Today the second city in Egypt, it was founded only in 332/332 and it is the most western of the eleven “Alexandreia”.
The name, subsequently to the great development of this Mediterranean port and of its cultural institutions in the Greek-roman epoch, symbolizes both the birth and the prospering of the Greek culture, at the point that you could ask yourself what does this Hellenic territory have to do with the pharaohs, and why it interests Egyptology. Actually, before Alexander’s intervention, the thin cordon of rocks that at the north-western corner of the Delta separates the sea from the vast lake Mareotide was occupied only by a coastguard station, while the lake and the marshes were frequented only by primitive cowboys.
The name, that had continued to indicate in demotic and Coptic Egyptian the city of Alexandria, was Rakote (Rhacotis), literally “ The construction”, meaning “solid building”, in contrast with the cowboys’ huts, and also because, according to a recent hypothesis, this name indicated “the building site” started by the Greek-Macedonian. At about 800 meters in the open sea, there is an island, Faro, where Tolomeo II erected a lighthouse that was used as a stopping place for the sailors that came from the Egeo sea, before going toward the east coast to present themselves at the pharaoh’s custom-house, at the entrance of the west branch of the Nile, where the cowboys tried to convince the pirates in not going in Egyptian country.
Here was founded a modern city, of Greek geometry, residence for the dynasty, site for the government and for a central administration where the main language was Greek. For the first time, the Egyptian State provided its naval and commercial strategies with a sea port Being followers of the Greek philosophers, people who loved the Greek literature, the Tolomei made their capital a gathering place and the center of the development of the Hellenic patrimony: the Museum was created, a kind of permanent seminar and the famous library, that collected and enriched the literature and the scientific work of the Greek knowledge, but opposed to an idea that still resists, nothing indicates that it had the papyrus hieroglyphics, hieratic and demotic, in the same way the idea that the work by the thinkers and the sages in Alexandria, Eratostene and others, came from the hieratic sacred science in Menfi, Tebe and Eliopoli has no foundation.
Still, we certainly can not limit ourselves in imagining a perfect Greek “base of life”, at the edge of Egypt, a colony almost totally closed to the people, to the faiths and the practices of the natives; different information induce to regard the Egyptology of this Hellenic city in a new way, to estimate how the pharaoh’s influence was present in it, visible and lived. From the beginning, the first Tolomei chose as a protector for Alexandria, Osiride/Apis, that the inhabitants in Menfi, including the Greek-born settlers, worshipped because a figure, in this world and in the other, of the highest God, as well as Ra, Phta and Osiride.
If, inside the Serapeum that was built on the main hill, Bryaxis made statue of Serapis that made him similar to Zeus, to Ades and to Asclepio, deposits founded in the typical pharaoh’s way, prove that some chapels were conceived and consecrated with Egyptian rituals, since their hieroglyphic inscriptions imply the Egyptian priests’ participation.
From the XVII century, the European travelers, as well as the local and national archaeological authorities and citizens in Alexandria, and the more recent explorations on the submerged places by the Center of Study in Alexandria and by the European Institute of submarine archeology, have collected in the whole city, with finds in Greek style and language, a great number of testimonies and fragments in the pharaoh’s style, that often show hieroglyphic inscriptions.
These finds are mobile monuments: statues, sphinxes, obelisks (among them the two “Cleopatra’s needles”, a couple of obelisks of the New Reign, today divided between London and New York) and so on, and some architectonic fragments: columns, pieces of walls, doorframes, and above all the seven remarkable inter-column little walls of Psammetico and Nectanebo I, then distributed among the museums in Bologna, Alexandria, Vienna and London; many of these royal finds go back to the ancient dynasties, but you could not, in any way, use them as a pretext to say that the previous pharaohs had founded in their own epoch a port city decorated with big sanctuaries. The inscriptions state that they were taken from the temples in the Country, mainly from Eliopoli, as it has been ascertained since more than a century. On the other hand, traces found on many wandering rocks prove that in the Greek-Roman epoch they had been cut again, maybe many times, and used again as building material. It’s better to distinguish the works in pharaoh’s style, that go back to previous kings in Alexandria and imported from other sites.
The first, above all the famous colossal of the lagidi kings and the isiache queens found at the feet of fort Qait-Bey and in the suburb of Eleusi, or again the group of Filadelfi discovered in Faro, prove that the Macedonian sovereigns were pleased to show all their divine power under the pharaoh’s features inside the Hellenic city. Some beautiful Egyptian statues of dignitaries are, as others, votive images put in the temples in the capital, by themselves. Now, we know that during the III century some priestly dignitaries, native from “nomoi”, attended the Court and that in the II-I century some of them, traditional and Hellenistic at the same time, had high government positions up to the one, very important, of minister in economy.
The point to prove is to determine in what periods and circumstances, and for which reason, the antiques that go back to the Sesostri, to the Ramessidi, to the Saiti and to the Sebenniti were moved to Alexandria.
It seems, that the sphinxes , as well as the images of the king making offers, were simply included in the mobile ritual goods of the Serapeum and of the other temples, in which they materialized the pharaoh’s presence and actions, affirming in everything the prestigious and remote continuity of the divine royalty. The removable architectonic elements, such as frames, little walls and monolithic columns, were probably integrated for the same uses in the new architecture, before being brutally used again in remakes in the roman epoch. The main source of brick monuments, Eliopoli had apparently lost its importance at the beginning of the lagide epoch.
Since 30 bc, when its ruin was evident, the roman emperor decided to move its obelisks to Rome, in homage to the Sun and as a proof of the domain acquired in the world.
Should we or shouldn’t we attribute to the Romans the other demolitions of the sanctuaries in Eliopoli?
With no doubt, the complicated history of this pharaonic Alewandria will impose to be methodically precise in order to determine the right place of the pharaohs, the hieroglyphics and the Egyptology in the archaeology in Alexandria.

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