Where East Met West
For Two Millennia
Alexandria is the city that invented the idea of a great library — the notion that all human knowledge could be gathered in one place.
Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in 331 BCE, selecting the site himself on a narrow strip between the Mediterranean and Lake Maryut, and commissioning the architect Dinocrates to lay out its ordered grid. Under the Ptolemies it became the capital of a dynasty that would last three centuries and give the world its most famous library: the Mouseion and its hundreds of thousands of scrolls, a lighthouse — the Pharos — that stood among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and Cleopatra VII, the last and most brilliant of her line, whose court on the eastern harbour commanded the most powerful city between Rome and the Persian Gulf.
The Arab conquest of 642 CE shifted Egypt's political centre to Fustat, but Alexandria endured as the gateway of the Mediterranean. By the nineteenth century, under Muhammad Ali, it was reborn as the most cosmopolitan city in the Arab world: Greeks, Italians, Jews, Syrians and Egyptians trading, intermarrying and building an elegant, European-inflected cityscape along the Corniche. This Alexandria — vivid, melancholy and multilingual — was the city that C.P. Cavafy, the great Greek poet, recorded in his verse, and that Lawrence Durrell mythologised in his four-volume Alexandria Quartet, a meditation on desire, memory and the dissolution of empire.
