When President Nasser—himself an Alexandrian—rose to power in the s, the government turned its back on a city that seemed almost foreign. The international community fled, and Alexandria slipped once again into obscurity. The rediscovery of ancient Alexandria began 14 years ago, when Empereur went for a swim. He had joined an Egyptian documentary film crew that wanted to work underwater near the 15th-century fort of Qait Bey, now a museum and tourist site.
The Egyptian Navy had raised a massive statue from the area in the s, and Empereur and the film crew thought the waters would be worth exploring. Most scholars believed that the Pharos had stood nearby, and that some of the huge stone blocks that make up the fortress may have come from its ruins.
No one knows exactly what the Pharos looked like. Literary references and sketches from ancient times describe a structure that rose from a vast rectangular base—itself a virtual skyscraper—topped by a smaller octagonal section, then a cylindrical section, culminating in a huge statue, probably of Poseidon or Zeus.
Scholars say the Pharos, completed about B. It survived an astonishing 17 centuries before collapsing in the mids. It was a calm spring day when Empereur and cinematographer Asma el-Bakri, carrying a bulky millimeter camera, slipped beneath the waters near the fort, which had been seldom explored because the military had put the area off limits.
Empereur was stunned as he swam amid hundreds of building stones and shapes that looked like statues and columns.
The sight, he recalls, made him dizzy. But after coming out of the water, he and el-Bakri watched in horror as a barge crane lowered ton concrete blocks into the waters just off Qait Bey to reinforce the breakwater near where they had been filming. El-Bakri pestered government officials until they agreed to halt the work, but not before some 3, tons of concrete had been unloaded, crushing many artifacts. One column had a diameter of 7. Corinthian capitals, obelisks and huge stone sphinxes littered the seafloor.
Curiously, half a dozen columns carved in the Egyptian style had markings dating back to Ramses II, nearly a millennium before Alexandria was founded. The Greek rulers who built Alexandria had taken ancient Egyptian monuments from along the Nile to provide gravitas for their nouveau riche city. Empereur and his team also found a colossal statue, obviously of a pharaoh, similar to one the Egyptian Navy had raised in He believes the pair represent Ptolemy I and his wife, Berenice I, presiding over a nominally Greek city.
With their bases, the statues would have stood 40 feet tall. Over the years, Empereur and his co-workers have photographed, mapped and cataloged more than 3, surviving pieces on the seafloor, including many columns, 30 sphinxes and five obelisks.
He estimates that another 2, objects still need cataloging. Most will remain safely underwater, Egyptian officials say. Franck Goddio is an urbane diver who travels the world examining shipwrecks, from a French slave ship to a Spanish galleon. In , Goddio and his team located the remains of a monumental structure, feet long and feet wide, as well as a finger from a bronze statue that Goddio estimates would have stood 13 feet tall. Perhaps most significant, he has found that much of ancient Alexandria sank beneath the waves and remains remarkably intact.
The new maps reveal foundations of wharves, storehouses and temples as well as the royal palaces that formed the core of the city, now buried under Alexandrian sand. Radiocarbon dating of wooden planks and other excavated material shows evidence of human activity from the fourth century B. At a recent meeting of scholars at Oxford University, the detailed topographical map Goddio projected of the harbor floor drew gasps.
But how had the city sunk? He determined that the edge of the ancient city had slid into the sea over the course of centuries because of a deadly combination of earthquakes, a tsunami and slow subsidence. On August 21, in A. Townspeople wandered into the weirdly emptied space. That disaster, which may have killed 50, people in Alexandria alone, ushered in a two-century period of seismic activity and rising sea levels that radically altered the Egyptian coastline.
In the eyes of Hippodamus, streets were not just by-products of houses and shops but centre-points in their own right: a showpiece of efficient urban governance. But Alexander himself would never live to see these marvels, or indeed the city which he founded. Ptolemy wanted Alexander in death because it helped legitimise his own authority in life. Whereas the original Hellenistic town was intended as a polis in which autonomous citizens enjoyed an equal say in decision-making unless, of course, they were female, foreign or enslaved , Alexandria became a template of urban absolutism — its regimented layout and carefully-demarcated quarters a display of control from above, not democracy from below.
That tension, over whether the design of our cities best serves its residents or its rulers, has persisted down the centuries and continues to colour Alexandria today. Now home to nearly 5 million people, and the second largest metropolitan area in a country racked by mass rebellion and urban revolt in recent years , Alexandria remains on the frontline of competing visions of what thoughtful urban planning should really look like.
Last year a scheme was unveiled to rebuild the long-lost ancient lighthouse in its original location — part of a grand redevelopment project involving major new shopping malls and a high-end hotel. The question of whose interests our urban spaces are really planned for has remained a live one ever since. Does your city have a little-known story that made a major impact on its development?
Euclid teaches in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy. No details of his life are known, but his brilliance as a teacher is demonstrated in the Elements , his thirteen books of geometrical theorems. Many of the theorems derive from Euclid's predecessors in particular Eudoxus , but Euclid presents them with a clarity which ensures the success of his work. It becomes Europe's standard textbook in geometry, retaining that position until the 19th century.
Archimedes is a student at Alexandria, possibly within the lifetime of Euclid. He returns to his native Syracuse, in Sicily, where he far exceeds the teacher in the originality of his geometrical researches. Early in the 3rd century BC two surgeons in Alexandria, Herophilus and Erasistratus, make the first scientific studies designed to discover the workings of human anatomy.
The cost of their contribution to science would be considered too high in modern times they acquire much of their information from Human vivisection , the patients being convicted criminals. But Celsus, a Roman writer on medical history, energetically justifies the suffering of the criminals as providing 'remedies for innocent people of all future ages'.
Pipes of varying sorts are among the earliest of musical instruments, and pipers must often have imagined a pipe too large for human lungs.
A scientist in Alexandria, by the name of Ctesibius, is credited with being the first to invent an organ - with a hand-operated pump sending air through a set of large Pipes. Each pipe is played by pressing a note on a board.
This is the beginning of keyboard instruments. By the time of the Roman empire, a few centuries later, the organ is a familiar and popular instrument - playing a prominent part in public games and circuses as well as private banquets.
The emperor Nero , an enthusiastic performer, is proud of his talents on the organ. The circumference of the earth: calculated c. Eratosthenes, the librarian of the museum at Alexandria , has more on his mind than just looking after the scrolls. He is making a map of the stars he will eventually catalogue nearly , and he is busy with his search for prime numbers; he does this by an infinitely laborious process now known as the Sieve of Eratosthenes.
But his most significant project is working out the circumference of the earth. Eratosthenes hears that in noon at midsummer the sun shines straight down a well at Aswan, in the south of Egypt. He finds that on the same day of the year in Alexandria it casts a shadow 7. If he can calculate the distance between Aswan and Alexandria, he will know the circumference of the earth degrees instead of 7.
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