Who ruled Alexandria?

Alexandria runs along a narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean and Lake Mariout, at the western edge of the Nile Delta in Egypt. The site was chosen because the offshore island of Pharos sheltered a pair of harbours on a coast otherwise short of good anchorages, and because a canal could link it to the Nile. For three centuries it was the greatest Greek city in the world and the intellectual capital of the Mediterranean; its later history is one of long decline, revival in the nineteenth century and a cosmopolitan golden age that ended in the 1950s.

Alexander the Great founded the city in 331 BCE beside an Egyptian settlement called Rhakotis, and his architect Dinocrates laid it out on a grid. After Alexander's death his general Ptolemy made it the capital of the Ptolemaic Kingdom, and the dynasty filled it with monuments: a causeway joining Pharos to the mainland, the great lighthouse on the island, the Serapeum, and the Museum with its famous library, where scholars such as Euclid and Eratosthenes worked. Greeks, Egyptians and a large Jewish community lived in separate quarters, and the Hebrew Bible was first translated into Greek there. Within a century of its founding Alexandria was probably the largest city in the world and the showpiece of Hellenistic civilisation.

The last of the dynasty, Cleopatra, lost her war with Octavian, and in 30 BCE Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire. Alexandria remained the second city of the empire and the port from which Egyptian grain fed Rome. It was also a centre of early Christianity, its bishops among the most powerful in the church. A tsunami flooded parts of the city in 365 CE, and religious conflict grew bitter in late antiquity: the Serapeum was destroyed in 391 and the philosopher Hypatia was murdered by a Christian mob in 415. The library declined gradually over these centuries rather than burning in a single fire.

Persian forces held the city briefly from 619, and in 641 Arab armies under Amr ibn al-As took it. The new rulers built their capital inland at Fustat, later absorbed by Cairo, and Alexandria slipped to the rank of a provincial port, though it still traded with Venice and Genoa under the Fatimids, Ayyubids and Mamluks. Crusaders from Cyprus sacked it in 1365. The ruined lighthouse was finally brought down by earthquakes, and in the 1470s Sultan Qaitbay built a fort on its foundations. Under the Ottomans, who took Egypt in 1517, the city shrank to a town of perhaps 10,000 people.

Napoleon landed there in 1798, but the real revival began under Muhammad Ali, who from the early nineteenth century reopened the canal to the Nile and made Alexandria the outlet for Egypt's cotton. Greeks, Italians, Levantines and others poured in, and the city became the most cosmopolitan in the eastern Mediterranean. In July 1882 the Royal Navy bombarded it at the start of the British occupation of Egypt. During the Second World War it served as a main base for the British fleet, and the battle of El Alamein was fought little more than 100 kilometres to the west.

In 1956 Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in a speech in Alexandria, and in the years that followed most of the city's foreign communities left. A new Bibliotheca Alexandrina opened in 2002 near the site of the ancient library. Alexandria is now Egypt's second city and its largest port, with more than five million people.