Alexandria, Real and Imagined

Anthony Hirst, Michael Silk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351959599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Alexandria, Real and Imagined offers a complex portrait of an extraordinary city, from its foundation in the fourth century BC up to the present day: a city notable for its history of ethnic diversity, for the legacies of its past imperial grandeur - Ottoman and Arab, Byzantine, Roman and Greek - and, not least, for the memorable images of 'Alexandria' constructed both by outsiders and by inhabitants of the city. In this volume of new essays, Alexandria and its many images - the real and the imagined - are illuminated from a rich variety of perspectives. These range from art history to epidemiology, from social and cultural analysis to re-readings of Cavafy and Callimachus, from the impressions of foreign visitors to the evidence of police records, from the constructions of Alexandria in Durrell and Forster to those in the twentieth-century Arabic novel.

1
Alexandria, the Mouseion, and cultural identity

Herwig Maehler

Alexander’s general, Ptolemy son of Lagus, who became the first Macedonian king of Egypt, established the Mouseion at Alexandria as a research centre for literature and the sciences, and with it the famous library.¹ The facts are well known; about his motives and aims we can only speculate. There are, however, some indications as to why he undertook this ambitious project in the way he did; why it was he who did so, and not one of the other Hellenistic rulers of his time; and why it was in Alexandria, and not in Athens or anywhere else, that the project was undertaken - it was, I believe, no coincidence, but had everything to do with the peculiar situation of Alexandria as the new Greek capital of Egypt.

Let us begin with Alexandria itself. Why did Alexander found the new city, in 331 BG, on the site of an Egyptian village called Rakôte (in Greek, Rhacotis), which was incorporated into the plan of the Greek city? According to Arrian, Alexander, having first sacrificed to Apis and the other Egyptian gods at Memphis, sailed down the western branch of the Nile to its mouth at Canopus and then turned west, landing on the ridge between Lake Mariût (Mareotis) and the island of Pharos. Arrian implies that Alexander personally chose this spot; of Alexander’s reasons for the choice, Arrian says merely that it seemed best (ϰάλλιστoς) for the foundation of a city, and that the city founded there would prosper (γενέσθαι εύδαíµονα), as indeed it did. Alexander, according to Arrian, got carried away with enthusiasm for the project (πόθος οὖν λαμβάνει αύτòν τοῦ ἔϱγoυ), and he personally laid out the plan for the city - where the agora should be, and the city walls, and the temples of the gods (the Egyptian Isis as well as the Greek gods).² None of this tells us much about Alexander’s motives. And Plutarch’s account does not enlighten us either; it merely adds some colourful anecdotes.³ It seems reasonable to assume, though, that Alexander knew, or had been advised, that this would be a good location for a harbour, since, on the one hand, it was close to the Canopic branch of the Nile, which would connect it with Memphis and the country to the south, while, on the other, the harbour would not silt up from the deposits which the Nile discharged into the sea, since the currents along the coast would always shift those deposits away to the east.⁴ Having marched to Memphis and taken possession of Egypt, Alexander must have been considering how to secure the new province strategically: hence the need for a harbour, where reinforcements and supplies from Macedonia and Greece could be landed. Commercial considerations may have been equally important: opening up the rich country to trade with Greece and Ionia on a much larger scale than had been possible through the existing port of Naucratis, would certainly make the new city εύδαíµονα (‘prosperous’)• But I doubt that Alexander could have foreseen the full impact of his foundation upon Egypt itself.

What were the consequences of the foundation of Alexandria? In commercial terms, it was a stunning success. As Strabo says, ‘the exports by sea from Alexandria exceed the imports. This any person may ascertain, either at Alexandria or Dicaearchia, by watching the arrival and departure of the merchant vessels, and observing how much heavier or lighter their cargoes are when they depart or when they return.’⁵

Trade with the Mediterranean world must have developed rapidly, with exports not only of grain but above all of manufactured goods, like glass, papyrus and textiles (linen), and imports of all kinds of luxury goods and foodstuffs for the wealthy upper-middle class (including silk from China and perfumes from Arabia), and wood from Lebanon (essential for shipbuilding).⁶ The result for Egypt as a whole was not only an increase in wealth for the royal treasury and for the merchants, shipowners, shipbuilders and countless others who benefited from increased trade, but also a dramatic re-orientation of the country’s trade. In Pharaonic times Egypt’s foreign trade had been chiefly with Nubia, East Africa (the famous land of Punt), Arabia, and (via the Arabian coast) with India, and also, to a lesser extent, with Cyprus, Crete, and Phoenicia; but the Ptolemies opened new trade routes and reached new markets in Asia Minor, mainland Greece, southern Italy and North Africa (Carthage, for example), and most of their foreign trade passed through Alexandria. It must have been Alexander’s aim - and it was certainly the result of his foundation of Alexandria as a harbour connecting the Nile with the Mediterranean - to redirect Egypt’s foreign trade away from the south and towards Europe. (We might compare the redirection of Britain’s trade over the last twenty years, away from the Commonwealth and towards continental Europe.)

Even greater, however, was the impact of the new foundation on the cultural orientation of the country and its leading class. By this I mean not only Macedonians and Greeks but also Egyptians, as we shall see. (I shall address the question of ethnicity later.) Greek culture - poetry, mythology, philosophy, history and art - was imported, naturally, by the Greeks and Macedonians who came to Egypt from all parts of the Greek-speaking world. As can be seen very clearly in the famous papyrus roll of the late third century BG known as Le liυre d’écolier,⁷ Greek school curricula were focused entirely on the Greek cultural tradition, and completely ignored Egypt. This school-book has a list of the names of all the main rivers which Alexander crossed on his way to Bactria and India, including the Arachotes (near Kandahar in Afghanistan) but not the Nile.⁸ If this school-book is typical of the way in which Greek-speaking children were educated in Ptolemaic Egypt, we must conclude that their schools were fiercely Hellenocentric and quite deliberately ignored the Egyptian cultural traditions which surrounded them. These schools were exclusive; they evidently did not cater for Egyptian children, nor indeed for any other non-Greek children, since knowledge of the Greek language was taken for granted: they had no programme for ‘Teaching Greek as a Foreign Language’.

How did the Egyptians react to this Hellenocentric attitude of the immigrants? Did they regard it as a kind of cultural imperialism, as we regard MacDonald’s and Hollywood? Some probably did; there is some evidence, mostly from the second century, for Egyptian resentment against the foreigners who ruled in Alexandria (which Demotic texts continue to call Rakôte), and there are cases of racial conflict and harassment.⁹ On the whole, however, relations seem to have been relaxed, and intermarriage was common right from the beginning. This must have had implications for the relationship between Greek and Egyptian culture. But should this relationship be described as interaction, or as coexistence?¹⁰ Until relatively recently, most scholars thought that the two cultures began to merge early on, developing into a ‘mixed’ Graeco-Egyptian civilization. Today, the opposite view, that Greeks and Egyptians lived their separate lives without taking much notice of each other, seems to be generally accepted.¹¹ This view is taken to extremes by Bianchi who categorically denies any influence of Hellenistic art on Ptolemaic Egyptian art, and flatly rejects the idea that Alexandria ever played a significant role as a centre of cultural creativity and innovation.¹² The truth, as so often, is probably hidden somewhere between the two positions, and the answer is likely to be complex.

So we might, at this point, ask a question which can be answered more easily. If, as the school texts seem to suggest, Greek education under the Ptolemies concentrated exclusively on Greek culture, was this a deliberate policy inspired and promoted by the king’s government, and was the foundation of the Mouseion at Alexandria part of such a policy? Let us first review the evidence for the foundation of the Mouseion and the Library; this will not take long because, unfortunately, the evidence is woefully limited. According to Plutarch, it was Ptolemy I Soter who ‘brought together’ or ‘assembled’ (συναγαγών) the Mouseion;¹³ Strabo adds that it was organized as a ‘community’ (σύνοδος) headed by a priest, the ίερεύς τοῦ Μουσείου, who was nominated by the king.¹⁴ Another interesting piece of information, also preserved by Strabo, concerns Aristotle; Strabo reports that Aristotle was the first to collect books (which must mean not just some books - he certainly was not the first to have done that! - but a library), and that he taught the kings of Egypt the arrangement of a library (βιβλιοθήϰης σύνταξιν),¹⁵ by which Strabo evidently meant that the royal library at Alexandria was organized according to the areas of research practised in Aristotle’s Περίπατος (peripatetic school) in Athens.

From these statements in Plutarch and Strabo it is clear that the king, Ptolemy I, played a key role in the foundation and organization of the Mouseion. From a number of anecdotes, most of which are preserved in Athenaeus, we can see that the first four Ptolemies, at any rate, had close personal contacts with the scholars who lived and worked at the Mouseion under the king’s patronage.¹⁶ The king’s personal involvement is illustrated by two other pieces of evidence. The first is a statement by Iren...