Alexandria

Alexandria suffered much destruction in the political disruptions of the later 3rd century AD. After riots between pagans and Christians in 391, the great Serapeum temple was destroyed, and many temples were eventually converted into churches. Earthquakes also took their toll in Alexandria, including major parts of the harbor-front, which are now submerged. When the invading Muslim army entered the city in 642, however, there was still much impressive monumental architecture. As Alexandria became an Islamic city more rebuilding occurred when many churches were transformed into mosques. Today with many ancient remains covered by the modern city (thus precluding excavation), much of what is known about the Greco-Roman city is from textual information, especially descriptions of the Greek geographer Strabo, who visited Alexandria in the early years of Roman rule.

The first systematic excavations in Alexandria were ordered in 1866 by the Khedive of Egypt. They were conducted by Mahmud Bey, who later published a plan of the Roman Period city, with streets, canals, and the city wall (Figure 10.1). Another map of the city in the late 19th century, locating the known ancient remains, was also published by Mahmud Bey. With the founding of the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria in 1892, observations and excavations of ancient remains there have been conducted under the museum’s auspices.

Ancient Alexandria was a Greco-Roman city, with little Egyptian-style architecture, as is evident from the excavations of the Polish Center of Mediterranean Archaeology (Warsaw University) on the Kom el-Dikka. Roman baths (3rd century) have been uncovered with rooms for warm and cold baths and a steam-room, near a complex of cisterns which stored water underground. Located near this complex was a Greek-style theater with white Italian marble columns (4th-7th centuries), which has been restored. (A number of theaters are known in the city from textual sources, and the Roman city also had a hippodrome, where chariot races continued to be a great public spectacle in Byzantine times.) In this area the Polish archaeologists have excavated large houses (villa urbana) dating to the 1st-3rd centuries, which were subsequently replaced by smaller ones of the 4th-7th centuries. They have also uncovered the first evidence of Alexandria’s university - a building with 13 lecture halls, each arranged with stepped benches on three sides of the room.

Impressive monumental finds, which may have formed part of the lighthouse complex, have been excavated at an underwater site to the east of the Islamic Qaitbay Fort by Jean-Yves Empereur, Director of the Centre d’Etudes Alexandrines (Plate 10.1). These include Ptolemaic royal statues and pharaonic monuments, such as obelisks, sphinxes, and columns, many of which were taken from Heliopolis. Remains of an earlier Greek city, Herakleion/ Thonis, have also been located at an underwater site in the Bay of Abukir, about 22 kilometers east of Alexandria, where Admiral Lord Nelson defeated Napoleon Bonaparte’s fleet in 1798. The sea finds from Herakleion suggest that Delta temples could have been built on a very large scale - which is not known from the preserved evidence of temples on land.

Figure 10.1 Plan of the city of Alexandria. Source: Ian Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. oxford: oxford university Press, 2000, p. 406. used by permission of oxford university Press.

Empereur has also done rescue excavations in the Gabbari district of Alexandria (to the west of the ancient city), where a burial complex was discovered during the construction of a highway. Forty-three tomb complexes for multiple burials were located - one of which contained ca. 250 rectangular burial niches cut in the bedrock (Plate 10.2). Sometimes as many as 12 skeletons were found in one niche, the earlier ones simply being shoved aside for a later burial, and the niche was closed off by a stone slab. These tombs were destroyed, however, when the site was bulldozed and construction began on the Gabbari bridge in 2000.

The rescue excavations in the Gabbari district tombs uncovered thousands of ceramic lamps and vessels, as well as other artifacts associated with Greek mortuary rites. Although Empereur also found some Egyptian mummies with gold foil on the faces of their cases, these catacomb tombs seem to have been used mostly by Alexandrines who adhered to Greek (and not Egyptian beliefs) about burial and the afterlife, with Greek inscriptions identifying some of the occupants. Cremation burials in urns were also found - a distinctly non-Egyptian type of burial known in the Greek (and later Roman) world. Cross motifs on artifacts and in wall niches identified the later reuse of some of the tombs by early Christians.

Large, multi-roomed tombs for multiple burials of high-status persons are known elsewhere in Alexandria, such as at Shatby and Kom el-Shuqafa, and along the coastal region to the west of the city. The rock-cut substructures of these tombs often contain elements of Greek then Roman funerary architecture, as well as Egyptian temple architecture - and decorations, both painted and in relief, that combine Egyptian symbols and scenes pertaining to the afterlife with classical motifs.