Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 26 Sept. - 2 October 2002 Issue No. 605
Alexandria before Alexander
Egyptians have allowed Greece to claim Alexandria as a Graeco-Roman legacy. Jill Kamil goes back three hundred years before the great Mediterranean capital was founded and attempts to set the record straight
The arrival of Alexander the Great in 332 BC was not the close of an epoch, and nor did his heirs, the Ptolemies, cause a social revolution. The so-called "conquest" was a mere episode in Egyptian history, as there had been a blending of Egyptian and Greek cultures in Egypt long before Alexander's arrival. From the sixth century BC Greek traders and sailors had established communities in Egypt and worshipped Egyptian gods under Greek names.
As well as having these close ties with Greeks, the Egyptians welcomed Alexander because Egypt and Greece shared a common enemy: Persia. When Alexander, after vanquishing the Persians, arrived at the Nile he stopped in Memphis to pay homage at the temple of Ptah, one of the "great gods" of Egypt, but did not waste time going to Thebes (Luxor), the southern capital and the centre of the cult of Amun-Re (that gesture of respect could wait until he went to Siwa). Instead, he sent his officer Apollonius south as his envoy while he himself marched down the Canopic branch of the Nile towards the Mediterranean.
He reached its outlet east of the cape of present-day Abu Qir, a long limestone spur about 45 kilometres west of Alexandria where a port had existed as far back as the reign of Ramses II. This great New Kingdom Pharaoh had built fortresses all along the Mediterranean coast, and numerous statues of him found at Canopis are now in the Graeco-Roman Museum.
Continuing his march westwards, Alexander reached a long, narrow sandy ridge where a series of islands separated the Mediterranean from Lake Maryut (Mareotis). Pharos, the largest of the offshore islands, protected a natural bay, and tradition holds that Alexander immediately perceived a site on the mainland opposite as an ideal location for his new city.
In fact, its strategic importance had been recognised much earlier. A community which existed nearby was probably founded in the 18th dynasty, about 1567 BC. This town was known as Rhakotis, a name it retained in the Egyptian community until the 12th century AD. This community grew, and two centuries later Ramses II built a temple there in honour of Osiris to cater to the people's spiritual needs. In the Saite Dynasty, six centuries before the arrival of Alexander, a military garrison was established at Rhakotis.
So it is clear from the above that alongside the site chosen by Alexander for his new capital there was already a large town with a temple, and there is indication, but no conclusive proof, that it was important enough for Nektanebo II, the last native Pharaoh before the Greek conquest, to consider being buried there.
Rhakotis was clearly not the insignificant village peopled by nomadic pastoralists and their flocks alluded to in classical sources, nor "the wretched fishing village" described by Idris Bell in his Egypt from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest.
Pre-Ptolemaic ruins have been found beneath the sea between the large rock known as Abu Bakr and the western tip of the island of Pharos, along with a series of smaller rocks joined by breakwaters placed on the north side to create a harbour. Most of these ancient quays were reused in the foundations of a modern breakwater, but evidence of their existence was confirmed by M Jondet in his Les ports submergés de l'ancienne ”le de Pharos, in which he attributed construction of the harbour to Crete, then a maritime power. Furthemore, he claims the 1,800m-long Heptastadion Dike attributed to Alexander's engineers was built on an older foundation.
When Alexander, with the help of Dinocrates, an experienced Greek city planner from Rhodes (who built the great temple of Diana at Ephesis), laid out his new city, it was designed on a regular blueprint of Hellenic cities but on a much larger scale. Rhakotis and its temple, ideally located at the shortest distance between Pharos and the mainland, was automatically absorbed into the city on the west.
Ptolemy I Soter, who assumed the throne some years after Alexander's untimely death, saw the need to create a national god who would be equally acceptable to all members of the community of Alexandria, Egyptian and Greek, and Osir-Apis (Serapis) was invented. This was a god who combined Osiris, Egypt's most beloved ancestor-figure who was worshipped in Rhakotis and popular throughout Egypt, with Apis, the sacred bull of Memphis. The invention of this hybrid deity has been attributed to two sources: a priestly family acquainted with Greek ritual and an Egyptian familiar with local tradition. To launch Serapis on his career, the colossal statue of a reclining man (carved by the Greek sculptor Bryaxis) was appropriated from a sanctuary of Hades at Sinope on the north coast of Asia Minor and shipped to Alexandria. The Temple of Osiris was rebuilt to accommodate Osir-Apis, and became known as the Serapeum.
This temple was destroyed by Christians during the religious strife in Alexandria in 391, but archaeological evidence, along with the description of the historian Rufinus at the end of the fourth century, reveals that it was large, rectangular in shape, and surrounded by a colonnade, halls and storerooms -- in other words much like a traditional Egyptian temple. Surviving blocks of stone suggest that considerable material from earlier Pharaonic structures was reused in its construction. In 1943 and 1945 the foundation deposits at the site revealed two sets of bilingual Greek-Egyptian texts which attest to the Serapeum having been completed under Ptolemy III Euergetes and to its catering to a Graeco-Egyptian community.
When the Mouseion, a great research facility with its famous library, was founded by Ptolemy I Soter and completed under Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285-247 BC) Alexandria became culturally unrivalled. It attracted the most illustrious poets, artists and scientists of the day. Ptolemy II had a passionate desire to store up knowledge, and one of his chief librarians, Callimachus, a Homeric scholar and one of the greatest epic poets of antiquity, accumulated a store of Greek literary heritage. The library of Alexander's former tutor Aristotle was also brought to Alexandria. The complex scriptures of the Zoroastrian Bible (Avasta Zend) were translated into Greek in the institution, along with the Hebrew scriptures and the Egyptian "king list", which was compiled by a priest called Manetho.
But little was done to collect or collate the rest of Egypt's enormous literary heritage, and one must ask why this was so. The answer is self- evident. It was because the Egyptians had their own library in the now upgraded temple of Osir- Apis (Serapis) in Rhakotis.
All important Egyptian temples had a "house of life" where ancient literature was stored, texts copied by scribes, and some of the papyrus scrolls cut and bound into books (codices). The temples of Heliopolis, Sais and Memphis were among the most famous for their scribes and sages, who studied the constellations and the courses of the planets, trained physicians, and copied their ancient wisdom from generation to generation through the millennia.
Under what is known as the Saite revival in the sixth century BC, for example, scribes were ordered to collect, document and recopy proverbial wisdom, medical prescriptions and sacred religious texts. Faced with mountains of inherited literature they had to acquaint themselves with an archaic method of writing, and soon became an exclusive class of society. They were not historians, however, and sometimes in their copies of the texts they added fresh associations, or rendered them in a form they never originally possessed. Recollections of earlier times had become hazy, and the interpretations sometimes confused. But they were proud of their heritage, and when Alexandria became the capital and a great centre of learning the contents of some of the most important "houses of life" in the temples may have been transported there.
In other words, the libraries of Alexandria, which are referred to in classical literature as the Great Library and the so-called Daughter Library established in the Serapeum "at some unknown date", may well have been two separate and distinctive libraries.
Working on this hypothesis -- that they were parallel institutions -- the first, the Serapeum, comprising a reputed 428,000 rolls of papyrus and some bound volumes, would have had its own professional scribes, book binders and calligraphers who probably inherited their skills. The contents of this library may have included some of the same syncretic material as that discovered in the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945: Pharaonic and Greek mythological texts and folklore, Persian mysticism, Greek philosophy, ancient Egyptian wisdom and "teachings" and pre-Christian Gnostic texts.
Meanwhile, 490,000 original works were stored at the so-called Great Library in the Mouseion. Here research was carried out on the brain by Herophilus of Chalcedon, as a result of which it was understood to be the central organ of the nervous system and the seat of intelligence; Erasistratus of Chios distinguished veins from arteries and the capillary connection between the venous and arterial systems, and Hipparchus the astronomer made accurate determinations of the tropic year and lunar month and mapped out positions of 850 stars using 150 years of Alexandrian observations, plus earlier Egyptian and Babylonian observations.
It is not unreasonable to suppose that in this Egypto-Greek Mediterranean city, where there was a hybrid god to cater to both segments of the Egypto-Greek community, there were parallel schools of learning. Certainly the Egyptian presence in Alexandria in Ptolemaic times was strong. In fact, the brilliant Greek city state known as "the bride of the Mediterranean" wore its distinctly Egyptian flavour with pride. And the myth of "Graeco-Roman" Egypt created by classicists has unfortunately remained unchallenged by Egyptologists.
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