17 stories set here.
Ferdinand de Lesseps's canal joined the Mediterranean and Red Seas after ten years of digging — the early years by Egyptian corvée labour in the tens of thousands, with a heavy and uncounted toll of dead. The 1869 opening was the party of the century; within six years Britain owned Egypt's shares, and within thirteen it owned Egypt.
Read the story →Cleopatra VII killed herself at Alexandria on approximately 10 August 30 BCE, eleven days after her partner Mark Antony's suicide and three weeks after the city's fall to Octavian. The conventional account of the Egyptian cobra concealed in a basket of figs is first attested by Plutarch a century later. A 2010 reanalysis by Christoph Schaefer argued for a self-administered poison mixture as the more plausible cause of death.
Read the story →Hatshepsut ruled Egypt as pharaoh from approximately 1479 to 1458 BCE, the longest reign of any female ruler of ancient Egypt. About twenty years after her death her stepson Thutmose III ordered her cartouches systematically chiselled out of the public monuments she had built. Most of the erasures missed inaccessible interior surfaces, which is how Egyptologists reconstructed her reign in the 19th century.
Read the story →Constantin von Tischendorf visited Saint Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in May 1844 looking for old biblical manuscripts. He spotted 43 vellum leaves of an unfamiliar Greek script in a wastebasket of materials the monks were preparing to burn for fuel. The leaves were 4th-century — the oldest substantially complete Christian Bible manuscript known. He took 43 leaves home. A second 1859 visit secured the rest.
Read the story →Howard Carter's workmen uncovered the first sealed step of Tutankhamun's tomb on 4 November 1922 in the Valley of the Kings. Carter had been hired by the Earl of Carnarvon in 1907 and had spent six years on the specific Tutankhamun excavation. Carnarvon had been about to cancel funding. The discovery of the substantially intact 18th-Dynasty royal tomb was the most significant Egyptological find of the 20th century.
Read the story →Ptolemy Philadelphus was born to Cleopatra and Mark Antony in 36 BC, the third of their three children together. He was four years old when his parents died and his siblings were taken to Rome. The Roman record loses him after approximately 30 BC. His fate is unknown.
Read the story →Serapis was a deliberately syncretic Greco-Egyptian deity created under Ptolemy I around 305 BC to unite the Ptolemaic kingdom's Greek and Egyptian populations under a shared imperial cult. The Serapis cult flourished across the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean for six centuries before the 391 AD Christian suppression substantially erased it.
Read the story →Eratosthenes's famous measurement of the Earth's circumference depended on a peculiar geographical fact about the southern Egyptian town of Syene. On the summer solstice, the Sun stood exactly at the zenith there — a single annual moment that defined the line we now call the Tropic of Cancer.
Read the story →The 27-metre red granite column that stands on the Alexandrian acropolis where the [Serapeum once was](/articles/serapeum-destruction-391) is the largest free-standing ancient column in the Mediterranean world. The Crusaders gave it the name "Pompey's Pillar" in the 14th century. It was actually erected in 297 AD as a victory monument for the Roman emperor Diocletian, 350 years after Pompey was dead.
Read the story →Claudius Ptolemy's *Mathēmatikē Syntaxis* — known to Europe as the *Almagest* through its 9th-century Arabic translation — was the single dominant astronomical reference work of the Western world from approximately 150 AD to 1543. Most of its observational content was inherited from Hipparchus of Rhodes three centuries earlier.
Read the story →Theophilus of Alexandria served as patriarch from 385 to 412. He was the principal Christian figure behind the 391 destruction of the Serapeum, was substantially responsible for the systematic dismantling of Alexandrian Hellenistic-pagan religious institutions, and was succeeded by his nephew Cyril — under whose patriarchate Hypatia was murdered in 415.
Read the story →Moses Maimonides was expelled from Córdoba as a teenager, fled across the Mediterranean, and ended up as court physician to Saladin and Saladin's son in Cairo. In between he wrote the most important medieval Jewish work of philosophy.
Read the story →In 391 the Patriarch of Alexandria, with imperial authority, took a mob to the Serapeum and tore it apart. The temple had been the most important Egyptian library outside the Mouseion. After this day there was no library at Alexandria worth the name.
Read the story →Around 240 BC the chief librarian at Alexandria measured the planet's circumference using two shadows and a piece of arithmetic. He was off by about two percent.
Read the story →Hypatia of Alexandria was the most famous philosopher in the eastern Mediterranean. In March 415 a crowd dragged her from her carriage and killed her with roof tiles.
Read the story →Caesar's fire, the Christian mob, the Caliph's order — every famous ending of the Library of Alexandria is wrong, or only partly true. It died slowly.
Read the story →For sixteen hundred years the Pharos of Alexandria threw light over a sea. Three earthquakes finished what nothing else could.
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