Academic literature on the topic 'Lighthouse of Alexandria'

In 333 BC Alexander III, king of Macedon, whose claims to Greekness were treated with some scepticism down in Athens, wreaked vengeance on the Persian kings who had posed such a threat to Greece in past centuries, by defeating a massive Persian army at the battle of the Issos, beyond the Cilician Gates. Yet he did not pursue the Persian king, Darius III, into the Persian heartlands. He well understood the need to neutralize Persian power along the shores of the Mediterranean, and marched south through Syria and Palestine, where he ruthlessly took charge of the Phoenician cities that had in the past provided Persia with its fleets; Tyre resisted him for seven months, much to his fury, even after he built the great mole that for ever after joined the island city to the mainland. Once he had captured Tyre, most of its inhabitants were slaughtered, enslaved or crucified. He bypassed Jerusalem, choosing the road through Gaza, since his real target at this stage was Egypt, ruled by a Persian satrap for nearly 200 years, since the days of Cambyses, and his conquest of this land transformed not just Egypt but the entire eastern Mediterranean. The result of his victory was that Egypt was turned around, looking outwards to the Mediterranean rather than inwards to the Nile valley. In 331 BC he decided to found a city on the northernmost edge of Egypt, on a limestone spur separated from the alluvial lands of the interior by a freshwater lake – a city next to rather than actually in Egypt, as its designation in later Latin documents as Alexandria ad Aegyptum, ‘Alexandria on the way to [or ‘next to’] Egypt’, affirms. This sense that Alexandria was more a city of the Mediterranean than of Egypt would persist for over two millennia, until the expulsion of its foreign communities in the twentieth century. For much of that period it was the greatest city in the Mediterranean. Alexander’s motives certainly included his own glorification.