The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
A city built from one man’s ego
From Cleopatra and Napoleon to the Arab Spring, Alexandria saw it all, as this superb history shows
496pp, Sceptre, T £25 (0844 871 1514), RRP£30, ebook £17.99
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One day in 331BC – “halfway in the timeline between us and the great Pyramids of Giza” — the young ruler of Macedon, Alexander, halted his empire-building campaign through Egypt and Greece on the small island of Pharos, all windswept coast, empty beaches and tiny fishing villages.
Alexander, aged 24, and only five years into his reign after his father, Philip, had been assassinated, saw promise in the vacant scene.
It had an enviable position, at the intersection of Europe, Africa and Asia. With the mainland within bridging distance, a sheltered harbour, and the Nile and a nearby lake providing trade routes and fresh water, he couldn’t believe his luck.
He dropped to his knees, and using barley – or, as one version of the story has it, flour – sketched out a plan. The island would be connected to the mainland, and a grand city between the lake and the ocean would be built.
With its grandeur – majestic temples, streets large enough for “eight lanes of horses and chariots to move efficiently” — this would be a city for the ages. Alexander would never see the city that bore his name: as quickly as he’d appeared, he sailed off again, with only the briefest look over his shoulder.
But Alexandria, “born from one man’s ego”, already had all it needed from its founder: a rich mythology that could live alongside, and enrich, its real history. In Islam Issa’s monumental and vividly imagined new tale of the city, Alexandria comes to life.
Issa paints a picture of a city as magical as it is beleaguered; it saw Helen of Troy, Antony and Cleopatra, and the foundation of Christianity in Egypt, but also endured the first pogroms, the ravages of Napoleon, and the Second World War.
Among its other treasures – from its Pharos Lighthouse (the last of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World and, for centuries, the tallest manmade building), to the lavish, and now lost, tomb for Alexander – ancient Alexandria is often most remembered for its Great Library.
Alexander had included a “library dedicated to the Muses” in his initial barley-plan, but it was his successor, Ptolemy I, who started the project. He gave his son’s tutor, Demetrius, money to collect, as one letter records it, “all the books in the world”. It was a grand pursuit of knowledge, but one that had amusing and unintended consequences. While Ptolemy I angered foreign powers by “borrowing” their valuable scrolls and never returning them, his grandson, Ptolemy III, instigated a practice whereby every visitor to the city was searched for whatever papery knowledge they might have on them, and paid for whatever they carried.
Not unsurprisingly, a roaring trade in forgeries of ancient texts quickly sprung up.
But, as much as Alexandria was the home to fake knowledge (one wit, “Cratippus”, pretended he’d been a confidant of the historian Thucydides, and wrote Everything Thucydides Left Unsaid), it was also the home to reams of real learning.
It was in Alexandria where, in the third century BC, it was discovered that the Earth moved round the sun – an idea that wasn’t revived until the renaissance, with the writings of Copernicus. It was Alexandria where alphabetisation as an organisational system was first used; where pneumatics were first developed; where the world’s circumference was calculated; and where leaps were made with medical sciences.
Ancient Alexandria – a melting pot of knowledge, culture, and religion – was also remarkable for its gender dynamics: unlike the rest of the ancient world, its medical school was open to women.
It is an understandable side effect of the scope of Issa’s book that, from the drama of ancient Alexandria – generations and generations of Ptolemy pharaohs; incestuous marriages; Antony and Cleopatra – he skips lightly through some of the medieval and early modern years (the Ottoman years are the “three quietest centuries”).
But his story picks up pace again in the late 18th century, as Alexandria’s prime geographical position placed it in successive battles. Issa is adept on military and political history – the 20th century’s domino-sequence of wars and revolutions – but he is at his best on the cultural background: from Alexandria’s sultry reputation (belly dancers and sex-workers) to Lawrence Durrell, EM Forster, and the Alexandrian poet CP Cavafy whose brazenly homoerotic poetry, Issa maintains, could not have been written anywhere else.
Issa’s Alexandria arrives at 2011’s Arab Spring having covered more than two millennia in just over 400 pages – no mean feat.
But his real success is the book’s sense of personality. It ends with Issa walking through the modern city that now stands on the ancient site, passing its markets and art deco cinemas (“I’ve just stopped at a street vendor”). Issa writes about the present as vividly as the storied past; a fitting tribute to a city that has survived, changed and grown for so many centuries.
Issa’s epic narrative takes in battles and belly-dancers, street food and EM Forster