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Chapter One
Eternal Life
Almost without exception every great library, from the days of classical Athens to
the Age of Reason, has been built on holy ground. The reason is plain. Of all the devices
of magic by which a king maintains his sway over his subjects, the magic of the written
word is the most potent.
--Raymond Irwin, The Origins of the English Library
While probing the murky bottom of Alexandria's Eastern Harbor for
fragments of Queen Cleopatra's sunken palace, French divers came across an ancient stele
that had been shielded from the sunlight for sixteen centuries. After making an underwater
cast of the stone inscriptions with a silicone-rubber mold, archaeologists translated the
hieroglyphics to mean "Eternal Life," a fitting tribute to a city that began as
an idea from a book and perpetuates its legacy today through the wonder of literature.
Plutarch tells us that Alexander the Great carried his copy of the Iliad with him
on his eleven-year campaign to conquer the world, and that he stored it in a richly
wrought jeweled casket taken from the personal collection of King Darius III, by common
consent the most exquisite trophy seized from the Persian royal treasury by the Greek
forces. The story, as handed down from generation to generation, is that the blind poet
Homer appeared to Alexander one night in a dream at a time when the Macedonian was
considering where among his recent triumphs to build a new Greek colony. Here, in John
Dryden's seventeenth-century translation of Plutarch's Lives, is the advice Alexander
received from his favorite author:
An island lies, where loud the billows roar,
Pharos they call it, on the Egyptian shore.
Jolted awake by the vision, Alexander proceeded directly to the small
island that Homer had described in the Odyssey as having a "snug harbor"
with a "good landing beach where crews pull in, draw water from the dark wells, then
push their vessels off for passage out," and determined straightaway that he had
found exactly what he was looking for, a strategic outpost on the Mediterranean Sea
through which Greek culture could pass to Africa and Asia. He then sketched out on the
bare ground what he conceived as the basic layout for his glittering namesake, indicating
precisely where temples, ornamental gardens, fountains, and public buildings should be
erected. The architect Dinocrates, who had accompanied Alexander's army on its campaign
eastward, set about creating a city of rectangular shape with broad streets intersecting
at right angles and an efficient hydraulic system that would bring fresh water in from
outlying areas to be stored in underground cisterns. In time the little island just
offshore would be connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway called the Heptastadion,
so called because it was seven stades, or furlongs, in length, creating the oval enclosure
known today as the Eastern Harbor.
To guide sailors along the tricky coastline, a three-tiered lighthouse was erected on the
outermost tip of the breakwater; called the Pharos in honor of the island, it cost eight
hundred gold talents to build, according to Pliny the Elder. The 385-foot-tall beacon --
about 80 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor -- assisted mariners
well into the fourteenth century, and was esteemed in its time as one of the Seven Wonders
of the World, the only ancient wonder that had a totally practical function. The
lighthouse inspired such awe that likenesses were reproduced on Roman coins, and a brisk
business was to be had in the sale of souvenir models to tourists, precursors to the
Eiffel Tower and Empire State Building replicas that are hawked about by street vendors in
Paris and New York today. Examples of the popular ancient clay trinkets still turn up from
time to time in various reaches of the region. The dimensions of the lighthouse are fairly
well known, thanks in part to an Arab traveler, Abu el-Haggag el Andaloussi, who carefully
measured them in 1166. At the summit stood the statue of a deity, thought by some to have
been Poseidon, believed by others to have been Zeus. On the façade was a formal
inscription that is reported by Lucian of Samosata to have read, "Sostratus of
Knidos, son of Dexiphanes, has dedicated this monument to the gods for the protection of
sailors."
All of this bustling activity got under way in the winter of 331 B.C., when Alexander was
twenty-four years old. The tempestuous monarch never saw the city he willed into being,
although his mortal remains were brought there from the ancient Egyptian capital of
Memphis fifty years after he died at the age of thirty-two. Embalmed by skilled Egyptian
and Chaldean morticians, his body was wrapped in sheets of gold leaf, immersed in honey,
and placed in the heart of the royal quarter in an elaborate mausoleum known as the
Brucheum, where it attracted throngs of tourists for seven hundred years.
Unlike Athens and Rome, where architectural ruins endure in glorious profusion, modern-day
Alexandria offers little visible evidence of its noble heritage, and the original city
exists only as a glittering memory. Whatever graceful edifice was not pillaged over the
centuries was toppled by earthquakes or leveled in modern times by indifferent developers.
A tidal wave that swamped the city in A.D. 365 also inflicted devastating damage, burying
much of the waterfront beneath twenty feet of water. Two spectacular red-granite obelisks
that had survived the tribulations intact were dismantled in the nineteenth century and
sent abroad as gifts to England and the United States. Although called Cleopatra's
Needles, the spires have no known connection with the famous queen; dating from 1500 B.C.,
they were erected at Heliopolis by King Thothmes III, and moved to Alexandria in 12 B.C.
by the Romans. Centuries later, one was shipped to London in recognition of Admiral
Horatio Nelson's victory over the French fleet...
Excerpted from PATIENCE & FORTITUDE © Copyright 2001 by Nicholas Basbanes. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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