The city of Alexandria in Egypt was one of over seventeen cities named Alexandria that were founded by Alexander the Great before he died in 323 B.C. Alexandria in Egypt is one of the few of these that as survived to modern-day. One of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Lighthouse of Alexandria was constructed on the island of Pharos, a tiny island off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt. The Lighthouse of Alexandria was a tower, whose construction was ordered by Ptolemy Soter shortly after he made himself king in 305 BC. The Lighthouse of Alexandria wasn’t completed until between 280 and 247 B.C., during the term of Ptolemy Soter’s son, Ptolemy Philadelphos. The Lighthouse of Alexandria took twenty years to complete and was created to serve as a beacon for sailors in the night. A man-made causeway, called the Heptastadion, linked the island of Pharos with the mainland and served as a port boundary on one edge of the city.
 |
| The Lighthouse of Alexandria (pic: courtesy: wikipedia.org) |
The height of the Lighthouse of Alexandria is thought to have been 380 feet. It was built of intersecting light-colored stone blocks fused together with molten lead to bear the fury of the sea. The first lighthouse in the world, second in height only to the Great Pyramids of Giza, ancient coins portray the Lighthouse of Alexandria as having three distinctive tiers. The first of these was a square base that contained hundreds of storage rooms and a large spiral ramp enabling materials to be carted to the top. The middle level was an eight-sided tower that connected to a cylindrical top. A 16-foot statue of what appeared to be the likeness of Poseidon stood above the tower. The Lighthouse of Alexandria was surrounded by sea in all but the eastward and southern directions. At the top of the Lighthouse, a mirror reflected sunlight in the day and showcased a fire in the evening. The entrance to the tower was accessed by a 600-foot ramp that rested on sixteen sequentially higher curved arches until it reached the doorway. Although rumor stated that Ptolemy refused to allow Sostratus to mark the tower with his signature, discovered years later beneath the plaster, under another inscription honoring Ptolemy as the architect, was this inscription in Greek: Sostratus of Cnidus, son of Dexiphanes, to the Gods protecting those upon the sea” Because the Lighthouse of Alexandria was erected on the island of Pharos, the word Pharos became the root of “lighthouse” in Italian, Spanish, French, and Romanian languages. And in 2008, the possible theory that the Pharos was the vertical yardstick used in the first precise measurement of the size of the earth was announced.
A series of earthquakes from 956 to 1323 destroyed the Lighthouse of Alexandria so much that an Arab traveler documented the tower was no longer accessible. By 1480, even the ruins had disappeared and Qaitbay, sultan of Egypt used some of the crumbling stone to erect a medieval fortress on the site. In 1994, ruins of what was believed to be the Lighthouse of Alexandria were unearthed by divers on the floor of Alexandria’s Eastern Harbor. It is still possible to go diving and see further ruins of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, still lying on the ocean floor.
