The lighthouse was built on the nearby island of Pharos. Neither the building nor even the island exists any more. Pharos was eventually joined to the mainland by a causeway, which fattened out into a peninsula and became a minuscule bump on the scalp of Africa. The lighthouse was an immense structure, at some 120 meters the tallest building in the world for many centuries, and contained as many as 300 rooms. Somewhere in its upper stories a fire burned all night long, and its light was reflected out across the Mediterranean by some kind of rotating mirror or prism. This was a fine bit of ancient hacking in and of itself, but according to legend, the optics also had magnifying properties, so that observers peering through it during the daytime could see ships too distant to be perceived by the naked eye.
According to legend, this feature made Alexandria immune to naval assault as long as the lighthouse remained standing. According to another yarn, a Byzantine emperor spread a rumor that the treasure of Alexander the Great had been hidden within the lighthouse's foundation, and the unbelievably fatuous local caliph tore up the works looking for it, putting Pharos out of commission and leading to a military defeat by the Byzantine Empire.
Some combination or other of gullible caliphs, poor maintenance, and earthquakes eventually did fell the lighthouse. Evidently it toppled right into the Mediterranean. The bottom of the sea directly before its foundations is still littered with priceless artifacts, which are being catalogued and hauled out by French archaeologists using differential GPS to plot their findings. They work in the shadow of a nondescript fortress built on the site by a later sultan, Qait Bey, who pragmatically used a few chunks of lighthouse granite to beef up the walls - just another splinter under the fingernails of the historical preservation crowd.
You can go to the fortress of Qait Bey now and stare out over the ocean and get much the same view that the builders of the lighthouse enjoyed. They must have been able to see all kinds of weirdness coming over the horizon from Europe and western Asia. The Mediterranean may look small on a world map, but from Pharos its horizon seems just as infinite as the Pacific seen from Miura. Back then, knowing how much of the human world was around the Mediterranean, the horizon must have seemed that much more vast, threatening, and exciting to the Alexandrians.
Building the lighthouse with its magic lens was a way of enhancing the city's natural capability for looking to the north, which made it into a world capital for many centuries. It's when a society plunders its ability to look over the horizon and into the future in order to get short-term gain - sometimes illusory gain - that it begins a long slide nearly impossible to reverse.
The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over. But it took only a few seconds, and if you were looking the other way when it happened, you might have missed it entirely - you'd see nothing but blue breakers rolling in from the Mediterranean, hiding a field of ruins, quickly forgotten.
31° 11.738' N, 29° 54.108' EIntersection of El Horreya and El Nabi Daniel, Alexandria, Egypt
Alexandria is most famous for having been the site of the ancient library. This was actually two or more different libraries. The first one dates back to the city's early Ptolemaic rulers, who were Macedonians, not Egyptians. It was modeled after the Lyceum of Aristotle, who, between other gigs, tutored Alexander the Great. Back in the days when people moved to information, instead of vice versa, this library attracted most of the most famous smart people in the world: the ultimate hacker, Archimedes; the father of geometry, Euclid; Eratosthenes, who was the first person to calculate the circumference of the earth, by looking at the way the sun shone down wells at Alexandria and Aswøan. He also ran the library for a while and took the job seriously enough that when he started to go blind in his old age, he starved himself to death. In any event, this library was burned out by the Romans when they were adding Egypt to their empire. Or maybe it wasn't. It's inherently difficult to get reliable information about an event that consisted of the destruction of all recorded information.
The second library was called the Library of Cleopatra and was built around a couple of hundred thousand manuscripts that were given to her by Marc Antony in what was either a magnificent gesture of romantic love or a shrewd political maneuver. Marc Antony suffered from what we would today call "poor impulse control," so the former explanation is more likely. This library was wiped out by Christians in AD 391. Depending on which version of events you read, its life span may have overlapped with that of the first library for a few years, a few decades, or not at all.
Whether or not the two libraries ever existed at the same time,
the fact remains that between about 300 BC and AD 400, Alexandria was by far the world capital of high-quality information. It must have had much in common with the MIT campus or Stanford in Palo Alto of more recent times: lots of hairy smart guys converging from all over the world to tinker with the lighthouse or to engage in pursuits that must have been totally incomprehensible to the locals, such as staring down wells at high noon and raving about the diameter of the earth.
The main reason that writers of tourist guidebooks are so cheesed off at Alexandria is that no vestige of the first library remains - not even a plaque stating "The Library of Alexandria was here." If you want to visit the site, you have to do a bit of straightforward detective work. Ancient Alexandria was laid out on a neat, regular grid pattern - just the kind of thing you would expect of a place populated by people like Euclid. The main east-west street was called the Canopic Way, and the main north-south street, running from the waterfront toward the Sahara Desert, was called the Street of the Soma. The library is thought to have stood just south of their intersection.
Though no buildings of that era remain, the streets still do, and so does their intersection. Currently, the Canopic Way is called El Horreya Avenue, and the Soma is called El Nabi Daniel Street, though if you don't hurry, they may be called something else when you arrive.
We stayed at the Cecil Hotel, where Nabi Daniel hits the waterfront. The Cecil is one of those British imperial-era hotels fraught with romance and history, sort of like the entire J. Peterman catalog rolled into one building. British Intelligence was headquartered there during the war, and there the Battle of El Alamein was planned.
Living as they do, however, in a country choked with old stuff, the Egyptians have adopted a philosophy toward architecture that is best summed up by the phrase: "What have you done for me lately?'' From this point of view, the Cecil is just another old building, and it's not even particularly old. As if to emphasize this, the side of the hotel where we stayed was covered with a rude scaffolding (sticks lashed together with hemp) aswarm with workers armed with sledgehammers, crowbars, chisels, and the like, who spent all day, every day, bellowing cheerfully at each other (demolition workers are the jolliest men in every country), bashing huge chunks of masonry off the top floor and simply dropping them - occasionally crushing an air conditioner on some guest's balcony. It was a useful reminder that Egyptians feel no great compulsion to tailor their cities to the specifications of guidebook writers.
This fact can be further driven home by walking south on Nabi Daniel and looking for the site of the Library of Alexandria. It is now occupied by office buildings probably not more than 100, nor less than 50, years old. Their openings are covered with roll-up steel doors, and their walls decorated with faded signs. One of them advertises courses in DOS, Lotus, dBase, COBOL, and others. Not far away is a movie theater showing Forbidden Arsenaclass="underline" In the Line of Duty 6, starring Cynthia Khan.