The wonders of the world

by John Loraine Abbott

POMPEY’S PILLAR AND CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLE.

Passing out, toward the south, from modern Alexandria, one of the first objects that greets the eye of the traveler, is Pompey’s pillar, which rears its stupendous mass of polished granite in solitary grandeur, a monument of buried empires and of nations that have passed away. Though it now stands alone, it is supposed to have been but one of the four hundred stately columns of the Serapeum as it once stood in all its grandeur. “This pillar,” says Thompson, “is the one solitary monument of the old city upon its southern front, and answers to the one standing obelisk that is its solitary monument on the north. Of its origin, history is as silent as the mummy of Belzoni’s tomb; but there is no doubt that ‘Pompey’s pillar is really a misnomer;’ for the inscription ‘shows it to have been erected by Publius, the prefect of Egypt, in honor of Diocletian,’ who subdued a revolt at Alexandria by capturing the city, A. D. 296. But whether it was then first hewn from the quarry, or was transported from some decaying temple up the Nile, the Greek lettering does not inform us. If the latter, (which, considering the decline of art and the pilfering propensities of the Romans, is probable,) then this now lonely sentinel, an Egyptian column with a Greek inscription to a Roman emperor, has witnessed in turn the decay of Egypt, of Greece, and of Rome, upon the soil where it still disputes with Time the empire of the past. To the reader of Gibbon, it may seem strange that a monument should have been reared at Alexandria in honor of a conqueror, who, during a siege of eight months, wasted the city by the sword and by fire, and who, when it finally capitulated and implored his clemency, caused it to feel ‘the full extent of his severity,’ and destroyed ‘thousands of its citizens in a promiscuous slaughter.’ The fact may serve to show the worthlessness of such monuments as testimonials to character, or as expressions of public esteem. But whatever may be its history or its associations, one can not look upon this column without a feeling of astonishment and awe. Outside of the modern city walls and some six hundred yards to the south of them, away from the present homes of men, but on an eminence that overlooks the entire city, and in striking contrast with the meager, attenuated style of its present architecture, stands this stupendous column of red granite, ninety-nine feet in hight by thirty in circumference, its shaft an elegant monolith measuring seventy-three feet between the pedestal and the capital. It marks the site of an ancient stadium, and as some conjecture, of the gymnasium, which was surrounded with majestic porticos of granite.”

CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLE.

From Pompey’s pillar, to Cleopatra’s needles, is a distance of about a mile through the city in a north-easterly direction. “These obelisks,” says Thompson, “have no more relation to Cleopatra, than the pillar has to Pompey. Their hieroglyphics, according to Wilkinson and Lepsius, date back as far as the exodus from Egypt; and they were brought to Alexandria from the city of Heliopolis, or On, about a hundred miles to the south. Each ‘needle’ is a solid block of red granite, about seventy feet high, and nearly eight feet in diameter at the base. How such huge blocks were cut from the quarry, transported hundreds of miles, and erected upon their pedestals, is a mystery not solved by anything yet discovered of ancient mechanic arts. Only one of the obelisks is standing. The other was taken down to be transported to England, but now lies half buried in the mud and sand. On one side of the standing obelisk the hieroglyphics are distinctly legible, but on the northern or seaward side they are much defaced by the action of the weather. It stands upon the edge of the great harbor, in a line with the rock of Pharos that forms the extreme northern point of the horseshoe port.

“Besides the pillar and the needles nothing remains to testify the former splendor of Alexandria; a capital that once vied with Rome, containing a population equal to that of New York, (three hundred thousand freemen and as many slaves,) and that so late as the seventh century, according to the testimony of Amrou, its Saracenic conqueror, contained ‘four thousand palaces, four thousand baths, four hundred theaters, twelve thousand shops for the sale of vegetables, and forty thousand tributary Jews.’ A few ruins are pointed out, but these are fast disappearing with the ravages of time. Its name is the only memorial of its founder; and the long range of catacombs along the shore to the west of the city, the sole vestige of its ancient population. So rapid was the growth of the city, that at the commencement of the Christian era, it was ‘second only to Rome itself,’ and ‘comprehended a circumference of fifteen miles’ within its walls. It was a great seat of commerce. ‘Idleness was unknown. Either sex, and every age, was engaged in the pursuits of industry;’ the blowing of glass, the weaving of linen, manufacturing the papyrus, or conducting the lucrative trade of the port. Alexander, fresh from the conquest of Tyre, boasted that he would here build an emporium of commerce surpassing that which he had ruined, and thus would recreate in his own image the world he had destroyed. The site of Alexandria, more felicitous than that of Tyre, promised to realize his ambitious dream. Its gates ‘looked out on the gilded barges of the Nile, on fleets at sea under full sail, on a harbor that sheltered navies, and a light-house that was the mariner’s star, and the wonder of the world.’ But neither the felicity of its location, nor the enterprise of its Ptolemaic rulers, nor the wealth of its commerce, nor the learning that gathered to its schools the students of art, of philosophy, of medicine, of science, and of religion, could withstand the march of empire from Asia to Europe, nor the laws of trade that followed in its track.”

The present population of Alexandria is less than a hundred thousand; a mixture of all the oriental races, with many Europeans and Jews. In passing through its narrow and dirty streets, now occupied with a motley and poverty-stricken populace; in traversing the villages of hovels within its walls, where the Arab lies down with his sheep, his goat, his dog, and his donkey, all in the mud inclosure of a few feet square, which must be entered by stooping; and in climbing the huge mounds that are said to cover the ancient capital, it is difficult to realize that here once dwelt the hundred thousand Jews, for whom the seventy made their celebrated Greek version of the Old Testament; that here the eloquent Apollos was born, and the learned Athanasius conducted his theological controversies; that here Theodosius, by imperial edict, destroyed the temple of Serapis, and publicly established Christianity in place of the outcast divinities of the Egyptian Greeks; that here was a school to which the sages of Greece resorted for instruction in philosophy, science and letters, and where Jewish rabbins and Christian apologists vied with Greek dialecticians in the various pursuits of learning; and that here was a library of seven hundred thousand manuscript volumes, a British museum or a Smithsonian institute, boasting the originals or the duplicates of many of the most valuable works of the then current literature, and which, after the accidental destruction of a part of it in the insurrection against Julius Cæsar, and the willful destruction of another portion in the sanguinary religious wars under Theodosius, yet contained enough of written papyrus to heat for six months the four thousand baths of the city, under the summary decree of Omar: “If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious, and ought to be destroyed.” It is difficult amid such surroundings, to realize that here Cæsar and Antony dallied with the charms of Cleopatra. It is difficult to realize that where now bigotry, fanaticism and superstition hold sway over an ignorant and degraded people, were schools of theology, and learned fathers, and astute controversialists of the early Christian church; that here Christianity triumphed over paganism in popular tumults backed by imperial decrees; that here Mark preached the gospel of the kingdom where the Ethiopian eunuch had preceded him with the tidings of the great salvation. And yet that old Alexandria, which began to be in the fourth century before Christ, and of all whose palaces and temples and monuments only two columns are now standing, was the youngest of Egyptian cities, and was built by the conqueror of Egypt when Thebes, and Memphis, and the university city of Heliopolis, were already in their decline. Such is the antiquity that meets us at the threshold of the land of the Nile.