When approaching Alexandria, we often focus on the role of the Pharos in guiding ships from far
out to sea to the city and its great port. This was the essence of the Epigrams of Poseidippus on
the left side of the screen. But the Pharos was more than just a large signpost for the
city and harbour and a warning of the reefs at its entrance. Its scale and magnificence
was a visible symbol of Ptolemaic wealth and power. It was an icon for their regime,
striking and unambiguous. In his description of the harbour on the right of the screen,
it's notable that the framing device that Strabo uses is the Pharos and the journey into the Portus
Magnus from the sea and the views of the city that this afforded. The narrative is punctuated by
the main buildings and spaces: the royal palace on the Lochias promontory, Antirhodos island and
its royal palace, the temple of Poseidon and so on. This view of the city from inside the harbour,
Alexandria's urban maritime facade, is also replete with meaning about how the ruling elite
wish to portray themselves to those approaching Alexandria by sea. Consequently, in this paper,
I want to show Alexandria's monumental biography and illustrate how the changes within
it reflect the aspirations of its rulers and how it shifts in the transition from Ptolemaic to Roman
power. I'll mainly concentrate on the most obvious of these visual axes for an incoming maritime
visitor to the city. And this is the view straight ahead once their ship had broached the entrance
and sailed past the view of the Pharos. And it moves into the calm waters of the outer harbour.
This view was one of three temples. There's one visible on the waterline, another on the shore,
and a final one on the hill above. They're the Iseum, the Caesarium, and the Serapeum.
It's more than just the view of the city that I want to analyze, but to consider the repetitive
unfolding journey of ships past the Pharos and into the outer harbour. Such movement was part
of the rhythms of daily life in the Portus Magnus. And this had a profound influence upon the social
production of space and in particular how power is articulated through architecture.
Now, furthermore, thanks to the results of our excavations, we've also been able to examine
how these expressions change with time. So, in order to think about this quotidian journey
across the port and the views that it affords, a good place to start is with the importance of the
outer harbour as the great connecting space of the Portus Magnus. Now, here on the screen is
a map of the harbour and the beginnings of a syntax model of it. It shows how the harbour
is broken down into its elemental structures and how these are combined into its complex overall
form. It shows effectively the morphology of this space. So we can see from this
illustration that the outer harbour acts as a connecting space to the other main areas
of the Portus Magnus. There's the docks on Pharos island. There's further docks on the
Navalia and those of Antirhodos island and the Poseidium. And then interestingly the
military and royal port of the galleys are in terms of both the morphology of the port and
the complexity of the journey to get there. These are much more secluded or defended.
So here in this illustration we can see a simplified hierarchy of spaces and how this
would work for a journey into one of the ports of Antirhodos. It clearly shows the areas of the Portus
Magnus that a vessel would have needed to pass through in order to get from the open water of
the sea to a quayside. Now while our analysis of the Portus Magnus in this way is ongoing,
it's clear to see that when we break it down to these anatomical elements,
both its complexity and also the logic behind the port is revealed. While the space syntax
analysis emphasizes that every journey into and indeed across the Portus Magnus involves the
outer harbour. So spatially it's the heart of the port and in terms of sailing ships and wind it's
also the area where ships would be blown into and they would then wait there for a tugboat to help
guide them onto more complex movements around the harbour and then finally to the quayside.
Now the upshot of all of this is that the view of the city that's laid out from the outer harbour
which encompasses these three temples is really unlikely to have been randomly or unconsciously
created. The meanings that these buildings project therefore reveals an underlying structure a kind
of narrative of power for the city. Now thanks to the excavations of the Institut Européen
d'Archaéologie Sous-Marine (IEASM) we can start to unpick how these messages were transmitted through
the maritime facade and we can look at them in three distinct phases. There's the early Ptolemaic
around the 3rd century BC which was associated with the creation of this view. Then we have
late Ptolemaic changes of Cleopatra VII and there then finally there's the reconfiguration in the Roman
period and it's these three views that we'll now examine in the context of approaching Alexandria.
The origins then of the maritime facade can be traced to the earliest years of Ptolemaic rule
with the construction of the lighthouse and the Heptastadium being mentioned in the Epigrams by
Poseidippus who's active in the reign of Ptolemy II. Together they helped to define the maritime space
of the Portus Magnus and specifically how a ship approached Alexandria. At this time, the outer
port becomes the great connecting space with a view of the city and its buildings in front of it.
Last year, the excavations in the Iseum reached the very lowest levels of the strategraphy,
revealing that parts of it can be attributed to an initial phase of activity with
the earliest ceramics coming from the very end of the 4th century and more generally from the third.
The evidence seems to point to this being a temple to the god Osiris. Furthermore,
excavations on the remains of the royal palace is also on Antirhodos island have
suggested that it too may have had its origins around this time. Now together they established
the view of the island of Antirhodos as being an important focal point from the outer harbour.
Furthermore, up on the hill above the city, the foundation plaques of the Serapeum,
one of which is depicted here, which are in the corners of the temenos of the temple are dated to
the reign of Ptolemy III. Now, interestingly, Pseudo-Callisthenes when writing about the
foundation of the city, he says of Alexander, "he's high in the hills above it" and he sees an
old altar from a sanctuary to Zeus and Hera with obelisks. And the quote is that "they now lie
in the Serapeum". Now while we should obviously treat this source with a degree of caution,
I think the linking of the hill above the city with the memory of Alexander may be of
significance when we're thinking about the meaning of it when approaching Alexandria.
The view that the outer harbour creates in the early years of Ptolemaic rule simply establishes
the fact that both the city and its harbour was an ideological showpiece. It represented the
wealth of the dynasty and their capacity to build on an enormous scale. The palaces and the temples
emphasized the ability to draw together Greek and Egyptian elements of the new hybrid society
and the link back to Alexander through the Serapeum emphasizes the origins of their dynasty in the
god king. Together this view is a manifesto. It helps to legitimize the dynasty's right to rule.
Substantial changes were made to the view from the harbour in the late Ptolemaic period. On Antirhodos
Island, the sanctuary to Osiris was substantially redeveloped with the creation of a new monumental
entrance facing the outer harbour accompanied by an extensive phase of redecoration. And this
monumental entrance is depicted here. It's a new portico with eight pink granite columns set in two
rows of four. Two lead tokens stamped with a view of the temple facade that we found in the
destruction deposits from the Iseum might suggest that it had a curved segmental pediment
and a semi-circular tempenum decorated with a sundisk and a uraeus. The dating evidence for all
of this would suggest that its redevelopment is from the reign of Cleopatra VII, so
after about 41 BCE. The material culture from the temple unambiguously supports its interpretation
as an Iseum. And this is seen most clearly in the statue of the priest with the Osiris Canopus jar,
which again is on the screen with other pieces indicating a strong connection with Dionysius,
including banqueting. And perhaps this all suggests a role in celebrations of the Nile flood.
The redevelopment of the Iseum, however, it was part of a wider building program in this
area of the Portus Magnus and altogether it augmented the view from the harbour. Around the
same time probably starting in the reign of Ptolemy XII was a major phase of land reclamation
which you can see here on the screen. This sees dumping layers of rubbish into a former
harbour area. These were strengthened with wooden piles and topped with a fine limestone pavement.
This was revealed in a series of excavations into these closely stratified dumping layers from the
1st century BCE in front of today's Cecil Hotel. Altogether, this phase of groundworks
suggests that changes to the structure of the royal port and the port of the Emporium with the
subdivision of these areas into a further port. On the new shoreline, this was accompanied by the
creation of a fine wide esplenade on which a large red granite altar was also found close to what has
been interpreted as a monumental landing stage. So the groundworks were more than simply the
creation of a new shoreline and these were instead associated with the creation of the Caesarium.
While neither the Caesarium nor its landing stage and esplanade were completed during the reign of
Cleopatra with the latest dating evidence from the dumping deposits coming from the Augustan period
which goes along with the erection of the temple's famous obelisks. It was clearly a
large and ongoing project in which only the Iseum may have been completed. Nevertheless though,
we can consider the underlying message that Cleopatra wanted to portray to those approaching
and then stepping foot perhaps on the monumental landing stage in Alexandria. For Cleopatra,
the goddess Isis was an important part of her identity. She proclaimed herself Nea Isis and
assumed the appearance of the goddess in public from the time of the Donations of Alexandria in
33/34 BCE. According to Plutarch, following the donations, Cleopatra continued to conduct
public audiences under the name of Nea Isis. Thus the embellishment of a temple to the
goddess adjacent to the royal palace on Antirhodos island was a firm reinforcement of the association
of the Ptolemies invested most clearly in Cleopatra but also in other members of the family past and
present with Isis/Osiris and Ptolemaic royal power and sovereignty over this newly enlarged Egyptian
empire. Now this dynastic link is also seen in the temple on the shore, the Caesarium, and while
there's debate about whether Cleopatra intended the temple to be for the cult of Julius Caesar and
or Mark Anthony or to emphasize the lineage of her son, Caesarion. All the possibilities seem to point
towards her vision of a new Egypto-Roman dynasty and it's set out in this building. So for visitors
arriving by sea and perhaps most importantly for VIP guests stepping ashore on the monumental
landing stage in front of the temple, the wider ambitions of Cleopatra and the recentering herself
and her family in Egypt within the wider Roman world would seem to have been very clear.
Following the Roman annexation of Egypt, the royal port of Antirhodos underwent a profound change from
being the harbour of the palace and the Iseum to simply another part of the commercial landscape
of the Portus Magnus. And this is seen really most clearly in the deposits of the harbour bottom,
notably in the presence of three shipwrecks that date from the Roman period. Two commercial
trading ships and a ship's boat is what we've discovered so far. Illustrated here is J3,
a 4 and a half meter long boat which from the analysis of the wood species and the combination
of how they were used in its construction appears to have been made in a shipyard on the Tyrrhenian
coast of Italy. It would have arrived in the Portus Magnus towed behind one of the trading ships that
plied this long distance route between Italy and Alexandria. So it's notable that so far we've
found no Ptolemaic era shipwrecks within this area of the port. And similarly the ceramic evidence from
the harbour bottom would also tend to corroborate this impression as while there's large-scale
evidence of Roman pottery notably intact amphorae but also other trade ceramics there's a marked absence
of anything earlier. This indicates that the royal port was transformed through the first and second
centuries CE to become an integral part of the commercial infrastructure of the Portus Magnus.
So how then did this commercial expansion affect the view of the maritime facade of the city from
the port? We can start with the Iseum and the Caesarium, two buildings that would have
had problematic associations for Cleopatra's vision of an Egypto Roman Empire.
The meaning was however reorchestrated in the Roman period to deal with this difficult legacy
of the civil wars and Augustus' coming to power. And we can look at the gifts given to the temple
and stored in its treasury. And from this we can see that the Iseum continues to function into
the early imperial period when it's destroyed. Here for example we can see a wooden box
with a silver opening mechanism filled with Roman coins. Patterns of donation in the Iseum do not
appear to have changed and from the scale of the Roman ceramics notably the lamps and the eating
and drinking wares neither did the intensity of use in the temple. What changed however
was the worship of Isis from its former close association with Cleopatra and other Ptolemaic queens
to a protectorous of seafarers and seafaring. Now this wasn't entirely new. Five of 53 verses of
a Ptolemaic aretalogy concern this facet of the goddess in which Isis says about
herself that she was the one who discovered maritime activities. Nevertheless, it was the
unproblematic aspects of this goddess, Isis Palagia and Isis Pharia that were increasingly emphasized,
highlighting Isis's new role or redeveloped role in the protection of seafarers. Similarly,
the emphasis of the Caesarium also shifts and takes on a different character with Philo of
Alexandria in the first century CE calling it a temple to Caesar on shipboard.
In terms of the maritime facade of Alexandria, we've moved on from emphasizing the role of the
Ptolemaic royal family and their dynastic links to Rome to one in which the Egyptian gods and
the emperor are the guarantors of safety at sea and they're the protectors of the fleets
that nestled in the great harbour and ensured its commercial success. It's a very different view of
that's related now to Alexandria's commercial importance to Rome. A little further along the
coast to the east this same process of ‘deptolemisation’ can also be seen with the shrines of
Arsinoé Zephyritis and Berenice Aktia, becoming referred to by the toponyms of Menestion and Meniouis.
And here we can see other Ptolemaic queens disappearing from the stage from the Hellenistic into the Roman time.
Now the Iseum is destroyed in an undocumented earthquake in the reign of Claudius that caused
the liquefaction of the quaysides of Antirhodos Island resulting in the flows of debris entering
the harbours. On the island itself, much of the debris was cleared away or it was leveled. And
with the disarticulation of the ruling power from the goddess Isis and the likely downgrading
of the former royal port to a more commercial space in the Roman period, there really wasn't
any need to rebuild this temple. There were other Isaia in the city where the necessary
rituals could be performed. It is however likely that the former royal palace remained standing.
The response to the earthquake does however effectively simplify the message of the view from
the port and the maritime facade and concentrated on the emperor and the imperial cult. While the
majority of the pink granite columns of the portico of the Iseum were swept into the harbour,
several of the more complete ones were recycled and set up again to the northwest and southwest
of the former royal palace. They were probably used as bases for honorific statues of the emperor
Caracala and were set up in association with his rather ill- fated visit to the city in 215. Thus,
for visitors to Alexandria, sailing past the Pharos and into the outer harbour,
the view that now confronted them was dominated by the emperor from the statues
on Antirhodos Island with its palace probably also associated with the imperial cult. And
then they would see the Caesarium and the role of the emperor in safeguarding their journey.
So in this short talk I've emphasized the importance of the everyday movement of ships into
the Portus Magnus and the view that this afforded passengers and crew of the city's maritime facade
and also importantly how this changes over time. The large public buildings that
I've concentrated on are replete with meanings and projections of power. But the issue though is how
were these received by the viewer? Now for some it would simply have been the monumentality of the
buildings that impressed them. The large palaces and temples would have dominated the view of the
foreground, the shoreline and the hill above the city. At their simplest, they're a projection
of the power of the rulers in the life cycle of most of the social actors who would have and
they would have seemed almost timeless. So we get the messages of the right to rule of the Ptolemies,
their lineages from the god Alexander and their ability to unite the Greeks and the Egyptians or
alternatively the benefits of being part of the Roman Empire and the beneficence of the
deified emperor who together with Egypt's gods ensured the safety of seafarers and continued
economic prosperity. The manipulation of these meanings, however, come more sharply into focus
at moments of transition when there are conscious decisions to change the messaging of the buildings
and to project something new. So, we've looked at Cleopatra's vision of an Egypto Roman dynasty and
then dealing with the difficult legacy in Imperial Alexandria. Over the longer term, we would also
could also include the transition from pagan to Christian Alexandria, particularly after 391,
which also obviously greatly impacted the maritime facade. The Caesarium becomes the Great Church. The
Serapeum is destroyed. In cases such as these, the manipulation of meanings would have been very
clear to those living in the city and for those stepping ashore in its ports. The monumentality
of the Portus Magnus and its maritime facade is consequently part of an unfolding discourse of
power. And thanks to the long-term work in it and elsewhere in the city, we're able to
glimpse how seafarers understood this view when approaching Alexandria from the sea.