The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (16 page)

The light was designed to operate both day and night. During the day it was simple enough to just reflect the rays of the sun out to sea, but at night something more was required. For this a circular shaft ran up the center of the entire building, which enclosed the spiral staircase that gave access to the higher floors. Up the middle of this could be winched the piles of resinous acacia and tamarisk wood that provided the fuel for a great bonfire whose light was reflected far out to sea each evening by the great mirror.

Though wildly exaggerated claims have been made for both the height of the lighthouse (1,500 feet!) and the visibility of the light (500 miles!) the consensus is that it was visible from about thirty miles out to sea. The location for the lighthouse was obvious, on the island whose name would come to stand for lighthouses everywhere—Pharos. Here it would be most conspicuous, not least to the wreckers and pirates who called the island home. Strabo, who saw the lighthouse in the late first century BC, gives us its location:

 
The building project took twelve years to complete and was said to have cost Ptolemy about eight hundred talents, approximately $3 million at today’s gold rates. A story, which may be apocryphal, attaches to its dedication. It’s said that when it came to placing a dedicatory inscription at its entrance, Sostratus knew he would have to dedicate it to Ptolemy and his wife, but was determined that he would not be forgotten himself. So he had his inscription engraved in the stone, then had it plastered over and the dedication to the Ptolemies etched into the plaster. In time, and hopefully long after Ptolemy’s death, the plaster would then eventually decay and fall away, revealing his words: “Sostratus, son of Dexiphanes the Cnidian, dedicated this to the Saviour Gods, on behalf of all those who sail the seas” (recorded in Lucian of Samosata,
How to Write History
).

Certainly this is the inscription that Strabo and other classical authors record as being carved into the lighthouse. Whether or not it was what Ptolemy saw at its dedication will forever remain unknown.

And Sostratus certainly built the lighthouse to last. Surviving several tsunamis and a devastating succession of earthquake swarms, it was still working when the Arabs took the city in AD 642, though about fifty years later the reflector was damaged by an earthquake. Around AD 1165 the Moorish traveler Yusuf Ibn al-Shaikh saw that the building was still in use and confirmed its construction in three levels, adding that the base was constructed of massive red granite blocks, joined with molten lead rather than mortar to strengthen it against the pounding waves. He also gives us a rare glimpse inside the building, describing how at that time the first section housed government offices and a military barracks together with stabling for at least three hundred horses. Above this in the octagonal section, refreshment stalls sold fruit and roasted meats to tourists who had climbed the tower to marvel at the statues that decorated the balconies. Above these a higher balcony gave visitors a panoramic view over the city and the sea beyond.

The third section had changed its use by al-Shaikh’s day. The cylindrical tower no longer contained the cresset for the beacon fire, but a small mosque now took its place. Perhaps above this, and crowning the whole structure, the colossal statue of Poseidon, god of the sea, leaning on his trident, still looked down on the tourists crowding around his feet.

However, by the time the fourteenth-century Arab voyager Ibn Battuta, on his way to China, reached Alexandria, the Pharos was in its death throes:

 
A sad end for such an extraordinary monument, yet for a building of forty stories’ height to survive for more than fifteen hundred years in an active seismic zone was little short of miraculous. And way back in those heady days when Ptolemy and Sostratus saw their colossal dream rising on the tiny barren island, they must surely have realized that now Alexandria truly was “the Light of the World.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

Henry Vaughan, “The World,” in
Silex Scintillans

 
 
T
he beacon on Pharos that now drew the traders of the Mediterranean to the world’s greatest emporium was also attracting other travelers. Among the scholars of the Aegean, word was out that Alexandria offered an environment where it was possible to think the unthinkable—to challenge the fundamental and apparently self-evident certainties of the world. The museum and library were fast becoming a new type of institution: a community of the world’s thinkers, working together to decipher the mysteries of the universe—the first true university.

The grain pouring out of Alexandria’s port continued to fund the work of the scholars now pouring in, giving Ptolemy II the pick of the most brilliant scholars of the age to tutor his son and heir, Ptolemy III. He in turn demonstrated as he grew up that, if anything, he was even more passionate about collecting, copying, and archiving books than his father and grandfather.

Strangely, it would not be philosophy that provided the foundation for Ptolemy III’s own rule, but war and tragedy. Following the death of his father in 246 BC, Ptolemy III succeeded to the kingdom without opposition, but the death of the old monarch had been seized on elsewhere to foment trouble. As part of a peace treaty between the Ptolemies and the rulers of the Seleucid dynasty of Syria, Ptolemy II’s daughter Berenice had been married to Antiochus II Theos, who had agreed to repudiate his previous wife, Laodice. When news of the pharaoh’s death reached Syria, Antiochus clearly considered himself no longer bound by that peace treaty and returned to his former wife. It was a deadly mistake, as Laodice immediately poisoned her former husband and declared her son the new king. Berenice and her son were bound to oppose this, and called on her brother Ptolemy III for help. War was inevitable.

By the time Ptolemy had raised an army and stormed across Egypt and up into the Middle East, news was emerging that Laodice had arranged the murder of Berenice and her son. Infuriated, the pharaoh raged through the region in a campaign that left the whole area stunned. One inscription from Adulis in Eritrea proudly compares this to the magnificent Middle Eastern exploits of the great Rameses II. When Ptolemy returned to Egypt his baggage train was laden with spoils, enough to comfortably support even the most lavish basileus. So rich was he that he offered to pay for the rebuilding of the Colossus of Rhodes. The 160-foot-tall statue (including pedestal) of the god Helios had stood at or near the harbor entrance to the island since its dedication fifty-six years earlier in thanks for Ptolemy I’s assistance in the wars of Alexander’s successors. The statue—as high as the Statue of Liberty—had recently collapsed following an earthquake, but the Rhodians, fearful they had offended the god, refused the offer to rebuild. The statue then spent another eight hundred years lying broken on the shore, although even fallen it was still a major tourist attraction, Pliny the Elder noting that few people could manage to reach their arms around the thumb.

But Ptolemy did not need the Colossus. He had other, more important statues in his baggage train. The wagons that rolled back into Alexandria brought with them the two thousand statues of Egyptian gods that the hated Persian king Cambyses had removed from Egypt. For this the people loved him and gave him the title “Euergetes”—“the Benefactor.” With Ptolemy having this title and more money than he could spend, the rest of his reign was both peaceful and prosperous. Patronizing the greatest minds of his age was thus both pleasurable and affordable, and Alexandrians could turn their minds from war to contemplating far greater things.

During the war a legend emerged which perhaps hints at the growing importance of one particular new area of science in the city. After Ptolemy left for his campaign, his wife, a Cyrenian also called Berenice, went to the temple of Aphrodite to pray for her husband. Here she promised to sacrifice her famous long hair to the goddess if Ptolemy returned safely. When he did she duly honored the pledge and cut off her hair, having it placed in the temple. The next day the offering was found to be missing, leaving the king and queen furious. Only one man could calm them, an astronomer called Conon. He told the queen that the hair had not been stolen but that the gift had so pleased the gods that they had taken it up into heaven. That night he proved it to her, showing her a small group of stars which he called “Coma Berenices”—“Berenice’s Hair”—and the constellation retains that name to this day.

 
 
By this time another astronomer and mathematician, Aristarchus of Samos, who had arrived in the city as a young man sometime before 281 BC, was also enjoying Ptolemy and Berenice’s largesse. He had turned his extraordinary mind away from the earth to contemplate the heavens, not simply to interpret signs of the zodiac so beloved by the ever-nervous rulers of the ancient world, but to understand the mechanisms of the universe itself. What he would see in the heavens was far removed from the theological ideas of gods and creation prevalent in his day, far removed even from the concepts of the universe discussed in the museum. He had brought to Alexandria a unique heritage, and to look into his world is to look into the very dawn of science.

Aristarchus came from Samos, birthplace of perhaps the most famous philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer of all time—Pythagoras. Pythagoras, who lived from around 580 BC to about 500 BC, stands almost at the dawn of rational philosophy, that is, at the point where reasoning began to supplant faith as a means of understanding how the universe, and everything in it, works. But he had one predecessor, a man who many classical writers assert actually met and taught the young Pythagoras when he was about seventy years old. His name was Thales of Miletus, and he was known throughout the classical period as “the First of the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece.”

Before Thales, those seeking answers as to how or why things occurred in the universe invariably referred to the gods. Divine interventions caused earthquakes, changed the seasons, played with the lives and health of puny mortals, and so on ad infinitum. People had only a hazy idea of the shape of the earth and the surrounding cosmos. Many believed the earth was flat and round, floating boatlike on an all-encircling ocean. They then added to the disk of earth sitting in its ocean-saucer some form of pillars or supports (the Egyptians placed them at the cardinal points and anthropomorphized them as the arms and legs of the sky goddess Nut), holding up the dome of the heavenly firmament which sun, moon, and stars traversed in a regular manner. Outside this cosmic eggshell some placed water, which could descend from above in the form of rain and snow or well up from below in springs, lakes, and wells.

But what was all this actually composed of ? What was the fundamental matter? Before Thales, and for many after him, the answer to this question was invariably divinity. Call it soul, spirit, or god, the fundamental matter was divine, untouchable, metaphysical.

Thales, however, preferred water. Water is, after all, fundamental: It can be solid, liquid, or gaseous, and without it there can be no life. Right up until the nineteenth century AD scholars believed that life could generate itself spontaneously in water. As the early metallurgists had discovered, even metals could be reduced to liquids with sufficient heat. And with the seasonal inundations of the great rivers of the ancient world—the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates—water created earth in revitalizing silt deposits and islands in the deltas of these great rivers.

But this is where Thales made his great leap. He asserted that earthquakes were the result of waves, disturbances in the water on which the earth floated, and not the acts of irate gods. This was one of the greatest revolutionary ideas of all time.

Of course today we know that earthquakes are not caused by ripples on a cosmic ocean, but it is Thales’ idea, not his conclusion, that matters. In attributing a natural phenomenon to mechanics and not gods, he took the universe out of the hands of divinities and claimed, extraordinarily, that everything was understandable, knowable. The furious sea god Poseidon was no longer shaking the planet as he strode across it. Something physical was making the world shake. This idea alone marks the beginnings of science.

Thales is credited by all the great masters—Plato and Aristotle among them—with being the founder of natural philosophy, Aristotle reporting simply that Thales considered that he had found the “originating principle.” “Thales says it is water,” he proclaimed.