This magnificent monument appears, in taste, to be the work of that period, between Hadrian and Severus; but, though the former erected several large buildings in the east, it is observed of him he never put inscriptions upon them.
This has had a Greek inscription, and I think may very probably be attributed to the time of the latter, as a monument of the gratitude of the city of Alexandria for the benefits he conferred on them, especially since no ancient history mentions its existence at an earlier period.
I apprehend it to have been brought in a block from the Thebais in Upper Egypt, by the Nile; though some have imagined it was an old obelisk, hewn to that round form. It is nine feet diameter; and were it but 80 feet high, it would require a prodigious obelisk indeed, that could admit to be hewn to this circumference for such a length, so as perfectly to efface the hieroglyphics that must have been very deeply cut in the four faces of it.
The tomb of Alexander has been talked of as one of the antiquities of this city. Marmol[64] says he saw it in the year 1546. It was, according to him, a small house, in form of a chapel, in the middle of the city, near the church of St Mark, and was called Escander.
The thing itself is not probable, for all those that made themselves masters of Alexandria, in the earliest times, had too much respect for Alexander, to have reduced his tomb to so obscure a state. It would have been spared even by the Saracens; for Mahomet speaks of Alexander with great respect, both as a king and a prophet. The body was preserved in a glass coffin, in [65]Strabo’s time, having been robbed of the golden one in which it was first deposited.
The Greeks, for the most part, are better instructed in the history of these places than the Cophts, Turks, or Christians; and, after the Greeks, the Jews.
As I was perfectly disguised, having for many years worn the dress of the Arabs, I was under no constraint, but walked through the town in all directions, accompanied by any of those different nations I could induce to walk with me; and, as I constantly spoke Arabic, was taken for a [66]Bedowé by all sorts of people; but, notwithstanding the advantage this freedom gave me, and of which I daily availed myself, I never could hear a word of this monument from either Greek, Jew, Moor, or Christian.
Alexandria has been often taken since the time of Cæsar. It was at last destroyed by the Venetians and Cypriots, upon, or rather after the release of St Lewis, and we may say of it as of Carthage, Periêre ruinæ, its very ruins appear no longer.
The building of the present gates and walls, which some have thought to be antique, does not seem earlier than the last restoration in the 13th century. Some parts of the gate and walls may be of older date; (and probably were those of the last Caliphs before Salidan) but, except these, and the pieces of columns which lie horizontally in different parts of the wall, every thing else is apparently of very late times, and the work has been huddled together in great haste.
It is in vain then to expect a plan of the city, or try to trace here the Macedonian mantle of Dinochares; the very vestiges of ancient ruins are covered, many yards deep, by rubbish, the remnant of the devastations of later times. Cleopatra, were she to return to life again, would scarcely know where her palace was situated, in this her own capital.