There is no chapter in history so sweeping and interesting as that which closed the career of Alexandria to the Christian world. It was the real centre of Christian light and influence. Its bishops were the most learned and potential, its schools of Christian thought the most renowned. It was in commerce with all the world and could scatter influences wider than any other city. It had given the Septuagint version of the Bible to the nations. All around, it had made converts of the
Coptic elements, which were native, and Egypt’s natural defenders in case of war. But these it had estranged. Therefore the Saracen conquest was easy. Pelusium and Memphis fell. Alexandria was surrounded, and fell A.D. 640. “I have taken,” says Amrou, “the great city of the west with its 4000 palaces,
4000 baths, 400 theatres, 12,000 shops, and 40,000 Jews.” Amrou would have spared the great library of 700,000 volumes. But the Califf’s (Omar’s) answer came, “These books are useless if they contain only the word of God; they are pernicious if they contain anything else. Therefore destroy them.”
Aside from the monuments above mentioned, there is little else to connect it with a glorious past except the catacombs on the outskirts, which are of the same general character as those at Rome. These catacombs possess a weird interest wherever they exist. They abound in one form or another in Egypt, and are found in many other countries where, for their extent and curious architecture, they rank as wonders.
IN THE SERAPEION.
Those lately unearthed in the vast Necropolis of Memphis, and called the Serapeion, were the burial place of the Egyptian God Apis, or Serapis, the supreme deity represented by the bull Apis. This sacred bull was not allowed to live longer than twenty-five years. If he died before that age, and of natural
causes, he was embalmed as a mummy and interred in the Serapeion with great pomp. Otherwise, he was secretly put to death and buried by the priests in a well. In the Serapeion are some magnificent sarcophagi in granite, and inscriptions which preserve the Egyptian chronology from 1400 B.C. to 177 B.C.
BRONZES OF THE EGYPTIAN GOD APIS.