Alexandria is at the western extremity of the Nile River delta, situated on a narrow isthmus between the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Mareotis. The city is Egypt’s leading port, a commercial and transportation center, and the heart of a major industrial area where refined petroleum, asphalt, cotton textiles, processed food, paper and plastics are produced. Much of ancient Alexandria is covered by modern buildings or is underwater; only a few landmarks are readily accessible, including ruins of the emporium and the Serapeum and a granite shaft called Pompey’s Pillar. Nothing remains of the lighthouse on the Pharos, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and the site of the royal palace lies under the older (east) harbor. Alexandria was founded in 332 BCE by Alexander the Great and was the capital of the Ptolemies. The city took over the trade of Tyre (sacked by Alexander the Great), outgrew Carthage by 250 BCE, and became the largest city in the Mediterranean basin. It was the greatest center of Hellenistic civilization and Jewish culture. The Septuagint, a translation of the Old Testament into Greek, was prepared there. Alexandria had two celebrated royal libraries, one in a temple of Zeus and the other in a museum. The collections were said to contain 700,000 rolls. A great university grew around the museum and attracted many scholars, including Aristarchus of Samothrace, the collator of the Homeric texts; Euclid, the mathematician; and Herophilus, the anatomist, who founded a medical school there.
Alexandria’s History
Julius Caesar temporarily occupied the city of Alexandria in 47 BCE while pursuing Pompey, and Octavian (later Augustus) entered it in 30 BCE after the suicide of Antony and Cleopatra. Alexandria formally became part of the Roman Empire in 30 BCE. It was the greatest of the Roman provincial capitals, with a population of about 300,000 free persons and numerous slaves. In the later centuries of Roman rule and under the Byzantine Empire, Alexandria rivaled Rome and Constantinople as a center of Christian learning. It was (and remains today) the seat of a patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The libraries, however, were gradually destroyed from the time of Caesar’s invasion, and suffered especially in 391 CE, when Theodosius I had pagan temples and other structures razed.
the Royal Library of Alexandria
The Royal Library of Alexandria, also known as the Great Library or simply the Library of Alexandria, was once the largest library in the world. It is generally thought to have been founded at the beginning of the 3rd century BCE, during the reign of Ptolemy II of Egypt. It has been reasonably established that the Library or parts of the collection were destroyed by fire on a number of occasions (library fires were common and replacement of handwritten manuscripts was extremely difficult, expensive and time-consuming). To this day the details of the destruction (or destructions) remain a lively source of controversy. Ancient and modern sources identify four possible occasions for the destruction of the Library: Julius Caesar conquest 48 BCE, the attack of Aurelian in the 3rd century CE, the decree of Theophilus in 391, or the Muslim conquest in 642 or thereafter. Each of these has been viewed with suspicion by other scholars as an effort to place the blame on particular actors. Moreover, each of these events is historically problematic.
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