The 27-Metre Granite Column in Alexandria That Has Almost Nothing to Do With Pompey

The column that 14th-century European Crusaders called Pompey’s Pillar is a single piece of red Aswan granite about 27 metres tall, 2.7 metres in diameter at the base, and weighing about 285 tonnes. It is the largest free-standing ancient monolithic column in the Mediterranean world — taller than Trajan’s Column in Rome (29.8 metres total but built from 19 stacked drums of Carrara marble), taller than the Marcus Aurelius Column (39.7 metres total but stacked from 28 drums), taller than the Vendôme Column in Paris (44 metres total but made of bronze plates over a brick core).

It stands on the highest point of central Alexandria — the small limestone acropolis known in antiquity as the Rhakotis hill — where the great pagan temple of Serapis stood until Patriarch Theophilus’s Christian mob demolished it in 391 AD. The column predates the destruction by 94 years. It is the only intact above-ground monument that survives from the entire ancient acropolis complex.

It has nothing to do with Pompey.

What it actually is

The column was erected in late 297 or 298 AD as a victory monument to the Roman emperor Diocletian, after his successful suppression of an Alexandrian-led Egyptian revolt against Roman rule.

The revolt — led by a Roman officer named Domitius Domitianus who had been proclaimed emperor by the Egyptian provincial troops in mid-296 — had taken Diocletian about 18 months to put down. The emperor personally led the siege of Alexandria for eight months in 297; the city’s defences were eventually breached in late 297 and the revolt collapsed. Diocletian executed Domitianus’s senior officers, fined the city heavily, and granted it a contradictory bundle of punitive and rewarding gestures over the following year as part of a calculated political settlement.

The column was the central public component of the settlement. It was erected on the Serapeum acropolis by the Roman prefect of Egypt — a man named Postumus, whose name appears in the dedicatory inscription on the western face of the column. The dedicatory inscription is in Greek (the dominant administrative language of Roman Egypt) and reads, in approximate translation:

To the most just emperor, the protecting god of Alexandria, Diocletian the invincible. Postumus, prefect of Egypt, [dedicates this].

The dedication is precisely-dated by the Egyptian provincial year reference to 297–298 AD. The column itself was quarried at Aswan, about 850 kilometres up the Nile, and shipped down the river on a specially-built barge in the dry season of 297. The transport took about three months. The base and capital were carved separately and assembled at the Alexandria site in early 298.

Why the Crusaders thought it was Pompey’s

The misattribution to Pompey the Great (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, 106–48 BC) was the work of Western European Crusader visitors to Alexandria during the 13th and 14th centuries — particularly the period of the Seventh Crusade (1248–54) under Louis IX of France, when significant numbers of Western European pilgrims passed through Egypt en route to the Holy Land and recorded what they saw.

Pompey had been murdered on the Egyptian coast near Alexandria in 48 BC — beheaded as he stepped ashore by agents of the young Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII, who hoped that delivering Pompey’s head to Julius Caesar (then pursuing Pompey across the Mediterranean after the battle of Pharsalus) would secure Caesar’s favour. The story was widely-known in medieval European Crusader literature; Pompey’s posthumous fate at Alexandria was one of the historical anchors that medieval travellers brought to the city with them.

The 14th-century Crusader habit was to associate any large ancient Alexandrian monument with whatever well-known classical story the monument’s location vaguely suited. The 27-metre column on the Alexandrian acropolis was the largest free-standing ancient monument visible to medieval European travellers in the city; Pompey was the largest well-known Roman figure associated with Alexandrian death. The misattribution stuck. By the mid-15th century the column was uniformly known in European travel literature as Colonna di Pompeo or La Colonne de Pompée.

The actual Postumus dedicatory inscription on the western face of the column was first read and correctly dated by European scholars in the 18th century — by a French archaeological team attached to Napoleon’s 1798 Egyptian expedition, which included a substantial scholarly contingent (the Description de l’Égypte project) tasked with documenting Egyptian antiquities. The Napoleonic identification was confirmed by subsequent 19th-century epigraphic work and is now uncontroversial.

The name Pompey’s Pillar has nonetheless stuck in European-language usage. The Egyptian Arabic name for the column is عمود السواري (Amud al-Sawari) — the Pillar of the Horsemen — referring to its historical association with the equestrian games that were held on the acropolis in the late Roman and early Byzantine period.

Why it survived

The column is the only standing above-ground component of the ancient Alexandrian acropolis because everything else was destroyed. The Serapeum temple complex itself was demolished by the 391 AD Christian mob action. The later Coptic and Islamic-period overbuilding on the same acropolis (a small Coptic monastery in the 5th–7th centuries, an early Islamic-period administrative compound, a medieval Arab fortress) progressively cleared the underlying Roman-period material and reused the masonry. The acropolis was used as a quarry through the 14th and 15th centuries; significant amounts of cut stone from the original Serapeum complex were carted off for reuse in medieval Alexandrian building projects.

The 27-metre granite column was too large to dismantle and too inconveniently shaped to topple and break up for reuse. It was left standing.

The 19th-century Egyptian archaeological clearance of the acropolis site (the work of the Italian-Egyptian archaeologist Giuseppe Botti in the 1890s) recovered the column’s original Roman-period footing and a few fragmentary remains of the surrounding Serapeum complex (most importantly the sphinx avenue that originally led from the temple’s eastern gate down toward the harbour). The site is now an open archaeological park managed by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities; the column stands at its original Roman-period footing, surrounded by the cleared remains of the surrounding ancient pavement, with two Ptolemaic-period red granite sphinxes flanking the western approach.

The acropolis is approximately 25 metres above modern sea level. The column adds another 27 metres to that. From the top of the column — which is inaccessible to visitors; the most-recent recorded climb was a British naval officer’s 1798 wager during the Napoleonic occupation — the view would have included the entire ancient harbour of Alexandria, the Pharos Lighthouse to the northwest, and the long curved breakwater of the Heptastadion. None of those things exist any longer. The column is what remains.