The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern World

57 Pages·2007·1.63 MB·English

by  Justin Pollard

Table of Contents

About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE - FLOUR AND SAND
CHAPTER TWO - STEALING A GOD
CHAPTER THREE - EGYPT REBORN
CHAPTER FOUR - THE LEGACY OF ARISTOTLE
CHAPTER FIVE - CITY OF THE MIND
CHAPTER SIX - GREEK PHARAOHS
CHAPTER SEVEN - THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
CHAPTER EIGHT - THE LITTLE O
CHAPTER NINE - THE “EUREKA” FACTOR
CHAPTER TEN - A GREEK TRAGEDY
CHAPTER ELEVEN - THE LAST PHARAOH
CHAPTER TWELVE - THE CLOCKWORK CITY
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - URBI ET ORBI
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - DAWN OF THE ICONOCLASTS
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - INTO THE SOFT MACHINE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - THE ASCENDANCY OF FAITH
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - THE END OF REASON
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - HYPATIA
CHAPTER NINETEEN - THE SHIPWRECK OF TIME

EPILOGUE
CHRONOLOGY
APPENDIX
Acknowledgements
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE RISE AND FALL OF ALEXANDRIA
Justin Pollard has worked extensively in both British and American television
and has worked closely in developing feature films for directors including
Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth), Gillies MacKinnon, Sam Mendes, Neil Jordan, and
Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice).

Howard Reid worked for the BBC from 1979 to 1991 on many major
documentary series, including the Emmy-winning Story of English, and has
since worked widely in both British and American television. He has written five
previous books, including The Way of the Warrior, coauthored with Michael
Croucher.

PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2006
Published in Penguin Books 2007

Copyright © Justin Pollard and Howard Reid, 2006
All rights reserved

Title page image: SPL/Photo Researchers, Inc.
Map by Jeffrey L. Ward eISBN : 978-1-4406-2083-6

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For Liz, Wilson, Dudley, and Teän “Ipsa scientia potestas est”
PREFACE
Flotsam . . .
Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the
shipwreck of time.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
On most days in the summer of AD 1295 an Eastern Orthodox monk called
Maximos Planudes could have been found in the great market of
Constantinople, making his way past the spice sellers and the silk traders to
the dusty undercrofts where the book merchants piled their own wares in
tottering stacks of parchment. Here were codices and manuscripts in
Arabic, Syriac, Greek, and Latin, some newly completed, some old. Holy
books for all religions, practical treatises, histories, and chronologies.
Here too were books still waiting to be written, fresh blank sheets and old
volumes that had been scrubbed clean of whatever they once held, ready for
a new text.
Walking along the waterfront to the great market, Maximos Planudes might
have been reminded of the description in Strabo of Alexandria in the first
century AD, which he excitedly called “the greatest emporium in the whole
world” (Strabo, Geography, book 17, chapter 13). Constantinople, despite the
sack of 1204, had since taken on that mantle, which was why this diminutive
monk was spending each day of a hot summer there searching through piles of
books and manuscripts.
The book dealers must have taken careful note of this unusual creature in their
midst. Monks swarmed through the city, but their interest in books was
invariably limited to medieval Greek religious works—the biblical glosses and
commentaries, the credulous hagiographies, the missals, Psalters, and breviaries
whose attraction was as much in the artistic illumination of their pages as in the
illuminating quality of their text. But Planudes was after something different. He
spent his hours poring over the dreariest-looking texts, from faded Latin
fragments to terse Arabic treatises.
Then one day, sometime that summer, he found it. It certainly wasn’t much to