During his brief but storied life, Alexander the Great founded many cities that bore his name. The most fabled of them, however, was Alexandria in Egypt. The idea for the metropolis is supposed to have appeared to him in a dream: a multi-ethnic haven on the Mediterranean – an intersection between three continents – to link his conquests with his homeland. Alexander’s city was home both to the Lighthouse of Pharos, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and his library, the greatest repository of learning of the pre-modern age.
Islam Issa’s history takes the city from Alexander’s transformation of an Egyptian fishing village around 331 BC through its multiple subsequent lives. It was, by turns, Ptolemaic, Islamic, Ottoman, Napoleonic and Egyptian and it hosted, among innumerable others, Cleopatra, St Mark the Evangelist and Saladin. Issa, an Alexandrian himself, is an assured narrator with an easy, undemonstrative manner, who unearths myths and stories that give vivid life to his more sober account of Alexandria’s travails and triumphs.
By Michael Prodger
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