Alexandria: A Guide to Egypt’s Ever-Changing City

ARTnews

Factuality

Ownership

Alexandria: A Guide to Egypt’s Ever-Changing City

Alexandria is a city of turning points. When it was founded by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.E., near an existing Egyptian settlement, the port city represented Egypt’s absorption into Greco-Roman culture. It’s no coincidence that the city’s patron god was Serapis, a syncretic deity representing the fusion of Greek and Egyptian paganism. Likewise, the city’s later fall to the Arab conqueror ‘Amr ibn al-ʿĀṣ in 642 C.E. made Islam dominant in Egy…