ALEXANDRIA | Kirkus Reviews

A comprehensive history of a city that has served as a “representative illustration of some of history’s most consequential empires.”

An Alexandrian by birth, Issa, a curator, broadcaster, and professor of literature and history, relates his native city’s past principally through attention to its most famous figures and rulers. Alexandria may carry the name of an extraordinary world-historical military genius, but many other celebrated figures—Homer’s Helen of Troy and Paris, Aristotle (Alexander’s teacher), Cleopatra and Antony, and the Ptolemy dynasty—have been associated with it over the centuries. Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Egypt’s founding strongman, was born there; writers C.P. Cavafy, Anatole France, and Lawrence Durrell evoked it in their work; and composers like Sayed Darwish, known as “the father of Egyptian music,” called it home. Alexandria’s famous library housed the world’s first great collection of knowledge, and its lighthouse was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World. As a Mediterranean seaport on the western edge of the Nile Delta, Alexandria’s grain trade sustained other significant cities like Athens, Rome, and Carthage. As Issa emphasizes in his brisk tale, the city’s founders successfully “gambled on two outrageous hypotheses: that gathering a diverse set of people to live and work together would make the strategically located spot a world trading centre; and that collecting and generating knowledge would render it a global power.” Thus, from its earliest days, Alexandria, whose history embodies most of the history of Mediterranean civilization, prefigured later, modern communities in its diverse, polyglot population of pagans, Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It remained vital even as it fell to successive conquests by Rome, Arab dynasties, the Ottomans, French, and British, before Egypt gained its independence in 1953 and Alexandria became the Arab city it is now.

A well-researched, readable history of one of the world’s oldest and most consequential cities.