Alexandria, Egypt, city of Alexander, city of Cleopatra, is where I am, but
I’m looking neither for the great man who founded the city (he spent only
six months here anyway), nor for the great woman who lost it. I’m hunting
the dynasty that links Alexander to Cleopatra — the violent, inbred
Macedonian Greek dynasty, the ones who built the city, the ones who married
their own sisters — the Ptolemies.
Who were they? Ptolemy I, a general of Alexander, got all Egypt as his private
estate on Alexander’s death in 323BC, and hijacked Alexander’s corpse to be
his lucky mascot. He ended up as pharaoh, a living god. Fifteen more
Ptolemies, 10 generations of Greek monarchs, followed, ending with Cleopatra
VII, about whom you know everything.
At the start, Ptolemies I, II and III had riches, glory, empire. The decline
began with Ptolemy IV, who murdered his mother (and maybe his father).
Things got better under Ptolemy V and VI; worse under the cruel Ptolemy VIII
(Fat Belly), who murdered one of his sons; worse again under Ptolemy IX and
X. Ptolemy XI was forced to marry his stepmother, but strangled her after 19
days, when the good people of Alexandria carried him to the gymnasium and
pulled off his arms and legs. The end began with Ptolemy XII, father of the
famous Cleopatra — who was the last of the Ptolemies.
Nine times, a Ptolemy married his own sister. Twice, an uncle married his
niece. It’s a sorry but wonderful tale, all native revolts and bust-ups with
Rome, a 300-year catalogue of death at the palace — matricide, patricide,
fratricide, infanticide, massacre, suicide — making this family history the
greatest tragedy never told.
I have a brilliant guide, Mahmoud, and a demon driver, Khaled, with his speedo
fixed to 0mph and his fist fixed to the horn. What traces could we find of
this bloodstained family and the city they built? I try to sweep away
mentally the apartment blocks and racing traffic to imagine the original
cosmopolis, the magnet of the ancient world, where they boasted Here Nothing
Is Forbidden. I conjure up Greek temples and porticoes, sparkling
white-marble colonnades, mile upon mile of Corinthian columns. Still, some
lateral thinking is needed, for most of this is buried 20ft underground, and
what isn’t buried is drowned, underwater.
I BEGIN with Alexandria’s great landmark, Fort Qaitbey, at the entrance to the
harbour, where stood the ancient Pharos, or lighthouse, the pride of the
Ptolemies. One of the Seven Wonders of the World, it stood 400ft tall and
turned night into day for 1,000 years, until an earthquake tipped it into
the sea. What was left, they say, was built into Fort Qaitbey about 1480.
Qaitbey looks to me, though, very like the massive bottom storey of the
Pharos itself.
At its heart a great space soars upwards, and what was it for if not to hoist
fuel to the top so the light should burn? We inspect curious round holes
inside the building, with air blasting up from below. Ancient air
conditioning? Or were they topped in antiquity with mechanical horns, to
warn the triremes of fog? It’s not difficult to imagine how the Pharos
looked and, right or wrong, I think this is it, here I am, and time gone by
means nothing.
On the other side of the harbour, near the (vanished) palaces, a 23-ton statue
of a Ptolemy towers above the entrance to the magnificent new Bibliotheca
Alexandrina. Originally founded by Ptolemy I, the Great Library is now
reborn, thanks to the Egyptian government and Unesco. Together with the
Ptolemies’ Museum, or Temple of the Muses, it formed a 3rd-century BC
research institute, where a hundred Greek scholars thought up fresh thoughts
and inventions to the glory of King Ptolemy, who bragged that he had one
copy of every book in the world — some 400,000 papyrus scrolls. The new
library has a planetarium and archeology museum attached, and space for 8m
books. I think Ptolemy would have been chuffed to see it still open.
I GET to meet the family in the Graeco-Roman Museum. On the coins their eyes
seem to pop out, as if they were astonished by everything they saw in Egypt
— probably true. Statues of the kings wear the double crown of pharaoh and
look heavy from overeating. Their queens look whippet-thin, but were fierce,
powerful women who kept poison in their handbags and were good at murder in
the dark.
Here is the mosaic masterpiece of Berenike II, queen of Ptolemy III (both
murderess and murderee), wearing the prow of a warship on her head,
Alexandria personified. Here is a butch Mark Antony in Aswan granite, a
pinkish terracotta Alexander, and the famous Tanagra figurines, beautiful
dolls of death wearing pointed sunhats and pleated dresses — ancient women’s
fashions preserved for ever.
The most memorable objects here are the door of the Temple of Sobek, the
crocodile god, from Theadelphia in the Faiyum, much chewed by woodworm but
with its Greek dedication still legible; and the original wooden litter on
which Sobek was paraded at his festival. In fact, the god is still here
himself, lying on top of the litter — a 12ft mummified crocodile, 2,000
years dead, but grinning as in life.
Nearby, in the former American embassy, is the spanking new Alexandria
National Museum, full of wonderful antiquities fished out of the sea —
amphoras, golden jewellery, statues of kings and gods — and a sinister,
smiling bust of the poisonous Queen Arsinoe II, sister (and wife) of Ptolemy
II, the original iron lady.
Beside Pompey’s Pillar, we stand on the site of the Ptolemies’ great Temple of
Serapis — long since razed to the ground by the Christians. The mysterious
subterranean galleries, however, survive. Nobody can say what they were for,
except to suggest some link with the cult of Apis, the sacred bull, or the
temple library — but the darkness would have made reading difficult, and the
niches don’t look much like bookshelves. Whatever their purpose, the
galleries are deep, sandy, suffocatingly hot and, in spite of electric
lights, pretty spooky.
In the deeper and spookier catacombs of Kom es-Shoqafa there are fabulous
carvings of the jackal and crocodile gods dressed as Roman legionaries, and
scenes of mummification. I imagine the mourners eating the funeral banquet
for the dead, actually dining deep underground. The lost tombs of the
Ptolemies must have looked something like this, and I think of torchlit
processions of chanting priests, the terror of ghosts and the dark, the
tears (or perhaps, for Ptolemy, the absence of tears), and the fact that
they believed in this stuff.
THE BEAST Garden of Ptolemy II, whose passion (apart from his concubines) was
for natural science, has not survived, but the Alexandria Zoo is its
successor. My Egyptian friends smile when I talk about this, because the
Cairo Zoo is better... but that isn’t the point.
In antiquity, we might have visited the sacred animals in the Egyptian
temples. Now the temples have gone, but we can visit the animals in the zoo.
So I say hi to the lioness, who is Sekhmet, goddess of war; to the jackal,
who is Anubis, god of mummification; and the baboon, who is Thoth, god of
wisdom. The elephant, the tank of ancient times, who lumbered into battle
with Ptolemy, half drunk on barley wine lest he run away or trample his own
men, is still in Alex. Life goes on, but the old gods remain.
Above ground, then, things change slowly. Underwater, nothing changes at all.
Thanks to the Alexandra Dive Company, we put on wetsuit, flippers, aqualung,
and jump off a boat beside Qaitbey to see thousands of giant stone blocks
from the toppled Pharos, many with hieroglyphic inscriptions, lying in 10
metres of water. A short splash further out are a couple of ancient Greek
shipwrecks, with stone anchors, oil lamps and bronze vases.
Within the Great Harbour we drift about the submerged Royal Quarter, the
sunken island of Antirrhodos and a so-called Cleopatra’s Palace, with
statues, columns, sphinxes and obelisks — and a superbly carved block of
marble that has become “Cleopatra’s Table”.
Imagine the Egyptian bits of the British Museum as an aquarium, flooded with
blue-green water; imagine floating through time pursued by a shoal of little
striped fish: that is what diving off Alexandria is like. This is the
world’s first underwater museum and it’s an extraordinary, eerie, moving
experience: absolutely unmissable.
Even so, the winter seas off Alex can be rough and there are rumours of strong
waves, undertows and murky water. The truth is that the Alexandra Dive Co
doesn’t go out (or down) in bad weather,and if the water is calm, visibility
is good. Diving goes on all year round, weather permitting. If you’ve never
dived before, they will teach you how in half an hour, and they are the
friendliest guys in the world.
BY DAY we hunt Ptolemies. After dark we wander the streets, because Alexandria
never sleeps — neither the cafes nor the markets, nor, apparently, the
people. Now I think not just about monarchs but about their subjects,
groaning under a punishing tax system, and I am curious, in Rhakotis —
always the poorest quarter — to see donkeys still in daily use, orange sheep
and black goats tethered in the street.
The markets sell food still squawking — Egyptian geese, pigeons, cockerels,
black-and-white chickens (the ancient Greeks used them in magic spells).
Dinner doesn’t come fresher than this, and I guess the reason is that the
fridge is a luxury, and it has always been like this. In the other direction
it’s nothing but bananas, limes, lemons and melons for hundreds of yards —
remove the cars and the electricity and this is the Agora, the Greek
marketplace. Suddenly, I know why the severed sheep’s heads with horns
attached seem so familiar — they are the curved ram’s horns worn by
Alexander on half the coins of Ptolemaic Egypt, the horns of Zeus- Ammon.
Just here, it feels as if the clock stopped 2,000 years back.
We pause to gulp a very sweet, bright-green drink — asiir asab — which I am
told is juiced papyrus (wow!), but my Arabic expert back home says is juiced
sugar cane. Whatever it is, it’s ancient and wonderful. Leave for one hour —
it turns brown, like Guinness. Add yeast and leave for two or three days —
it turns powerfully alcoholic. I ask about the beer of ancient Egypt and
Mahmoud says, yes, it is still called booza, still full of sediment, still
pretty filthy, and we drink another pint to make sure.
In the ahwas, or cafes, I puff on the sheesha, or water-pipe, snorting out
thick white clouds of apple-flavoured smoke. I am urged to try hummus, a
hot, brown salty drink with chickpeas in the bottom of it. This makes me
think of Ptolemy IX, called Lathyros, or Chickpea, though I never discovered
why. I ask Mahmoud, who says at once, yes, way back, he remembers mothers
calling their children Hummus, Little One. And so the mystery is solved.
In Anfushi, the pong reminds me that ancient Alexandria was fish paradise. It
still is, for I hear about people who eat fish three times a day, seven days
a week. Soon we are in fish paradise ourselves — Abou Ashraf, a restaurant
where we pick up our fish raw at the door and watch them cook it before our
eyes. I learn to eat fish in my fingers, ancient-Greek style, just like
Ptolemy.
I didn’t find the lost Tomb of Alexander, or the tombs of the Ptolemies, not
in four days flat. I did find, I think, something of the living past. As we
hurtle down the desert road to the airport at Borg el Arab, I glimpse
mud-brick pigeon houses, men poling flat boats among the reed beds of Lake
Mariut, farmers driving greenstuff into the city on donkey carts — things
that haven’t changed since pharaonic times. Even the motorway flyover is
Egyptian-style, with papyriform columns and a blue ceiling with golden
stars. The more it changes, as they say, the more it stays the same.
Duncan Sprott travelled as a guest of Mastertours. His new novel, The House
of the Eagle — Book One of the Ptolemies Quartet (£12.99) is
published by Faber.
TRAVEL BRIEF
Getting there: British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com
— operated by British Mediterranean Airways) flies direct to
Alexandria from Heathrow, from £306. The Airline Network (0870 241
0011, www.netflights.com) has fares
from £254 from Heathrow, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Manchester, with Lufthansa
via Frankfurt. Or try Trailfinders (020 7937 1234) or Flight Call (0870 905
0200, www.flight-call.co.uk).
Ebookers (01 241 5689, www.ebookers.com)
in Ireland has fares from Dublin from €488, with BA via Heathrow.
Where to stay: the upmarket hotels are situated 18km from Alexandria,
in Montazah. The El Salamlek Palace (00 20 35 477 999) has doubles from £77,
and the Sheraton Montazah (0800 353535, www.sheraton.co.uk)
from £54. Or try the central Hotel Cecil (00 20 34 807055, www.sofitel.com;
doubles £43), the most famous hotel in town and home to Monty’s
Bar.
Tour operators: Mastertours (020 7375 3187,
www.mastertours.co.uk) has four
nights’ B&B at the Sheraton Montazah from £639pp, including
BA flights, transfers and a full-day city tour. Or try Soliman Travel (020
7370 5159, www.solimantravel.co.uk)
or Kuoni (01306 742888, www.kuoni.co.uk).
Diving: a day’s diving with the Alexandra Dive Company
(00 20 34 832045, www.alexandra-dive.com)
costs £75pp including instruction, equipment and guidance.
When to go: March to April is your best bet.
Further information: the Egyptian tourist office (020 7493 5283)
or visit www.egypttourism.org.
