Travel in Alexandria - Egypt - Middle East - History

IMAGE:Library of Alexandria Alexander the Great founded the city in 332 BC after the start of his Persian campaign; it was to be the capital of his new Egyptian dominion and a naval base that would control the Mediterranean. The choice of the site that included the ancient settlement of Rakotis (which dates back to 1500 BC) was determined by the abundance of water from Lake Maryut, then a spur of the Canopic Nile, and the good anchorage provided offshore by the island of Pharos.

After Alexander left Egypt his viceroy, Cleomenes, continued the creation of Alexandria. With the breakup of the empire on Alexander's death in 323, control of the city passed to his viceroy, Ptolemy I Soter, who founded the dynasty that took his name. The early Ptolemies successfully blended the religions of ancient Greece and Egypt in the cult of Sarapis and presided over Alexandria's golden age. Alexandria profited from the demise of Phoenician power after Alexander sacked Tyre (332 BC) and from Europe's growing trade with the East via the Nile and the canal that then linked it with the Red Sea. Indeed, Alexandria became, within a century of its founding, the greatest city in the world and a centre of Greek scholarship and science. Such scholars as Euclid, Archimedes, Plotinus the philosopher, and Ptolemy and Eratosthenes the geographers studied at the Mouseion, the great research institute founded by the Ptolemies. Alexandria also was a centre of Jewish learning; and, according to tradition, the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew to Greek was produced there.

The decline of the Ptolemies in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC was matched by the rise of Rome. Alexandria played a major part in the intrigues that led to the establishment of imperial Rome.

It was at Alexandria that Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, courted Julius Caesar and claimed to have borne him a son. Her attempts at restoring the fortunes of the Ptolemaic dynasty, however, were thwarted by Caesar's assassination and her unsuccessful support of Mark Antony against Caesar's great-nephew Octavian. In 30 BC Octavian (later the emperor Augustus) formally brought Alexandria and Egypt under Roman rule. To punish the city for not supporting him, he abolished the Alexandrian Senate and built his own city at what was then the suburb of ar-Raml. Alexandria, however, could not be ignored, since it held the key to the Egyptian granary on which Rome increasingly came to rely; and the city soon regained its independence.

St. Mark, the traditional author of the second Synoptic Gospel, is said to have been preaching in Alexandria in the mid-1st century AD. Thenceforth, the city's growing Christian and Jewish communities united against Rome's attempts to impose official paganism. Periodic persecutions by various early emperors, especially by Diocletian beginning in 303, failed to subdue these communities; and, after the empire had formally adopted Christianity under Constantine I, the stage was set for schisms within the church.

IMAGE:Abu Simbel The first conflict that split the early church was between two Alexandrian prelates, Athanasius and Arius, over the nature of Christ's divinity. It was settled in 325 by the adoption of the Creed of Nicaea, which affirmed Christ's spiritual divinity and branded Arianism--the belief that Christ was lower than God--as heresy. Arianism, however, had many imperial champions, and this sharpened the conflict between the Alexandrian church and the state. In 391 Christians destroyed the Sarapeum, sanctum of the Ptolemaic cult and what Cleopatra had saved of the great Mouseion library. In 415 a Christian faction killed the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia, and Greek culture in Alexandria quickly declined.

After the ascendancy of the patriarchate of Constantinople--to which the see of Alexandria answered after the division of the Roman Empire in 364--the local church adopted Monophysitism (belief in the single nature and therefore physical divinity of Christ) as a way of asserting its independence. Although Monophysitism was rejected by the Council of Chalcedon (451), the Alexandrian church resisted Constantinople's attempts to bring it into line. An underground church developed to oppose the established one and became a focus of Egyptian loyalties. Disaffection with Byzantine rule created the conditions in which Alexandria fell first to the Persians, in 616, and then to the Arabs, in 642.

The Arabs occupied Alexandria without resistance. Thenceforth, apart from an interlude in 645 when the city was briefly taken by the Byzantine fleet, Alexandria's fortunes were tied to the new faith and culture emanating from the Arabian Desert. Alexandria soon was eclipsed politically by the new Arab capital at al-Fustat (which later was absorbed into the modern capital, Cairo), and this city became the strategic prize for those wanting to control Egypt. Nevertheless, Alexandria continued to flourish as a trading centre, principally for textiles and luxury goods, as Arab influence expanded westward through North Africa and then into Europe. The city also was important as a naval base, especially under the Fatimids and the Mamluks, but already it was contracting in size in line with its new, more modest status. The Arab walls (rebuilt in the 13th and 14th centuries and torn down in 1811) encompassed less than half the area of the Greco-Roman city.

Alexandria survived the early Crusades relatively unscathed, and the city came into its own again with the development of the East-West spice trade, which Egypt monopolized. The loss of this trade--which came about after the discovery of the sea route to India in 1498 and the Turkish conquest of Egypt in 1517--was the final blow to the city's fortunes. Under Turkish rule the canal linking Alexandria to the Rosetta branch of the Nile was allowed to silt up, strangling the city's commercial lifeline. Alexandria had been reduced to a small fishing village when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798.