Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great in the autumn of the year 332 B.C. It was situated originally on the low tract of land which separates the lake Mareotis from the Mediterranean, about 14 miles west of the Canopic mouth of the Nile. Before the city, in the Mediterranean, lay an island, upon the N.E. point of which stood the famous lighthouse, the Pharos, built in the time of Ptolemy I. in the 3d century B.C., and said to have been 400 feet high. The island was connected with the mainland by a mole, called the Heptastadium, thus forming the two harbours. The plan of Alexandria was designed by the archi- tect Deinocrates, and its original extent is said to have been about 4 miles in length, with a circumference of 15 miles. It was intersected by two straight main streets, crossing each other at right angles in a large square, and adorned with handsome houses, temples, and public buildings. The most magnificent quarter of the city was that called the Brucheion, which ran from the centre to the eastern harbour. This quarter of the city contained the palaces of the Ptolemies, the Museum, for centuries the focus of the intellectual life of the world, and the famous library; the mausoleum of Alexander the Great and of the Ptolemies, the temple of Poseidon, and the great theatre. To the south was the beautiful gymnasium. The Serapeum, or temple of Serapis, stood in the western division of the city, which formed the Egyptian quarter, and was called Rhacotis; a small town of that name had occupied the site before the foundation of Alexandria. To the west of the city lay the great Necropolis, and to the east the race-course and suburb of Nicopolis. Much of the space under the houses was occupied by vaulted subterranean cisterns, which were capable of containing a sufficient quantity of water to supply the whole population of the city for a year. From the time of its foundation, Alexandria was the Greek capital of Egypt. Its population, in the time of its prosperity, is said by Diodorus to have amounted to about 300,000 free citizens, and probably a larger number of slaves. This population consisted mostly of Greeks, Jews, and Egyptians, together with settlers from all nations of the known world. After the death of Alexander the Great, Alexandria became the residence of the Ptolemies. They made it, next to Rome and Antioch, the most magnificent city of antiquity, as well as the chief seat of Greek learning and literature, which spread hence over the greater part of the ancient world. The situation of the city, at the point of junction between the East and West, rendered it the centre of the commerce of the world, and raised it to the highest degree of prosperity.
Alexandria had reached its greatest splendour when, on the death of Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, in 30 B.C. it came into the possession of the Romans. Its glory was long unaffected, and it was the emporium of the world's commerce, especially for corn. In the reign of Caracalla, however, it suffered severely; and the rise of Constantinople promoted the decay of Alexandria. Christianity was introduced, according to tradition, by St Mark. In the 2d century its adherents were very numerous; amongst its teachers were Clemens Alexandrinus and Origen. The strife between Christianity and heathenism—powerfully described in Kingsley's Hypatia—gave rise to bloody contests in Alexandria. The Serapeum, the last seat of heathen theology and learning, was stormed by the Christians in 389 A.D., and converted into a Christian church. Alexandria was a chief seat of Christian theology till it was taken by the Arabs, under Amru, in 641, at which time it was much injured. The choice of Cairo as capital of the Egyptian califs hastened the now rapid decay of the city; the discovery of America, and of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, very much diminished its trade; and when, in 1517, the Turks took the place, the remains of its former splendour wholly vanished, walls and buildings being reduced to ruins. In 1778 Alexandria contained no more than 6000 inhabitants. Under Mehmet Ali, however, the tide turned, and the city recovered rapidly. It is now again one of the most important commercial places on the Mediterranean. The Suez Canal diverted part of its trade as the centre of steau communication with India; but this was more than compensated by the general impetus given by the canal to Egyptian prosperity. In 1882, during the rising of Arabi Pasha, serious damage was done to the city. The Europeans were maltreated; and as Arabi would not desist from strengthening the fortifications, an English fleet, in the interests of the khedive, bombarded the forts of Alexandria for over ten hours, July 11. On the two following days the town was sacked and plundered by the soldiery and populace, and great part of it destroyed by fire. A British force occupied it on the 14th.
The present city (called Skandcri'ch by the Arabs) is not situated exactly on the site of the old one, but is chiefly built on the mole, which has been increased by alluvial deposits till it has become a broad neck of land between the two harbours. The city is a strange mixture of East and West, old and new, not gracefully harmonised. The native town, unpaved and in wet weather hardly passable, contains poor houses and wretched huts. The ever-increasing Frankish quarters have quite a European appearance, and swarm with cafés, shops, theatres, and the like, lighted with gas. The castle stands near the old Pharos, and the handsome new lighthouse has a revolving light, visible at a distance of 20 miles. Recent improvements, undertaken at a cost of £2,000,000, are expected to make the old harbour—the western one—one of the best and most spacious on the Mediterranean. There is railway communication with Cairo and Suez; the Mahmoudieh Canal, made by Mehmet Ali, connects Alexandria with the Nile. The recent growth of the city has been extraordinary. Pop. (1825) 16,000; (1840) 60,000; (1882) 227,064; (1897) 319,766 (100,000 foreigners). The value of exports (mainly cotton, cotton seed, lentils, oilseed, hemp, drugs) varied in 1875-91 from £10,000,000 to £14,000,000 (two-thirds going to Britain); of imports, from £5,000,000 to £8,000,000 (half from Britain). Of the few remaining objects of antiquity the most prominent is Pompey's Pillar (q.v.), as it is erroneously called. Of the so-called Cleopatra's Needles—two obelisks of the 16th century B.C. which long stood here—one was brought to England and erected on the Thames Embankment, 1878; and the other, presented by the khedive to the United States, was set up at New York in 1881. The climate of Alexandria does not correspond with what is true of Egypt generally. In winter it rains almost daily; in summer the heat is moderated by sea breezes.
ALEXANDRIAN CODEX, an important manuscript of the sacred Scriptures in Greek, now in the British Museum. It is written on parchment, in finely formed uncial letters, and is without accents, marks of aspiration, or spaces between the words. Its probable date is the middle of the 5th century. With the exception of a few gaps, it contains the whole Bible in Greek (the Old Testament being in the translation of the Septuagint), along with the epistles of Clemens Romanus, of whose genuine epistle to the Corinthians it is the only manuscript extant. For purposes of biblical criticism, the text of the Epistles of the New Testament is the most valuable part. This celebrated manuscript belonged, as early as 1098, to the library of the patriarch of Alexandria. In 1628 it was sent as a present to Charles I. of England by Cyrillus Lucaris, patriarch of Constantinople, who declared that he had got it from Alexandria, where he had held the same office; and that it was written there appears from internal and external evidence. Fac-similes have been published, of the New Testament, by Woide (Lond. 1786), and by Cowper (Lond. 1860); of the Old Testament, by Baber (Lond. 1816-28).
ALEXANDRIAN LIBRARY.—This remarkable collection of books, the largest of the ancient world, was founded by the first Ptolemy, and fostered by his son. It quickly grew, and already in the time of the first Ptolemy, Demetrius Phalerus had 50,000 volumes or rolls under his care. During its most flourishing period, under the direction of Zenodotus, Aristarchus of Byzantium, Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, and others, it is said to have contained 490,000, or, according to another authority, including all duplicates, as many as 700,000 volumes. The greater part of this Library, which embraced the collected literature of Rome, Greece, India, and Egypt, was contained in the famous Museum, in the quarter of Alexandria called the Brucheion. During the siege of Alexandria by Julius Cæsar, this part of the Library was destroyed by fire; but it was afterwards replaced by the collection of Pergamos, which was presented to Cleopatra by Mark Antony. The other part of the Library was kept in the Serapeum, the temple of Jupiter Serapis, where it remained till the time of Theodosius the Great. When this emperor permitted all the heathen temples in the Roman empire to be destroyed, the magnificent temple of Jupiter Serapis was not spared. A mob of fanatic Christians, led on by the Archbishop Theophilus, stormed and destroyed the temple, together, it is most likely, with the greater part of its literary treasures, in 391 A.D. It was at this time that the destruction of the Library was begun, and not at the taking of Alexandria by the Arabs, under the Caliph Omar, in 641, when its destruction was merely completed. A ridiculously exaggerated, although ancient story, tells that the Arabs found a sufficient number of books remaining to heat the baths of the city for six months. The historian Orosius, who visited the place after the destruction of the temple by the Christians, relates that he then saw only the empty shelves of the Library. See Ritschl, Die Alexandrinischen Bibliotheken, in Opuscula (1866), and Weniger, Das Alexandrinische Museum (1875).
ALEXANDRIAN SCHOOL.—After liberty and intellectual cultivation had declined in Greece, Alexandria in Egypt became the home and centre of science and literature. The time in which it held this position may be divided into two periods; the first including the reigns of the Ptolemies, from 323 to 30 B.C.; the second, from 30 B.C. to 640 A.D. or from the fall of the Ptolemæan dynasty to the irruption of the Arabs. During the first period the intellectual activity at Alexandria was mainly of a purely literary or scientific kind; but during the second, partly from Jewish and Christian influences, it developed into the speculative philosophy of the Neo-Platonists and the religious philosophy of the Gnostics.
Ptolemy Soter, the first ruler who introduced and patronised Greek science and literature in Alexandria, was followed by that yet more munificent patron, Ptolemæus Philadelphus, who regularly established the celebrated Alexandrian Library and Museum, which had been begun by his father. This Museum was somewhat like a modern university, and within its walls learned scholars both lived and taught. The loss of Greek freedom soon took from Greek thought much of its boldness and originality, but thinkers found substitutes for these in learned research and criticism. They studied grammar, prosody, mythology, astronomy, and medicine, and unfolded their information in long didactic poems in epic form, full of learning, and marked by perfect mastery of verse, but often dull to a degree, and marred by numerous obscure and recondite allusions. Examples of these are the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, and the
Alexandra or Cassandra of Lycophron. Other writers of epics were Euphorion, Nicander of Colophon, Dionysius, Dicearchus, Rhianus, and Oppianus. Many poets employed lyric and elegiac forms for subjects completely unsuited for poetic treatment, which are yet happily expressed in verse. The earliest of the elegiac poets was Philetas of Cos; the greatest, perhaps, Callimachus. Among the lyric poets were Phanocles, Hermesianax, Alexander of Ætolia, and Lycophron. Epigrams and dramas were also written; but of the latter scarce anything has survived beyond the names of the seven tragedians called the Alexandrian Pleiades. Out of the Amœbean verse or bucolic mime—a rudimentary kind of drama—grew the best product of Alexandrian poetry, the Idylls of Theocritus. Still more active than the poets were the grammarians, to whom it is mainly due that we now possess the masterpieces of Greek literature at all. They were both philologists and littérateurs, who explained things as well as words, and were thus a kind of encyclopædists. Among these the greatest were Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus of Samothrace; only less eminent critics were Alexander of Ætolia, Lycophron, Callimachus, and Eratosthenes. Their chief service consists in having collected the writings then existing, prepared corrected texts, and preserved them for future generations.
The Alexandrian school has a spirit and character altogether different from the previous intellectual life of Greece. From the attention paid to the study of language, it was natural that correctness, purity, and elegance of expression should be especially cultivated; and in these respects many of its writers are distinguished. But what no study and no effort could give—the spirit that animated the earlier Greek poetry—was in most of these works wanting. In place of it, there was displayed greater art in composition; what had formerly been done by genius, was now to be done by the rules furnished by criticism. Where imitation and rule thus took the place of inspiration, each generation of disciples became more artificial and lifeless than their masters, until ultimately criticism degenerated into frivolous fault-finding, and both prose and poetry became laboured affectation. Still, for about four centuries, the Alexandrian school was the centre of learning and science in the ancient world. Counting from its origin to its complete extinction, it lasted a thousand years. The influence of the Alexandrian school upon Latin literature in the Augustan age must not be forgotten. We find it in all the contemporary poets, notably in Virgil, the greatest poet of the group.
The ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHY is characterised by a blending of the philosophies of the East and of the West, and by a general tendency to eclecticism, as it is called, or an endeavour to reconcile conflicting systems of speculation, by bringing together what seemed true in each. The most famous representatives of this school were the Neo-Platonists (q.v.). Uniting the religious notions of the East with Greek dialectics, they represent the struggle of ancient civilisation with Christianity; and thus their system was not without influence on the form that Christian dogmas took in Egypt. The amalgamation of Eastern ideas with Christian gave rise to the system of the Gnostics (q.v.), which was elaborated chiefly in Alexandria. See Bigg's Christian Platonists of Alexandria (Bampton Lectures, 1886); and the articles PHILO JUDÆUS, CLEMENS ALEXANDRINUS, ORIGEN.—The Alexandrian school was no less distinguished for the culture of the mathematical and physical sciences, which here reached a greater height than anywhere else in ancient times. Its mathematical school was founded in the reign of the first Ptolemy by the famous Euclid. Among its chief ornaments were Eratosthenes, who wrote well on almost all branches of human knowledge. His works on chronology are still valuable, and he was the first to attempt the measurement of the earth. Another was Apollonius of Perga, 'the great geometer,' author of a work on conic sections. The astronomers were distinguished from all their predecessors by their setting aside all metaphysical speculation, and devoting themselves to strict observation. Perhaps the greatest was Hipparchus, the true father of astronomy, to whom Clandius Ptolemy owed the substance of his famous work, the Almagest.