Passing out, toward the south, from modern Alexandria, one of the first
objects that greets the eye of the traveler, is Pompey’s pillar, which
rears its stupendous mass of polished granite in solitary grandeur, a
monument of buried empires and of nations that have passed away. Though
it now stands alone, it is supposed to have been but one of the four
hundred stately columns of the Serapeum as it once stood in all its
grandeur. “This pillar,” says Thompson, “is the one solitary monument of
the old city upon its southern front, and answers to the one standing
obelisk that is its solitary monument on the north. Of its origin,
history is as silent as the mummy of Belzoni’s tomb; but there is no
doubt that ‘_Pompey’s_ pillar is really a misnomer;’ for the inscription
‘shows it to have been erected by Publius, the prefect of Egypt, in
honor of Diocletian,’ who subdued a revolt at Alexandria by capturing
the city, A. D. 296. But whether it was then first hewn from the quarry,
or was transported from some decaying temple up the Nile, the Greek
lettering does not inform us. If the latter, (which, considering the
decline of art and the pilfering propensities of the Romans, is
probable,) then this now lonely sentinel, an Egyptian column with a
Greek inscription to a Roman emperor, has witnessed in turn the decay of
Egypt, of Greece, and of Rome, upon the soil where it still disputes
with Time the empire of the past. To the reader of Gibbon, it may seem
strange that a monument should have been reared at Alexandria in honor
of a conqueror, who, during a siege of eight months, wasted the city by
the sword and by fire, and who, when it finally capitulated and implored
his clemency, caused it to feel ‘the full extent of his severity,’ and
destroyed ‘thousands of its citizens in a promiscuous slaughter.’ The
fact may serve to show the worthlessness of such monuments as
testimonials to character, or as expressions of public esteem. But
whatever may be its history or its associations, one can not look upon
this column without a feeling of astonishment and awe. Outside of the
modern city walls and some six hundred yards to the south of them, away
from the present homes of men, but on an eminence that overlooks the
entire city, and in striking contrast with the meager, attenuated style
of its present architecture, stands this stupendous column of red
granite, ninety-nine feet in hight by thirty in circumference, its shaft
an elegant monolith measuring seventy-three feet between the pedestal
and the capital. It marks the site of an ancient stadium, and as some
conjecture, of the gymnasium, which was surrounded with majestic
porticos of granite.”
[Illustration: CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLE.]
From Pompey’s pillar, to Cleopatra’s needles, is a distance of about a
mile through the city in a north-easterly direction. “These obelisks,”
says Thompson, “have no more relation to Cleopatra, than the pillar has
to Pompey. Their hieroglyphics, according to Wilkinson and Lepsius, date
back as far as the exodus from Egypt; and they were brought to
Alexandria from the city of Heliopolis, or _On_, about a hundred miles
to the south. Each ‘_needle_’ is a solid block of red granite, about
seventy feet high, and nearly eight feet in diameter at the base. How
such huge blocks were cut from the quarry, transported hundreds of
miles, and erected upon their pedestals, is a mystery not solved by
anything yet discovered of ancient mechanic arts. Only one of the
obelisks is standing. The other was taken down to be transported to
England, but now lies half buried in the mud and sand. On one side of
the standing obelisk the hieroglyphics are distinctly legible, but on
the northern or seaward side they are much defaced by the action of the
weather. It stands upon the edge of the great harbor, in a line with the
rock of Pharos that forms the extreme northern point of the horseshoe
port.
“Besides the pillar and the needles nothing remains to testify the
former splendor of Alexandria; a capital that once vied with Rome,
containing a population equal to that of New York, (three hundred
thousand freemen and as many slaves,) and that so late as the seventh
century, according to the testimony of Amrou, its Saracenic conqueror,
contained ‘four thousand palaces, four thousand baths, four hundred
theaters, twelve thousand shops for the sale of vegetables, and forty
thousand tributary Jews.’ A few ruins are pointed out, but these are
fast disappearing with the ravages of time. Its name is the only
memorial of its founder; and the long range of catacombs along the shore
to the west of the city, the sole vestige of its ancient population. So
rapid was the growth of the city, that at the commencement of the
Christian era, it was ‘second only to Rome itself,’ and ‘comprehended a
circumference of fifteen miles’ within its walls. It was a great seat of
commerce. ‘Idleness was unknown. Either sex, and every age, was engaged
in the pursuits of industry;’ the blowing of glass, the weaving of
linen, manufacturing the papyrus, or conducting the lucrative trade of
the port. Alexander, fresh from the conquest of Tyre, boasted that he
would here build an emporium of commerce surpassing that which he had
ruined, and thus would recreate in his own image the world he had
destroyed. The site of Alexandria, more felicitous than that of Tyre,
promised to realize his ambitious dream. Its gates ‘looked out on the
gilded barges of the Nile, on fleets at sea under full sail, on a harbor
that sheltered navies, and a light-house that was the mariner’s star,
and the wonder of the world.’ But neither the felicity of its location,
nor the enterprise of its Ptolemaic rulers, nor the wealth of its
commerce, nor the learning that gathered to its schools the students of
art, of philosophy, of medicine, of science, and of religion, could
withstand the march of empire from Asia to Europe, nor the laws of trade
that followed in its track.”
The present population of Alexandria is less than a hundred thousand; a
mixture of all the oriental races, with many Europeans and Jews. In
passing through its narrow and dirty streets, now occupied with a motley
and poverty-stricken populace; in traversing the villages of hovels
within its walls, where the Arab lies down with his sheep, his goat, his
dog, and his donkey, all in the mud inclosure of a few feet square,
which must be entered by stooping; and in climbing the huge mounds that
are said to cover the ancient capital, it is difficult to realize that
here once dwelt the hundred thousand Jews, for whom the seventy made
their celebrated Greek version of the Old Testament; that here the
eloquent Apollos was born, and the learned Athanasius conducted his
theological controversies; that here Theodosius, by imperial edict,
destroyed the temple of Serapis, and publicly established Christianity
in place of the outcast divinities of the Egyptian Greeks; that here was
a school to which the sages of Greece resorted for instruction in
philosophy, science and letters, and where Jewish rabbins and Christian
apologists vied with Greek dialecticians in the various pursuits of
learning; and that here was a library of seven hundred thousand
manuscript volumes, a British museum or a Smithsonian institute,
boasting the originals or the duplicates of many of the most valuable
works of the then current literature, and which, after the accidental
destruction of a part of it in the insurrection against Julius Cæsar,
and the willful destruction of another portion in the sanguinary
religious wars under Theodosius, yet contained enough of written papyrus
to heat for six months the four thousand baths of the city, under the
summary decree of Omar: “If these writings of the Greeks agree with the
book of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved; if they
disagree, they are pernicious, and ought to be destroyed.” It is
difficult amid such surroundings, to realize that here Cæsar and Antony
dallied with the charms of Cleopatra. It is difficult to realize that
where now bigotry, fanaticism and superstition hold sway over an
ignorant and degraded people, were schools of theology, and learned
fathers, and astute controversialists of the early Christian church;
that here Christianity triumphed over paganism in popular tumults backed
by imperial decrees; that here Mark preached the gospel of the kingdom
where the Ethiopian eunuch had preceded him with the tidings of the
great salvation. And yet that old Alexandria, which began to be in the
fourth century before Christ, and of all whose palaces and temples and
monuments only two columns are now standing, was the youngest of
Egyptian cities, and was built by the conqueror of Egypt when Thebes,
and Memphis, and the university city of Heliopolis, were already in
their decline. Such is the antiquity that meets us at the threshold of
the land of the Nile.