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When approaching Alexandria, we often focus on 
the role of the Pharos in guiding ships from far

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out to sea to the city and its great port. This 
was the essence of the Epigrams of Poseidippus on

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the left side of the screen. But the Pharos 
was more than just a large signpost for the

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city and harbour and a warning of the reefs 
at its entrance. Its scale and magnificence

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was a visible symbol of Ptolemaic wealth and 
power. It was an icon for their regime,

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striking and unambiguous. In his description 
of the harbour on the right of the screen,

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it's notable that the framing device that Strabo 
uses is the Pharos and the journey into the Portus

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Magnus from the sea and the views of the city that 
this afforded. The narrative is punctuated by

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the main buildings and spaces: the royal palace 
on the Lochias promontory, Antirhodos island and

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its royal palace, the temple of Poseidon and so 
on. This view of the city from inside the harbour,

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Alexandria's urban maritime facade, is also 
replete with meaning about how the ruling elite

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wish to portray themselves to those approaching 
Alexandria by sea. Consequently, in this paper,

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I want to show Alexandria's monumental 
biography and illustrate how the changes within

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it reflect the aspirations of its rulers and how 
it shifts in the transition from Ptolemaic to Roman

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power. I'll mainly concentrate on the most obvious 
of these visual axes for an incoming maritime

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visitor to the city. And this is the view straight 
ahead once their ship had broached the entrance

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and sailed past the view of the Pharos. And it 
moves into the calm waters of the outer harbour.

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This view was one of three temples. There's one 
visible on the waterline, another on the shore,

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and a final one on the hill above. They're 
the Iseum, the Caesarium, and the Serapeum.

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It's more than just the view of the city that I 
want to analyze, but to consider the repetitive

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unfolding journey of ships past the Pharos and 
into the outer harbour. Such movement was part

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of the rhythms of daily life in the Portus Magnus. 
And this had a profound influence upon the social

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production of space and in particular how 
power is articulated through architecture.

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Now, furthermore, thanks to the results of our 
excavations, we've also been able to examine

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how these expressions change with time. So, 
in order to think about this quotidian journey

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across the port and the views that it affords, a 
good place to start is with the importance of the

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outer harbour as the great connecting space of 
the Portus Magnus. Now, here on the screen is

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a map of the harbour and the beginnings of 
a syntax model of it. It shows how the harbour

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is broken down into its elemental structures and 
how these are combined into its complex overall

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form. It shows effectively the morphology 
of this space. So we can see from this

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illustration that the outer harbour acts 
as a connecting space to the other main areas

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of the Portus Magnus. There's the docks on 
Pharos island. There's further docks on the

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Navalia and those of Antirhodos island and 
the Poseidium. And then interestingly the

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military and royal port of the galleys are in 
terms of both the morphology of the port and

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the complexity of the journey to get there. 
These are much more secluded or defended.

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So here in this illustration we can see a 
simplified hierarchy of spaces and how this

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would work for a journey into one of the ports of 
Antirhodos. It clearly shows the areas of the Portus

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Magnus that a vessel would have needed to pass 
through in order to get from the open water of

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the sea to a quayside. Now while our analysis 
of the Portus Magnus in this way is ongoing,

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it's clear to see that when we break 
it down to these anatomical elements,

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both its complexity and also the logic behind 
the port is revealed. While the space syntax

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analysis emphasizes that every journey into and 
indeed across the Portus Magnus involves the

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outer harbour. So spatially it's the heart of the 
port and in terms of sailing ships and wind it's

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also the area where ships would be blown into and 
they would then wait there for a tugboat to help

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guide them onto more complex movements around the harbour and then finally to the quayside.

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Now the upshot of all of this is that the view 
of the city that's laid out from the outer harbour

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which encompasses these three temples is really 
unlikely to have been randomly or unconsciously

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created. The meanings that these buildings project 
therefore reveals an underlying structure a kind

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of narrative of power for the city. Now thanks 
to the excavations of the Institut Européen

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d'Archaéologie Sous-Marine (IEASM) we can start to unpick 
how these messages were transmitted through

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the maritime facade and we can look at them in 
three distinct phases. There's the early Ptolemaic

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around the 3rd century BC which was associated 
with the creation of this view. Then we have

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late Ptolemaic changes of Cleopatra VII and there then finally there's the reconfiguration in the Roman

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period and it's these three views that we'll now 
examine in the context of approaching Alexandria.

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The origins then of the maritime facade can 
be traced to the earliest years of Ptolemaic rule

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with the construction of the lighthouse and the 
Heptastadium being mentioned in the Epigrams by

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Poseidippus who's active in the reign of Ptolemy II. 
Together they helped to define the maritime space

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of the Portus Magnus and specifically how a ship 
approached Alexandria. At this time, the outer

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port becomes the great connecting space with a 
view of the city and its buildings in front of it.

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Last year, the excavations in the Iseum reached 
the very lowest levels of the strategraphy,

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revealing that parts of it can be attributed 
to an initial phase of activity with

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the earliest ceramics coming from the very end of 
the 4th century and more generally from the third.

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The evidence seems to point to this being 
a temple to the god Osiris. Furthermore,

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excavations on the remains of the royal palace 
is also on Antirhodos island have

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suggested that it too may have had its origins 
around this time. Now together they established

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the view of the island of Antirhodos as being 
an important focal point from the outer harbour.

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Furthermore, up on the hill above the city, 
the foundation plaques of the Serapeum,

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one of which is depicted here, which are in the 
corners of the temenos of the temple are dated to

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the reign of Ptolemy III. Now, interestingly, 
Pseudo-Callisthenes when writing about the

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foundation of the city, he says of Alexander, 
"he's high in the hills above it" and he sees an

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old altar from a sanctuary to Zeus and Hera with 
obelisks. And the quote is that "they now lie

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in the Serapeum". Now while we should obviously treat this source with a degree of caution,

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I think the linking of the hill above the 
city with the memory of Alexander may be of

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significance when we're thinking about the 
meaning of it when approaching Alexandria.

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The view that the outer harbour creates in 
the early years of Ptolemaic rule simply establishes

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the fact that both the city and its harbour was an 
ideological showpiece. It represented the

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wealth of the dynasty and their capacity to build 
on an enormous scale. The palaces and the temples

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emphasized the ability to draw together Greek 
and Egyptian elements of the new hybrid society

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and the link back to Alexander through the Serapeum 
emphasizes the origins of their dynasty in the

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god king. Together this view is a manifesto. It 
helps to legitimize the dynasty's right to rule.

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Substantial changes were made to the view from 
the harbour in the late Ptolemaic period. On Antirhodos

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Island, the sanctuary to Osiris was substantially 
redeveloped with the creation of a new monumental

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entrance facing the outer harbour accompanied 
by an extensive phase of redecoration. And this

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monumental entrance is depicted here. It's a new 
portico with eight pink granite columns set in two

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rows of four. Two lead tokens stamped with a 
view of the temple facade that we found in the

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destruction deposits from the Iseum might 
suggest that it had a curved segmental pediment

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and a semi-circular tempenum decorated with a 
sundisk and a uraeus. The dating evidence for all

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of this would suggest that its redevelopment 
is from the reign of Cleopatra VII, so

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after about 41 BCE. The material culture from the 
temple unambiguously supports its interpretation

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as an Iseum. And this is seen most clearly in the 
statue of the priest with the Osiris Canopus jar,

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which again is on the screen with other pieces 
indicating a strong connection with Dionysius,

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including banqueting. And perhaps this all 
suggests a role in celebrations of the Nile flood.

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The redevelopment of the Iseum, however, it 
was part of a wider building program in this

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area of the Portus Magnus and altogether it 
augmented the view from the harbour. Around the

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same time probably starting in the reign of Ptolemy 
XII was a major phase of land reclamation

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which you can see here on the screen. This 
sees dumping layers of rubbish into a former

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harbour area. These were strengthened with wooden 
piles and topped with a fine limestone pavement.

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This was revealed in a series of excavations into 
these closely stratified dumping layers from the

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1st century BCE in front of today's Cecil 
Hotel. Altogether, this phase of groundworks

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suggests that changes to the structure of the 
royal port and the port of the Emporium with the

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subdivision of these areas into a further port. On 
the new shoreline, this was accompanied by the

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creation of a fine wide esplenade on which a large 
red granite altar was also found close to what has

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been interpreted as a monumental landing stage. 
So the groundworks were more than simply the

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creation of a new shoreline and these were instead 
associated with the creation of the Caesarium.

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While neither the Caesarium nor its landing stage 
and esplanade were completed during the reign of

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Cleopatra with the latest dating evidence from the 
dumping deposits coming from the Augustan period

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which goes along with the erection of the 
temple's famous obelisks. It was clearly a

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large and ongoing project in which only the Iseum 
may have been completed. Nevertheless though,

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we can consider the underlying message that 
Cleopatra wanted to portray to those approaching

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and then stepping foot perhaps on the monumental 
landing stage in Alexandria. For Cleopatra,

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the goddess Isis was an important part of her 
identity. She proclaimed herself Nea Isis and

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assumed the appearance of the goddess in public from the time of the Donations of Alexandria in

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33/34 BCE. According to Plutarch, following 
the donations, Cleopatra continued to conduct

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public audiences under the name of Nea Isis. 
Thus the embellishment of a temple to the

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goddess adjacent to the royal palace on Antirhodos 
island was a firm reinforcement of the association

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of the Ptolemies invested most clearly in Cleopatra 
but also in other members of the family past and

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present with Isis/Osiris and Ptolemaic royal power 
and sovereignty over this newly enlarged Egyptian

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empire. Now this dynastic link is also seen in 
the temple on the shore, the Caesarium, and while

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there's debate about whether Cleopatra intended 
the temple to be for the cult of Julius Caesar and

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or Mark Anthony or to emphasize the lineage of her 
son, Caesarion. All the possibilities seem to point

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towards her vision of a new Egypto-Roman dynasty 
and it's set out in this building. So for visitors

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arriving by sea and perhaps most importantly for 
VIP guests stepping ashore on the monumental

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landing stage in front of the temple, the wider 
ambitions of Cleopatra and the recentering herself

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and her family in Egypt within the wider Roman 
world would seem to have been very clear.

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Following the Roman annexation of Egypt, the royal 
port of Antirhodos underwent a profound change from

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being the harbour of the palace and the Iseum to 
simply another part of the commercial landscape

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of the Portus Magnus. And this is seen really 
most clearly in the deposits of the harbour bottom,

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notably in the presence of three shipwrecks that 
date from the Roman period. Two commercial

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trading ships and a ship's boat is what 
we've discovered so far. Illustrated here is J3,

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a 4 and a half meter long boat which from the 
analysis of the wood species and the combination

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of how they were used in its construction appears 
to have been made in a shipyard on the Tyrrhenian

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coast of Italy. It would have arrived in the Portus 
Magnus towed behind one of the trading ships that

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plied this long distance route between Italy 
and Alexandria. So it's notable that so far we've

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found no Ptolemaic era shipwrecks within this area of 
the port. And similarly the ceramic evidence from

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the harbour bottom would also tend to corroborate 
this impression as while there's large-scale

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evidence of Roman pottery notably intact amphorae but 
also other trade ceramics there's a marked absence

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of anything earlier. This indicates that the royal 
port was transformed through the first and second

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centuries CE to become an integral part of the 
commercial infrastructure of the Portus Magnus.

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So how then did this commercial expansion affect 
the view of the maritime facade of the city from

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the port? We can start with the Iseum and 
the Caesarium, two buildings that would have

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had problematic associations
for Cleopatra's vision of an Egypto Roman Empire.

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The meaning was however reorchestrated in the 
Roman period to deal with this difficult legacy

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of the civil wars and Augustus' coming to power. 
And we can look at the gifts given to the temple

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and stored in its treasury. And from this we can 
see that the Iseum continues to function into

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the early imperial period when it's destroyed. 
Here for example we can see a wooden box

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with a silver opening mechanism filled with Roman 
coins. Patterns of donation in the Iseum do not

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appear to have changed and from the scale of the 
Roman ceramics notably the lamps and the eating

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and drinking wares neither did the intensity 
of use in the temple. What changed however

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was the worship of Isis from its former close 
association with Cleopatra and other Ptolemaic queens

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to a protectorous of seafarers and seafaring. Now 
this wasn't entirely new. Five of 53 verses of

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a Ptolemaic aretalogy concern this 
facet of the goddess in which Isis says about

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herself that she was the one who discovered 
maritime activities. Nevertheless, it was the

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unproblematic aspects of this goddess, Isis Palagia 
and Isis Pharia that were increasingly emphasized,

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highlighting Isis's new role or redeveloped 
role in the protection of seafarers. Similarly,

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the emphasis of the Caesarium also shifts and 
takes on a different character with Philo of

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Alexandria in the first century CE 
calling it a temple to Caesar on shipboard.

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In terms of the maritime facade of Alexandria, 
we've moved on from emphasizing the role of the

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Ptolemaic royal family and their dynastic links to 
Rome to one in which the Egyptian gods and

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the emperor are the guarantors of safety at 
sea and they're the protectors of the fleets

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that nestled in the great harbour and ensured its 
commercial success. It's a very different view of

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that's related now to Alexandria's commercial 
importance to Rome. A little further along the

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coast to the east this same process of ‘deptolemisation’ can also be seen with the shrines of

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Arsinoé Zephyritis and Berenice Aktia, becoming referred to by the toponyms of Menestion and Meniouis.

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And here we can see other Ptolemaic queens disappearing from the 
stage from the Hellenistic into the Roman time.

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Now the Iseum is destroyed in an undocumented 
earthquake in the reign of Claudius that caused

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the liquefaction of the quaysides of Antirhodos 
Island resulting in the flows of debris entering

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the harbours. On the island itself, much of the 
debris was cleared away or it was leveled. And

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with the disarticulation of the ruling power 
from the goddess Isis and the likely downgrading

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of the former royal port to a more commercial 
space in the Roman period, there really wasn't

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any need to rebuild this temple. There were other Isaia in the city where the necessary

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rituals could be performed. It is however likely 
that the former royal palace remained standing.

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The response to the earthquake does however 
effectively simplify the message of the view from

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the port and the maritime facade and concentrated 
on the emperor and the imperial cult. While the

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majority of the pink granite columns of the 
portico of the Iseum were swept into the harbour,

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several of the more complete ones were recycled 
and set up again to the northwest and southwest

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of the former royal palace. They were probably 
used as bases for honorific statues of the emperor

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Caracala and were set up in association with his 
rather ill- fated visit to the city in 215. Thus,

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for visitors to Alexandria, sailing past the Pharos and into the outer harbour,

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the view that now confronted them was 
dominated by the emperor from the statues

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on Antirhodos Island with its palace probably 
also associated with the imperial cult. And

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then they would see the Caesarium and the role 
of the emperor in safeguarding their journey.

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So in this short talk I've emphasized the 
importance of the everyday movement of ships into

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the Portus Magnus and the view that this afforded 
passengers and crew of the city's maritime facade

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and also importantly how this changes over 
time. The large public buildings that

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I've concentrated on are replete with meanings and 
projections of power. But the issue though is how

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were these received by the viewer? Now for some 
it would simply have been the monumentality of the

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buildings that impressed them. The large palaces 
and temples would have dominated the view of the

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foreground, the shoreline and the hill above the 
city. At their simplest, they're a projection

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of the power of the rulers in the life cycle 
of most of the social actors who would have and

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they would have seemed almost timeless. So we get 
the messages of the right to rule of the Ptolemies,

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their lineages from the god Alexander and their 
ability to unite the Greeks and the Egyptians or

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alternatively the benefits of being part of 
the Roman Empire and the beneficence of the

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deified emperor who together with Egypt's gods 
ensured the safety of seafarers and continued

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economic prosperity. The manipulation of these 
meanings, however, come more sharply into focus

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at moments of transition when there are conscious 
decisions to change the messaging of the buildings

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and to project something new. So, we've looked at 
Cleopatra's vision of an Egypto Roman dynasty and

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then dealing with the difficult legacy in Imperial 
Alexandria. Over the longer term, we would also

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could also include the transition from pagan 
to Christian Alexandria, particularly after 391,

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which also obviously greatly impacted the maritime 
facade. The Caesarium becomes the Great Church. The

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Serapeum is destroyed. In cases such as these, the 
manipulation of meanings would have been very

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clear to those living in the city and for those 
stepping ashore in its ports. The monumentality

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of the Portus Magnus and its maritime facade is 
consequently part of an unfolding discourse of

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power. And thanks to the long-term work in 
it and elsewhere in the city, we're able to

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glimpse how seafarers understood this view 
when approaching Alexandria from the sea.