Hadrian and his architect Decriannus rebuilt the city. In 215 AD, Emperor Caracalla visited and, offended by satirical material directed at him by residents, ordered his troops to kill all men capable of bearing arms. On the 21st of July 365 AD, a tsunami triggered by the Crete earthquake devastated the city. The event was commemorated annually for years afterward as a day of horror.

  In 619, the Sassanid Persians took Alexandria. The Byzantine emperor Heraclius recovered it in 629, but in 641 the Arab general Amr ibn al-As seized the city after a siege of 14 months. The first Arab governor recorded to have visited Alexandria was Utba ibn Abi Sufyan, who built a governor's palace there in 664-665.

  By the late medieval period, Alexandria had re-emerged as the most important commercial port in Egypt. The traveller Benjamin of Tudela described it as a trading market for all nations. Goods from Arabia, India, South-East Asia, and Africa, including incense, spices, precious stones, pearls, exotic woods, and ivory, passed through its port. Latin trading cities including Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and Catalonia maintained fortified quarters called funduqs in the city, each under the authority of a consul. The Mamluk sultans actively encouraged this European trade, which brought them revenue and supplies of wood, iron, and eventually the slave-soldiers known as mameluks, often sold by Genoese merchants. This commercial dominance ended in the late 15th century when Portuguese navigators found a sea route to India, bypassing Alexandria entirely. After the Battle of Ridaniya in 1517, the Ottoman Turks took the city and held it until 1798.

• 6. Modern Reinvention

  ›

  French troops stormed Alexandria on the 2nd of July 1798 as part of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt. The British won a decisive engagement against the French at the Battle of Alexandria on the 21st of March 1801, then besieged the city, which fell to them on the 2nd of September 1801.

  Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman governor considered the founder of modern Egypt, began rebuilding around 1810. By 1850 the city had recovered much of its former standing. The Mahmoudiyah Canal, completed in 1820, had helped restore Alexandria's commercial importance after centuries of decline. Greeks and other Europeans moved into the city. Alexandria became the centre of the international cotton trade, benefiting from the overland connection between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

  Around the 1890s, twice the percentage of women in Alexandria could read compared to Cairo. The city produced the specialist women's publication al-Fatah by Hind Nawal, the country's first women's journal. In the early 20th century, Alexandria became a home for writers and poets. The Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy, who was born in Alexandria in 1863 and lived there until his death in 1933, drew repeatedly on the city in poems including Alexandrian Kings, In Alexandria 31 B.C., and The God Abandons Antony.

  In July 1882, British naval forces bombarded and occupied the city. In July 1954, Alexandria was the target of an Israeli bombing campaign that became known as the Lavon Affair. On the 26th of October 1954, Mansheya Square in Alexandria was the site of a failed assassination attempt on Gamal Abdel Nasser. The 1956 Suez Crisis triggered an outburst of Arab nationalism that drove most European residents to leave, and Nasser's nationalisation of private property, which reached its peak in 1961, expelled nearly all the rest. Alexandria's Jewish community, which once numbered 50,000, dwindled to fewer than 50 following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the emigration that followed.

• 7. Underwater Past, Rising Seas

  ›

  Cleopatra VII's royal quarters were inundated by earthquakes and a tsunami, causing gradual subsidence in the 4th century AD. Since 1992, the French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio and his team have been exploring this submerged section of the city, which contains the palace quarter and other significant Hellenistic remains. Among the artefacts raised was a noted head of Caesarion. The remains of a temple to Isis on the sunken island of Antirhodos were gradually discovered, excavated, and identified over a period of 30 years. The Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology published findings in 2025.

  Above water, archaeologists continue to face a different problem: the modern city sits almost directly on top of the ancient one. Excavation on any significant scale requires displacing the living city at enormous cost. The most productive finds have come from relatively open ground near Pompey's Pillar, where Dr. G. Botti exposed substructures of a large building complex possibly belonging to the Serapeum, along with immense catacombs. The Catacombs of Kom El Shoqafa, a multi-level labyrinth reached by a large spiral staircase and decorated with syncretic Romano-Egyptian religious symbols, were forgotten by the city and rediscovered by accident in 1900.

  Alexandria is now among the most vulnerable cities in the world to sea level rise, owing to its position on the Nile delta. Some estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of people in low-lying areas may need to be relocated before 2030. A 2022 IPCC report estimated that by 2050, Alexandria and eleven other major African cities could collectively sustain cumulative damages of US$65 billion under a moderate climate scenario, and up to US$137.5 billion under a high-emission scenario combined with marine ice sheet instability. In every estimate cited, Alexandria alone bears roughly half of those costs. Separate research published by the American Geophysical Union found that rising sea levels are lifting coastal aquifer levels and corroding building foundations; the study predicted that by 2025, more than 7,000 buildings in Alexandria would be at risk of collapse from these groundwater processes.