The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, 300 BC to AD 700 - By Judith McKenzie

The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, 300 BC to AD 700 JUDITH McKENZIE 460 pp., 624 colour and b&w illustrations, maps Yale University Press , 47 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3D , 2007 , £55 (hbk), ISBN 0-300-11555-5 The Roman historian Diodorus Siculus describes Alexandria c.60 BC as ‘the first city in the civilised world ... far ahead of all the rest in elegance and extent and riches and luxury’ (17.52.5–6). In this ambitious and beautifully-presented book Judith McKenzie brings this city and its role as a centre of architectural innovation to life, as she presents a history of its monumental architecture from the city's foundation by Alexander in 331 BC until the years after the Islamic conquest of AD 642. McKenzie's aim was to provide a handbook on Alexandrian architecture that could act as a reference book for future research, and carefully to separate facts from supposition or speculation (p.1). Overall the book is a remarkable achievement. Effectively synthesising decades of research by McKenzie herself and others, it is a work of detailed, impressive scholarship. The book is vast, with over 400 pages of text and 600 illustrations, many of which are new synthetic maps of the city and axonometric reconstructions of architectural complexes drawn by the late Sheila Gibson. It also contains an extensive bibliography which will be drawn on by students for years to come as the essential starting-point for the archaeology of Alexandria. The volume is divided into four parts, with a presentation of the architecture of Alexandria and Egypt from the Ptolemaic to the Byzantine periods occupying the majority. These are preceded by a useful and interesting section in which McKenzie outlines the history of the loss of the ancient city beneath modern Alexandria, and highlights the extent of the remains which were still visible to early travellers. For example, the ruins under the eastern harbour were still visible in 1895, as reported by the British archaeologist D. G. Hogarth who visited the city to report on its potential for further work: ‘In the water itself are to be seen long white lines of masonry, sea-worn and flush with the sand ... When the sea is calm and clear, columns, capitals, mouldings and squared blocks may be seen lying pell-mell on the bottom for some distance out below the low water mark’ (p.16). Many of these remains near to the shore were covered by the construction of the corniche, the modern road around the edge of the harbour. McKenzie continues by examining the history of the archaeological rediscovery of the ancient topography of Alexandria, starting from the first detailed plan drawn by the Arab astronomer and surveyor Mahmoud-Bey in 1866. His plan is then updated in a series of excellent new plans of the city recast in the light of archaeological evidence. As the volume primarily deals with the architecture of Alexandria, its maritime infrastructure is naturally included in the discussions, where there is sufficient evidence. This has the overall advantage of treating city and harbour as complementary elements of the same urban biography, which is amply displayed in the new plans. In particular, these emphasise the sheer scale of the harbours, especially fig. 34, which places the plan of the ancient city, along with its harbours, over that of the modern city. This plan also has the great advantage of reuniting the eastern and western harbour basins, separated by the recently-relocated heptastadium, which are usually considered separately in publications due to the activities of different archaeological teams working inside and outside the eastern harbour. McKenzie's considered approach to the evidence can clearly be seen through her discussion of the fabled lighthouse of Alexandria (pp.41–5), whose construction, cost, architecture, destruction and location she derives from a close study of Greek, Latin and Arabic textual sources, as well as its representations in material culture, examples of which are nicely illustrated (figs 42–5), and a consideration of recent work under water around Pharos Island. McKenzie neatly draws the strands of evidence together into a clear synthesis where the lines of scholarship and patterns in the evolution of knowledge can easily be followed through the text, notes and bibliography. As McKenzie says ‘the rigorous methodology used here of presenting evidence as much as possible so that it can speak for itself means that it is possible to see precisely what evidence there is for each monument and its chronology. This is essential as publications on Alexandria are plagued by an array of later legend, assumptions, and speculation’ (p.2): in a reference book for the future, one can ask for no more. Indeed within this context it is entirely appropriate that McKenzie does not engage with Franck Goddio's recent alternative suggestion for the location of the lighthouse not on Pharos Island itself but on a nearby small islet in the mouth of the eastern harbour. This is observable in an artist's reconstruction of the harbour which was based on the topographical work being carried out there by the Institut Européen d'Archéologie Sous-Marine (IEASM) (cf. F. Goddio, 2008, Rediscovered Sites, in Goddio and Fabre (eds), Egypt's Sunken Treasures, 29). While the detailed evidence on which this interpretation is based will be presented in a forthcoming new monograph on the eastern harbour, only the illustration was published at the time McKenzie was writing this volume. It is, therefore, likely that this omission was due to the absence of clear supporting evidence for the interpretation presented in the artist's impression. Maritime archaeology has continued in the eastern harbour and elsewhere offshore since the production of this work. Consequently, several new studies have been published which would have added further important details. For example, in the opening section, ‘How Ancient Alexandria was Lost’, McKenzie acknowledges the submergence of aspects of the city's archaeology but does not deal with the taphonomic issue of how the remains became submerged. At the time McKenzie was writing, however, others were actively researching the geomorphology, sedimentology and seismology of the eastern harbour and the wider eastern Mediterranean. These results have now been published and demonstrate that the submergence of the area to a maximum depth of 8 m below the present sea-level was due to a combination of long-term subsidence of the land surface coupled with incidents of catastrophic failure of the underlying sediment, which resulted in its sudden liquefaction (Stanley, J-D. et al., 2007, Geoarchaeology. Oxford; Stanley, J-D. and Landau, E., 2010, Early Human Activity (pre-332 BC) in Alexandria, Egypt, and Nur, A., 2010, Destructive earthquakes in Alexandria and Aboukir Bay, both in D. Robinson and A. Wilson (eds), Alexandria and the North-Western Delta. Oxford). One such episode of liquefaction occurred in the south-western corner of the island of Antirhodos in the 4th century AD, burying two sphinxes and a statue of a priest in the rubble from the collapse of a building (F. Goddio, and J. Yoyotte, 2008, The Portus Magnus of Alexandria, in Goddio and Fabre (eds), Egypt's Sunken Treasures). While the specific cause of the final collapse is still debated, with different authors favouring earthquake, tsunami or heavy flooding, the submergence of the structures beneath the eastern harbour can be dated to the latter half of the 8th century AD. Indeed a recent publication by Fabre and Goddio also suggests that by this time the Greco-Roman port structures in the south-western sector of the eastern harbour would have been entirely silted up, raising interesting new questions about how the port would have functioned during the Late Antique period (The Development and Operation of the Portus Magnus in Alexandria: An Overview, in Robinson and Wilson, Alexandria and the North-Western Delta). The largest discussion of the development of the harbours is contained within the second major part of the volume, which deals with the Ptolemaic Period. It is to this time that the majority of the harbour works are dated, including the construction of the heptastadium and lighthouse, in the reigns of Ptolemy I Soter (306–282) and Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246), as well as the port facilities in the eastern harbour. Here the harbour developed organically, through the addition of man-made jetties and breakwaters to the natural promontories and islands to create the smaller ports within the larger Portus Magnus. Useful to McKenzie's argument here is a C14 date of 250 BC ± 40 years for the timber components of a concrete formwork (Goddio, 1998, Alexandria. London, 37). The dating of this formwork has recently been called into question by the ROMACONS team who have been working in collaboration with Goddio's project in the study of the concrete from the eastern harbour. The concrete of the formwork in question contains the fine volcanic ash pozzolana. But the earliest use of pozzolana is thought to date to c.200 BC from the north end of the Bay of Naples in the region of Baiae and Puteoli. This is some 50 years after the dating of the formwork would suggest that pozzolana was first used in Alexandria. Clearly this highlights the importance of the dating of the Alexandrian formwork, which is currently being reinvestigated by IEASM through a new series of radiocarbon dates. While it would be intriguing if Alexandria proved to be the genesis loci for hydraulic concrete, which would incidentally fit within McKenzie's overall promotion of Alexandria as a centre of architectural and decorative innovation, it is perhaps more likely that the formwork in question and its concrete are later in date. Indeed the similarity of the Alexandrian mortar to that used in the harbour of Sebastos at Caesarea leads Oleson et al. to suggest a more-or-less contemporaneous date for them from c.20 BC (forthcoming, Technology, Innovation and Trade, in Robinson and Wilson (eds), Maritime Archaeology and Ancient Trade in the Mediterranean, Oxford). The use of pozzolanic concrete in the eastern harbour raises the issue of the further development of the Portus Magnus in the Roman period, a time when Strabo could, with perhaps justifiable hyperbole, describe Alexandria, its harbours and associated commercial infrastructure as ‘the largest emporium of the inhabited world’ (Geog. XVII.1.13). The discussion of any development of the harbours during the Roman period, however, is absent from McKenzie's narrative simply because at the time there were no published descriptions for her to work with. More recent publications, however, would suggest that areas of the harbour were both remodelled and redeveloped in the Roman period, particularly in the western area, which had to contend with and react to progressive silting-up as a result of the construction of the heptastadium (Fabre and Goddio, 2010, 65; also cf. Goiran et al., 2000, Évolution des rivages d'Alexandrie à l'Holocène récent, Revue géographique des pays méditerranéens 1–2, 83–90). There are also indications to suggest that the Ptolemaic royal palace on the island of Antirhodos was either rebuilt or substantially altered during the 3rd century AD (Goddio and Yoyotte, 2008, 273). A new monograph on the work of IEASM in the eastern harbour is currently in production and will add significant detail to the interim statements referred to above. It is likely that this will revolutionise our understanding of the eastern harbour in the Roman period. For Strabo (Geog. XVII, 6–11), writing in the early-1st century AD, the glory of Alexandria lay in both harbour and city: the same is true for The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt. While more-recent publications may offer further riches that both complement and advance the narrative of harbour development and destruction presented by McKenzie, they should not be used to deny the overall importance of her volume. The contextualisation of city and harbour into a single narrative is the strength of this work and precisely the reason why it should be the essential starting-point for scholarly engagement with the archaeology of Alexandria across the longue durée of a millennium of architectural, as well as social and political, change

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · CONQUEST · History of architecture · Islamic Architecture · Scholarship · Classics · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Law, logistics, and international trade · Maritime and Coastal Archaeology · Architecture