Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture Page | Alexandria revisited

Alexandria is much in the news these days, and our understanding of the ancient city is in a rapid state of change. Underwater archaeological investigations off the Qait Bey fortress have resulted in the discovery of a column field and of colossal statues and sphinxes. Some of these have been salvaged, others photographed in their watery graves. A vast burial ground has been discovered during the building of a city fly-over, and a salvage operation was quickly carried out before construction could proceed. The submerged remains of the port and palace area in the Eastern Harbour have been discovered, and, most recently, in July this year, the remains of Napoleon's fleet, destroyed during the battle of Abu Qir off Alexandria two centuries ago, has been found. Taken together with progress on the construction of the new Alexandria Library, which is scheduled for completion before the year 2000, and efforts to upgrade the city and open new museums, these events have meant that our appreciation of the ancient city is being extended and transformed. So fast are the discoveries coming that the media can hardly keep up, and as yet there have been few synoptic accounts of the discoveries' significance. There has also been a lack of literature on this city that once rivalled Rome politically and replaced Athens as a great intellectual centre of antiquity.

There was, then, a real need for a new book on Alexandria, not least because our perception of it was changing so rapidly, and Jean-Yves Empereur's Alexandria Rediscovered was written in response to this need and to frequent personal requests. The author is a renowned scholar, former secretary-general of the French School at Athens, director of research at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) and director of the Centre for Alexandrine Studies, and is thus unusually well qualified to write on this subject. He was asked to write at least a preliminary assessment of his experiences as an archaeologist, one aimed not at a scholarly readership alone, but also one that would appeal to the general public. The result, however, is much more than that, for Alexandria Rediscovered is the most informative and interesting work on Alexandria since E.M. Forster's Alexandria: a History and a Guide, which the English novelist wrote during his stay in the city during the First World War. A translation of the author's original French text, the book contains a concise, informative text accompanied by original photographs by Stéphane Compoint, many of which were taken underwater. It casts considerable light on the city once known as the 'Queen of the Mediterranean', and it gives a succinct account of the significance of the new discoveries.

By contrast to Forster's book, Empereur's Alexandria Rediscovered focuses on archaeology. In his introduction, he explains why so few monuments of the Graeco-Roman period have survived in Alexandria when compared to Rome, and why archaeologists in the 19th century paid such brief visits to the city, in contrast to their greater interest in the archaeological remains of other parts of Egypt. With few exceptions, they were interested solely in the prize of the tomb of Alexander the Great, and, when they failed to discover that, they turned their attention elsewhere. Empereur nevertheless devotes the first chapter of his book to the history of archaeological research, and this account, though illustrated by a picture of the 19th-century scholar Giuseppe Botti, who founded the city's Graeco-Roman Museum in 1892, inspecting the remains of a tomb near Pompey's pillar, and a delightful engraving of the Baths of Cleopatra in the Western Harbour (actually a tomb facade), makes for a somewhat disappointing record. Archaeologists had more information about the small Greek towns of the Mediterranean world than they had about the greatest of Hellenistic cities, since the remains of this had largely been obscured by more modern developments.

Chapters two and three of the book however leave this history behind, and cover instead the site of Alexandria, the city's walls, houses and streets, the importance of the Island of Pharos where the famous Lighthouse was built, and such intriguing discoveries as that of a Roman house in the garden of the former British Consulate, from a modern perspective. The Roman house in the consulate garden dates from the first half of the third century AD, and once had a delightful dining room with elegant mosaic floors. Today red marks around the edges of this show where couches for the diners would have stood. Chapter four of the book is devoted to the Alexandria Lighthouse itself, which was destroyed in a series of earthquakes, the last and most devastating of which occurred in the 14th century. Empereur illuminatingly discusses the salvage operations that have been carried out here, where the most modern equipment has been used to map ancient objects on the sea bed. Three thousand or so architectural blocks carpet this, and accompanying photographs to the text show divers face to face with a sphinx that appears to date back to the reign of Ramses II, swimming to get a close-up of the detail on a giant obelisk showing Seti I presenting offerings to the gods of Heliopolis, and measuring the size of the gigantic monoliths that were clearly usurped from earlier monuments. Many colossal statues on the sea bed have been identified, and one of them, which depicts a Ptolemaic king depicted in Pharaonic guise and might be one of a pair or even of a series that once adorned the harbour area, suggests that Alexandria may have been more influenced by Pharaonic traditions than has hitherto been supposed.

Jean-Yves Empereur's underwater excavations over the last 10 years, along with his descriptions of excavations on dry land, have considerably increased our knowledge of the ancient city of Alexandria, which was famed in antiquity for its library, its Mouseion (museum) and magnificent palaces, its temple to Serapeus (the Serapeum), catacombs (at Kom Al-Shuqafa) and necropolis at Gabbari. Reading Alexandria Rediscovered can only increase one's desire to visit or re-visit the modern city.

		Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 September 1999 Issue No. 446
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875