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Alexandria
Table of Contents
Alexandria

 * Introduction
   
 * 
   Character of the city
   
 * Landscape
    * City site
   
    * Climate
   
    * City layout

 * 
   People
   
 * Economy
    * Manufacturing, finance, and other services
   
    * Transportation

 * Administration and society
    * Government
   
    * Health and municipal services
   
    * Education

 * 
   Cultural life
   
 * History
    * Foundation and medieval growth
      * Greek period
      * Roman and Byzantine periods
      * Islamic period
   
    * Evolution of the modern city

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Home Geography & Travel Cities & Towns Cities & Towns A-B


ALEXANDRIA

Egypt
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Alternate titles: Al-Iskandariyyah
By Mary Rowlatt See All • Last Updated: Sep 3, 2022 • Edit History

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mosque of Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Mursī

Alexandria

Alexandria, Arabic Al-Iskandariyyah, major city and urban muḥāfaẓah
(governorate) in Egypt. Once among the greatest cities of the Mediterranean
world and a centre of Hellenic scholarship and science, Alexandria was the
capital of Egypt from its founding by Alexander the Great in 332 bce until its
surrender to the Arab forces led by ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ in 642 ce. One of Egypt’s
largest cities, Alexandria is also its principal seaport and a major industrial
centre. The city lies on the Mediterranean Sea at the western edge of the Nile
River delta, about 114 miles (183 km) northwest of Cairo in Lower Egypt. Area
city, 116 square miles (300 square km). Pop. (2006) city, 4,110,015.




CHARACTER OF THE CITY


Alexandria, Egypt

Alexandria has long occupied a special place in the popular imagination by
virtue of its association with Alexander and Cleopatra. Alexandria played an
important role in preserving and transmitting Hellenic culture to the wider
Mediterranean world and was a crucible of scholarship, piety, and ecclesiastical
politics in early Christian history. Although it has been asserted that
Alexandria declined as a result of its conquest by Muslim Arabs in the 7th
century ce, such a statement is misleading. While the city’s political primacy
was lost when the capital was moved to the interior, Alexandria remained an
important centre of naval operations, maritime commerce, and craft production.
As late as the 15th century, the city prospered as a transit point in the trade
conducted between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean basin.

Beginning in the 16th century, however, the city suffered a period of protracted
decline owing to epidemic disease and administrative neglect; by the end of the
18th century, traces of Alexandria’s former splendour had largely vanished. By
the time French troops invaded Egypt in 1798, Alexandria had been reduced to a
town of some 10,000 inhabitants, significant mainly for its role in Ottoman
maritime networks. Flourishing in the 19th century as a major centre of the
booming cotton industry, the modern city had come to bear little in common with
the ancient metropolis.

Alexandria has generally been characterized by a cultural ambivalence inherent
in the city’s location—extending along a spit of land with its back to Egypt and
its face to the Mediterranean. Throughout most of its history, Alexandria has
thus remained a cosmopolitan town, belonging as much—or perhaps more—to the
wider Mediterranean world as to its hinterland. The revival of the town in the
19th century, however, brought about a profound change in the city’s identity.
With the significant increase in agricultural exports, the influx of native
Egyptians to the city, and the formation and integration of the Egyptian state,
Alexandria became tied to the Nile valley more closely than ever before. As a
result, it also became the locus of an emergent Egyptian national consciousness.



Beginning in the mid-18th century, these underlying changes would be
overshadowed for roughly a century by the rise to power of a Levantine business
community. Foreign dominance was reinforced by the overlay of British
colonialism beginning in 1882 and by the formation of a foreign-dominated
municipality in 1890. The arts flourished during this century-long interlude,
and the city still boasts fine Neoclassical and Art Nouveau architecture dating
from this period. The literary side of the city’s flowering is reflected in the
works of the Alexandria-born Greek writer Constantine Cavafy, who drew on
Alexandria’s fabled past in his poetry. Likewise, the decadent cosmopolitanism
of the foreign community in Alexandria was depicted by the English writer
Lawrence Durrell in his famous series of novels, The Alexandria Quartet
(1957–60). A contrasting portrayal of the modern city is given in Naguib
Mahfouz’s Miramar (1967); set in postcolonial Alexandria, Mahfouz’s novella
offers a view of the city as an integral part of Egyptian history and society.
This process of integration was accelerated after the 1952 revolution, when most
of the remaining foreign residents departed.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Alexandria remained Egypt’s “second
capital.” It continued to contribute substantially to the national economy and
was popular as a summer holiday destination.

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LANDSCAPE




CITY SITE

The modern city extends 25 miles (40 km) east to west along a limestone ridge,
1–2 miles (1.6–3.2 km) wide, that separates the salt lake of Maryūṭ, or
Mareotis—now partly drained and cultivated—from the Egyptian mainland. An
hourglass-shaped promontory formed by the silting up of a mole (the
Heptastadion), which was built soon after Alexandria’s founding, links the
island of Pharos with the city centre on the mainland. Its two steeply curving
bays form the basins for the Eastern Harbour and the Western Harbour.





CLIMATE

The prevailing north wind, blowing across the Mediterranean, gives Alexandria a
markedly different climate from that of the desert hinterland. The summers are
relatively temperate, although humidity can build up in July and in August, the
hottest month, when the average temperature reaches 87 °F (31 °C). Winters are
cool and invariably marked by a series of violent storms that can bring
torrential rain and even hail. The mean daily temperature in January, which is
the coldest month, is 64 °F (18 °C).




CITY LAYOUT


Alexandria, Pharos of

Designed by Alexander’s personal architect, Dinocrates, the city incorporated
the best in Hellenic planning and architecture. Within a century of its
founding, its splendours rivaled anything known in the ancient world. The pride
of ancient Alexandria was the great lighthouse, the Pharos of Alexandria, which
stood on the eastern tip of the island of Pharos. One of the Seven Wonders of
the World, the lighthouse is reputed to have been more than 350 feet (110
metres) high and was still standing in the 12th century. In 1477, however,
Sultan Qāʾit Bey used stones from the dilapidated structure to build a fort
(named for him), which stands near or on the original site of the Pharos. In
1994 archaeologist Jean-Yves Empereur of the Centre for Alexandrian Studies
(Centre d’Études Alexandrines) found many of the stones and some statuary that
had belonged to the lighthouse in the waters off Pharos Island. The Egyptian
government discussed turning the area into an “underwater museum” to allow
tourists to see the archaeological remains of the lighthouse, and various
studies examining the project’s feasibility continued into the early 21st
century.

The Canopic Way (now Ṭarīq al-Ḥurriyyah) was the principal thoroughfare of the
Greek city, running east and west through its centre. Most Ptolemaic and Roman
monuments stood nearby. The Canopic Way was intersected at its western end by
the Street of the Soma (now Shāriʿ al-Nabī Dānyāl), along which is the legendary
site of Alexander’s tomb, thought by some to lie under the mosque of al-Nabī
Dānyāl. Close to this intersection was the Mouseion (museum), an academy of arts
and sciences, which included the great Library of Alexandria. At the seaward end
of the Street of the Soma were the two obelisks known as Cleopatra’s Needles.
These obelisks were given in the 19th century to the cities of London and New
York. One obelisk can be viewed on the banks of the River Thames in London, and
the other stands in Central Park in New York City.

Between Ṭarīq al-Ḥurriyyah and the railway station is the Roman Theatre, which
was uncovered in 1959 at the Kawm al-Dikkah archaeological site. At the
southwestern extremity of the ancient city are the Kawm al-Shuqāfah burial
grounds, with their remarkable Hadrianic catacombs dating from the 2nd century
ce. Nearby, on the site of the ancient fort of Rhakotis, is one of the few
Classical monuments still standing: the 88-foot- (27-metre-) high marble column
known as Pompey’s Pillar (actually dedicated to Diocletian soon after 297).
Parts of the Arab wall, encompassing a much smaller area than the Greco-Roman
city, survive on Ṭarīq al-Ḥurriyyah, but in Ottoman times the city contracted to
the stem of the promontory, now the Turkish Quarter. It is the oldest surviving
section of the city and houses its finest mosques and worst slums.

In the 19th century the renascent city’s commercial hub was a long rectangular
piazza, once called Al-Manshiyyah Square and now called Al-Taḥrīr Square
(“Liberation Square”). An equestrian statue of Egypt’s most famous viceroy,
Muḥammad ʿAlī Pasha, still adorns the square. The commercial centre later moved
eastward to Saʿd Zaghlūl Square, where the Cecil and Metropole hotels are
located, and inland toward the railway station. Blocked to the west by the port
and the industrial area, urban development moved eastward, both inland and along
the Corniche, a seaside promenade. Today the Corniche is a ribbon of beach huts,
bathing clubs, and restaurants faced across the road by a continuous wall of
hotels and apartment blocks.


PEOPLE

From the late 19th century to the 1980s the population grew 10-fold, the result
of high birth rates and migration from the countryside. In the decade following
the 1952 revolution, the city’s population reached roughly 1.5 million; by 1976
the population stood at more than 2 million, with half the people under 20 years
of age. The city’s population continued to grow, reaching more than 4 million in
the early 21st century.

Though Arabic-speaking Egyptians represent the vast majority of the city’s
population, Alexandria was once home to a polyglot foreign community made up
principally of immigrants from other Mediterranean countries, including Greece,
Italy, Syria, and France; for this community—and for most educated
Egyptians—French was the lingua franca. This community, which represented about
one-tenth of the population in 1947, virtually disappeared following the
widespread nationalization of industries and services of the Nasser era and the
concentration of state investment and administration in Cairo, the capital city.
Most Alexandrians, like most Egyptians, are Sunni Muslims; the city’s Christian
minority consists mainly of members of the indigenous church of Egypt, the
Coptic Orthodox Church.


ECONOMY


MANUFACTURING, FINANCE, AND OTHER SERVICES

Alexandria’s industrial and commercial activities—manufacturing, shipping,
warehousing, banking, food processing, and the production of petrochemicals and
cement—indicate the importance of the city’s output for the national economy.
Alexandria and its environs account for roughly two-fifths of Egypt’s industrial
production. Most industrial development has taken place in the western
approaches to the city, around the more modern Western Harbour and along its
southern flank; industry is the city’s chief employment sector.

The area around the port known as Mīnāʾ al-Baṣal contains warehouses and was
once home to the Cotton Exchange. West across the Al-Maḥmūdiyyah Canal is the
Al-Qabbārī neighbourhood, site of the asphalt works and rice and paper mills.
Farther to the west is Al-Maks, with its salt and tanning industries, an oil
refinery, a cement works, and, farther on, the limestone quarries. Other
industrial development has taken place still farther west in Al-Dukhaylah. To
the south lies the area of Al-ʿAmiriyyah, the site of two more refineries,
including the Middle East Oil Refinery (Midor), which was designed to meet
stringent environmental standards. Lighter industry is concentrated on the banks
of the Al-Maḥmūdiyyah Canal.

Agriculture is an important economic activity in the hinterland, and land
reclamation has been attempted with some success. In one such project
implemented near Alexandria, the Egyptian government has aimed to encourage food
production and divert job seekers from overcrowded urban areas by offering
graduates of universities and other institutes of higher education parcels of
reclaimed land, which they are able to purchase using long-term loans.

Europe’s increasing demand for cotton—introduced into Egypt in the 1820s—was by
the 1840s contributing substantially to the city’s wealth. As a result,
Alexandria became an increasingly important centre for banking and commerce. The
Alexandria Stock Exchange, founded in 1883, was followed by the Cairo Stock
Exchange in 1903; they eventually linked their operations and continued as the
Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchanges (CASE). Though some banks, such as the
Alexandria Commercial and Maritime Bank, are based in Alexandria, a majority of
banks—including the Bank of Alexandria—are headquartered in Cairo.



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External Websites
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 * Ancient Egypt Online - Alexandria, Egypt
 * World History Encyclopedia - Alexandria, Egypt

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External Websites
 * History World - History of Alexandria
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 * World History Encyclopedia - Alexandria, Egypt

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 * Alexandria - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
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